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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.""
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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")