Slashdot Mirror
Chemotherapy Patients Set Off Subway Alarms
dave writes "Recently, cities such as New York and elsewhere have been installing radiation detectors in subways as an anti-terror precaution. However, as reported in New Scientist, patients who are undergoing radiation treatment are setting off the alarms. From the article, "a 34-year-old patient who had been treated with radioactive iodine for Graves disease, a thyroid disorder, returned to their clinic three weeks later complaining he had been strip-searched twice in Manhattan subway stations.""
Would you need to a chemo-card to prove that you really had cancer and had to have the treatment? I hope and pray folk are not harassed, as that is very last thing that they need in their lives (very personal experience talking there).
On a rather serious note, it is interesting to see that someone even had the thought that someone carrying a dirty bomb strapped to them would "pose" (and I use the word here literally, so do not flame me here) as a cancer patient. Perfect way to disguise it, very clever. And to think that security noticed it at least commendable.
If the guy's not carrying anything like a briefcase, where do they think he's hiding a 'dirty' bomb? Do the authorities think it's possible to carry a bomb on your person? So they think the tech is available to make the device that small? A strip search does seem a little over the top.
It's true what you say. No one else is going to the extremes that we are.
We never did it before, we got owned, we beefed it up.
When someone wants to own Canada, you will see your liberties taken away as well.
/me set the BS flag up.
Radioactive stuff is mostly used to follow something you ingest, or an injection.
I really can't see the use of a powerful, radioactive drug taken every 6 months.
Though I might be wrong, I have serious doubt.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Call it what you will, it is still profiling.
You have a beard, you have glasses, you fit the profile of what someone has said to look for. That fits under the the Supream Courts ruling for racial profiling.
Besides, half of the middle east can look white easily, and I can look like I am from there after twoo weeks in Florida.
Wouldn't naturally occuring radioactive elements cause problems with that a little? Or do they have the ability to sort out the different forms and identify only those that are not naturally occuring?
This is just more fallout (no pun intended) from the Bush/Ashcroft "War On Terrorism", which is really just a thinly veiled way to erode people's Constitutional rights. Do you think that strip searching a cancer patient is a reasonable search as defined by The Constitution? Do you think that radiation detectors that force cancer patients to reveal their illness and treatment to complete strangers is a reasonable form of search?
People need to open their eyes and see what kind of police state the Bush administration is creating -- before it's too late.
The detectors are set at their most sensitive levels. Small price to pay for making the terrorists use some conventional explosives.
Maybe IHBT, but all these "evil terrorists" have used are just conventional explosives, are there even any equivalent technologies in use now that detect these?
So far it hasn't been demonstrated or even claimed that they even HAVE nuclear explosives, and I bet if they did they'd want to use amounts that would peg the meter, not be mistakable for cancer patients.
The best I've read they can do is just make a "dirty" bomb, which can be a conventional bomb that merely spreads radioactive material rather than megaton destruction, and the only way to make a dirty bomb any sort of a threat is to put in enough material to peg any standard meter.
So it sounds like another case where the people "protecting" us are simply building more roadblocks that prevent normal living.
They may choose not to use public transportation to avoid this inconvenience...
I'm sorry. Getting aroud NYC and many big cities without public transit is expensive, and complicated. Also, I would think that perhaps one might be irritated if they can't use the PUBLIC transit system their tax dollars pay for.
What will most likely happen in the end is that you will have a letter designation or something on a drivers license or on your state issued id/passport (everyone who flies knows that you have to have id). Yes, this could be defrauded, but anything can...
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Well posting as an AC and trolling as well. Ho hum.
1. Cops do whip black ass, and white ass, hispanic ass, all kindsa ass. Course next to Latin America and Russia, I would prefer a US ass whuppin than one of those. Have seen South American and Russian cops tear it up. And people don't sue there.
Hey you know what? I am a Jewish Hispanic. And I look like I should be selling rugs in a bazaar. I look more Arabic than most Arabs. I get searched in airports. Big deal, 5 minutes extra. Makes me feel kinda safe. I have been searched five times this year and the people in the airport were nothing but nice and apologetic to me.
We had a load of hurt come down on our country and we are watching our backs. Nothing wrong with that, and I am happy we are doing it. And you can use the arguement that the methods they are using are not effective. Well please suggest something. Should we do nothing?
I hold citizen ship in the UK,US, and Colombia. Pretty varied huh? Guess I am lucky, gotta pretty good world view IMHO.
The US does some harsh shit sometimes, but we do a lotta good stuff too. Stop trolling, stop being an AC.
