From a New York TV channel’s news site:

Several Brooklyn residents woke up to find their street empty — because someone had posted a No Parking sign and police had towed their rides.

The sign, which bans parking on a street in the DUMBO neighborhood from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, mysteriously appeared Monday or Tuesday, residents said, and then police started ticketing and towing cars parked there.

But the Department of Transportation says there aren’t any parking restrictions in the area and it doesn’t know who posted the placard, which looks official.

Resident David Bourgeois said he had to pay $205 to retrieve his Mini Cooper, with a $60 ticket on the windshield, from a police pound Wednesday after it was hauled away.

“It’s just outrageous,” he told the Daily News for Friday editions.

The DOT said it would try to dismiss the ticket — and take down the No Parking sign.

I especially like the statement that the DOT would “try to dismiss the ticket.” Hopefully they will do more than try, but if I were that guy, I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

I live in a zoned parking area (you must have a special sticker to park on the streets) here in downtown Chicago. We have often wondered what the results of a prank like this would be. While nobody would get towed, you could probably get a hundred cars ticketed without too much effort, and there’d be little to no chance of disputing it successfully.

I wouldn’t even need a proper sign. I could just forge and post paper “No parking” signs tied around trees but printed to match an official template which is little more than legal-sized heavy stock paper with red sans-serif printing. Getting an example would be trivial since they litter the trees & signs around any site of utility work, street work, or condo construction.

Yet another example of people unthinkingly trusting something was authoritative (in this case a sign) when it was not. Fortunately, the impact of this one was relatively minor. Unfortunately, there seems to be an upsurge “false flag” operations by serious criminals, terrorists, and resistance fighters.

I think this is symptomatic of the overall state of information overload that most people operate in all the time. As a result, any input which can be abstracted to a simple symbol (e.g. authority) immediately is, rather than considering whether or not it really makes sense. As a result, things are able to get out seriously out of control, by which time it’s too late for the victim to effectively react.