I gotta tell you somehing as well. These days more BLACK people have asked me if I was an arab. Trying be a computer geek who is in radioshack buying wire when a big black man says"lookit at ol bin lades kid getting his shit for a bomb, damn, you aint gonna blow me up, just where in the hell or you from"
Man, got me all pissed on a friday night.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
"My guess is that the detectors are set to "go off" even if the tiniest amount of radiation is found. That way, any attempt by terrorists to try to hide the radiation (thick lead, etc) will be thwarted."
If anything, all those false positives will make it easier to sneak in a nuclear or radiological device. When the alarms are going off every day you tend not to be as attentive as you would be otherwise, and the personnel involved won't exactly give a thorough search.
How did 12/7/41 and 9/11/01 happen? Too much information gathering, not enough information interpretation. And from the looks of this, we're setting ourselves up for more of the same.
This coming from someone who's never been through a NY winter. Thick coats winter coats man...
(Just to clarify, I'm from "upstate" (really central NY) )...
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
Tiny amounts of radiation in catshit in a landfill is too much, even though its probably full of smoke so detectors. So.... FLUSH it, so it ends up in the septic tank, runs out through the leach bed into the ditch, down to the creek and into Lake Ontario.
Fucking brilliant.
This space available.
What! You really think they thought about this? No. They just put them in to make themselves and the public at large feel 'safer'.
NOTE: The 2 minute delay between posting sucks.
How the hell can anyone moderate that comment as flamebait? It was insightful and intelligent. The poster was right. Bush and Ashcroft are turning the USA into a police state. The two of them have used the so-called war on terrorism as an excuse to throw the constitution out of the window. Did you even know that law enforcement can force librarians to reveal what books you check out and that the librarians are under a gag order so that they cannot tell you that they were approached? Did you know that post 9/11 there were grocery stores asked for their customer databases with all customer purchases? How about the detainees in the U.S. who have been locked away for months with no trials, no charges, and no access to attorneys?
Thank you for the link.
The idea that the Transportation Safety folks now keep a list of people to subject to intense search bothers me not at all.
The idea that one can get on that list simply for being politically distasteful to the Bush Administration is appalling.
The idea that nobody is willing to admit how this list is compiled or how one disputes being on it is terrifying.
When government declares that it is no longer accountable to the people it governs, then it has lost the legitimacy of that office.
I would compare this to McCarthy but McCarthy and his cronies weren't anywhere near this effective.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Let me guess: you don't live in Manhattan.
Apparently, the doctors don't live there either:
From the article: But even in the best-case scenario, a patient will have to wait while the contents of the letter are verified, say the doctors. "They may choose not to use public transportation to avoid this inconvenience," they write.
Try navigating Manhattan efficiently without public transportation.
moto411.com
Soon as the news hits that the New York subway system is contaminated with radioactive material, there will be panic, regardless of amount. And it wouldn't take a very big container of material to do it, either.
Tremendous amounts of fear; no bomb required. Remember when there was anthrax in the mail? You can scare a lot of people without any explosions.
~Idarubicin
His name is garcia because he's a fan of Jerry, not because he is Hispanic. Check his slashdot User Bio: "23, student records clerk, dork, drunk, deadhead.".
Of course, being a deadhead also implies other lifestyle activities. Those activities eventually lead to having a relaxed attitude about what is normal dress and grooming. And dude, what do you have to be smoking to think it's not unusual to carry a car stereo onto a plane? Where were you going to plug it in anyways???
I say you were accurately profiled. You just know not to be 'carrying' when you go through airport security.
Stay off the hard stuff.
I get it,... so we are supposed to wait until they do have a nuke and use it before we take measures to protect ourselves?
Did you read it? Try consider it a priority of known threats vs. theoretical threats. Or a case for balance. Or a rearrangeing of order of operations, as a gaping present day vulnerability is apparent.
Conventional bombs are a known threat, so why don't we make sure that the weapons detectors can sniff those out _first_ and _now_, and then once those systems are installed, worry about weapons that these people might, in theory, develop or aquire a few years in the future? So far, all that I have read that they have installed is rad detectors, which is useless against easily made and easily aquired conventional bombs, and the only thing they've managed to do with it is harass cancer patients, when conventional bombs could be passing through there every day.
My case is also for turning down the meter sensitivity just a tad as it sounds like the level it trips at is not that far above natural radiation.
Was your grandfather in charge of Pearl Harbour's defenses by chance?
No, but it's not relevant. The world was very different then, but that was still another interesting case of political bungling of people not having the right priorities and systematically poor foreign policies, it's not a newly developed problem.
So why does the ethnicity of the racist asshole who made this comment matter? Racists exist in all races. Why does this suprise you?
Similar to the issues raised in the disscusion on the spammer who was complaining about too much spam, some people have no empathy. They can't understand that their actions are wrong even if they've gone or are going through the same thing.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Al Quaida got EXACTLY what they wanted on 9/11/2001! Granted, a few thousand died that day..and a couple of buildings went down...but since then lives have been made miserable for MILLIONS...which is exactly what they wanted to to to us! Our freedoms have been curtailed at the airport..like they'll ever try that again..If they did, they'd be thrown out the window by an entire pissed off airplane. The old ideas of hijacking were to comply with the hijackers' demands...but not any more!! Now we have cancer patients being strip searched whose only crime is taking the subway. We have TV cameras looking at us everywhere, connected up to facial reckognization systems. We have more freedoms curtailed since World War II and unlike the ones then, these loss of freedoms are permanent. Yes, the terrorists got exactly what they wanted..a shift in the United States' citizens' right to freedom. The irony is that the REAL terrorists are Bush and Ashcroft and Congress who've perverted this awful event for their own political ends.
This whole line of reasoning is a crock of horseshit, e.g., "oooh, we need to protect our subways from evil nuke-toting terrorists!"
Let's examine this, shall we? Any terrorist organization with the resources and intelligence to get something like a suitcase-sized nuclear device into the United States quite probably isn't brain-dead enough to tote the thing through a secured installation wired to detect the bomb.
Although it appears some of my more idiotic countrymen think that very thing could happen. Forget the easily-made and easily-transported conventional explosives and poisonous gases - think of those nukes!
9/11 has apparently lobotomized more than a few people.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Honestly, all this will do is cause an unholy incovenience to cancer patients such that it gets into the media, at which point any self respecting terrorist who can do a bit of research will figure out that he should just avoid the subways.
Duh.
The best I've read they can do is just make a "dirty" bomb...
And if they did make a "dirty" bomb, why the fuck would they set it off in the subway? It seems that if you're going to wreak havoc in a subway, you want to take advantage of the fact that it is a closed space, which would imply a biological attack (consider how many people touch the poles in the car, or at least brush them as they walk in) or a gas attack (ala Aum cult in Tokyo). Setting off a dirty bomb in a subway would just be stupid, the tunnel collapses and then where is your radiation? Underground.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
We should provide radiotherapy patients with a hospital-issued ID so they do not have to suffer through security checks. It would not be much more difficult than issuing a driver's license.
Likewise, it would not be much more difficult for terrorists with bombs to create a fake hospital-issued ID.
The expression is "I could NOT care less." Think about it.
To paraphrase the GREAT Ben Franklin:
"Those that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Get your heads out the sand people! If you don't care enough about your freedom to put a stop to this kind of thing then go ahead and email your data to the Information Awareness Office!
American! Knows what that means! And PROUD!
Ya Sure! You Betcha!, The_THOMAS
First of all, given the number of people flying, yes, of course some people are going to end up as statistical anomolies. Also, people have a tendancy to remember annoying events. Try actually writing down each time you get searched when boarding the plane, and see if it is actually 80%. Finally, if it bothers you, try waiting until the plane is about to close the doors before boarding. It's just as confortable to wait in the airport as on the plane, and they don't delay departures to search the last few people who board.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I agree - it's profiling. I read what you said:
"You have a beard, you have glasses, you fit the profile of what someone has said to look for. That fits under the the Supream Courts ruling for racial [emphasis added] profiling."
How do glasses and a beard fit under the Supreme Court rulings on racial profiling?
Profiling itself has not been deemed illegal. Police/federal screeners are free to use any "reasonable" cause in determining who to search. Specific protections are provided against racial profiling in Title IV of the Civil Rights Act. I know of no protections against searches motivated by suspicion of glasses or beards.
I think gender and age profiling in airport security are needed. I fit the general description of whom they should be worried about: male in his early twenties. It will be an inconvenience to me, but it is the most prudent course of action. Otherwise, to achieve the same degree of safety, much more money will have to be spent searching women and the elderly for the sake of appearances.
The profiling in the airports is fundamentally different from the racial profiling in traffic stops.
First, it focuses on a group that has not been the focus of a pattern of discrimination: young males (pretty much regardless of race: Guys my age are much more prone to do stupid things).
Second, the inconvenience is much less.
Third, it is not the result of irrational prejudice, but of a rational allocation of limited resources.
If I can be charged higher insurance rates simply because of my age and gender, why can't it take me five more minutes to get through airport security? Both are inconvenient to me personally, but are rational.
"And yes, if I am getting the "treatment" 80% of the time I fly, I would sue. It takes time out of my day, it makes me want to fly less, it affects my mindset. It makes me grumpy, and that is not a good thing."
Would it really make you feel better if everyone else had to go through the 'treatment' just as often? What, misery loves company?
"After all, if you did not want to sue, the KKK would still be loving the site of the "coloreds" walking out to an outhouse rather then getting the same treatment that every person has a right for."
First, note that the suits brought in the civil rights movement were for much more serious matters than making you grumpy.
Second, what is your argument, that lawsuits hastened the introduction of indoor plumbing for blacks? Sorry, I couldn't resist that one. I assume you are talking about the court cases that established that separate facilities for different races were inherently unequal. Procurring access to decent education falls under what I consider a need to sue. Saving 15 minutes at the airport at the expense of less effective security is what I consider not justifying a lawsuit. It simply should not be that big of a deal.
"Which are you?"
-The one smart enough to not enter the casino.
Easy. Just don't eat for a week or so as to get a terrible face, don't sleep either. Then shave completly your head. Your face will be gaunt and you *will* looks like a cancer patient. Then wait that a few false alarm happen in the media, go in the subway.
When the alarm sound have some faked paper about a cancer treatment by radiation. When the guy come to you jsut show the paper. Chance are that in a year or so after so much false alarm they let you thru after seeing you (now really bad looking and not looking like a terrorist).
Think the scenario is far etched ? Think again. Human can also be pavlov trained to ignore false alarm if they come too often. That is why setting a detection level in an alarm is a science in itself.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Silly person, it's not about safety. This last year has simply been a power grab by the police while wafing a safety flag in our faces. The only improvement in actual security occurred on flight 93. Taking off our shoes, having our email read and watching cancer patients get dragged off the streets is just our way of lying to ourselves and giving Ashcroft everything he wants.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
That's interesting.. but what does chemotherapy have to do with radiation treatment?
And for the grandparent post... if you really think gamma radiation is not ionizing, and want to go telling the world that, go hang out with some gamma emitters for a while first, THEN come tell us how it passes harmlessly through things.
Alpha & Beta radiation, outside the body, cause radiation damage primarily in the skin. The higher the energy, the further they penetrate, of course. Gamma radiation, however, will pass right through you, causing damage to your internal organs along the way.
What is ionizing radiation?
Gamma radiation is VERY ionizing. Why do you think it causes cancer? Why do you think it casues radiation poisoning in high doses? What do you think radiation poisoning is?
tswinzig wrote:
> Too low? I'd say the detectors are working just
> right. Yeah it sucks for these patients, but they
> can work this out.
Those patients have rights! They should not be stripped searched because they are receiving treatment for a terminal illness. They should not have to carry papers to prove to the police that they are not terrorists. And they should not be barred from using public transportation.
> I'd much rather have a few false positives than
> possibly miss a dirty bomb shielded in lead.
If a dirty bomb was properly shielded, it wouldn't give a true positive (though there are far easier nukes to shield). The police would be busy strip searching cancer patients while the terrorists walked on through. I'm actually surprised with all the pollution from nuclear testing in the fifties and sixties that any detector could work reliably without giving off tons of false positives.
Perhaps everyone should just ride the subways (fly in airplanes, etc.) in their birthday suits. But that might violate your rights, which might induce you to care.
As for the mean terrorists: if they play with nuclear fire, they are gonna get burned, big time. That's what the Red Bamboo found out in 1966, the hard way.
"Once we wake Godzilla, he'll take care of those guys."
Ichiro "Godzilla, Ebira, Mothra: Big Duel in the South Sea" (Japanese version, 1966)
As it was before, may it be again. Grant us this, Godzilla! ("Godzilla March")
Stop whining. I have two prosthetic legs and a silver star to go along with them - not exactly my idea of a fair trade (but the medal is rather pretty blah, blah blah). I set off metal detectors from ten feet away (okay... maybe five feet). I travel for business at least one week out of every month. I'm white, 6'3", 190lbs, with a military haircut and I get searched EVERY time I fly, even if I wear shorts so everyone can see my titanium "Lt Dan magic legs". I have never complained about it. I never will.
People need to realize that freedom isn't free. If all it is costing you is a few minutes of your time while a security guard or soldier looks in your bag, I say "DEAL WITH IT."