Slashdot Mirror
Body Scanners for the London Underground
Ronald Dumsfeld writes "In a report in the TimesOnline, it is alleged that those lovely see-through-your-clothes scanners are to be installed in London's Tube stations. Part of the UK's Military-industrial complex, QinetiQ stands to make £150,000 to £2 million per station ($260,000 - $3.4 million) with their
Millimetre Wave Imagers."
Here(In Israel) we got used to this long time ago.
You can't go to anywhere without passing thru metal detectors(full size or hand used) and surface body checks.
Armed guards are common view.
I can't remember when was the last time that I've entered a mall and nobody have checked me.
The terror is taking over our lives, Now all over the world.
And when someone does try to proactively think like a terrorist asshole and says something like "Hey, it'd be pretty easy to contaminate the nation's milk supply," our politicians try to censor them instead of saying "Oh shit maybe we better fix that!" I know dealing with terrorism is a hard problem and our politicians would rather be securing pork for their home districts but we're paying them to provide real leadership. Maybe it's time to start evaluating how good a job they're actually doing...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You see every other little thing on the security cameras, people dropping their packages. People picking their nose. People bending over.
But when it comes to something like this, it's amazing that you never see anything.
Could a secret government military unit do this? Ex-military? It's worth billions in revenue for some companies out there and that includes a tax increase for the government to cover the expense.
Follow the money. If this becomes profitable, be ready for more attacks like this.
What good are all these cameras? And now they want more expensive stuff that isn't going to help much anyway? Can government agents simply pass right through them or go around with the "proper credentials"?
Why not figure out the expense of all this ahead of time and then realize it would just be cheaper to just stay out of other countries' business. (if this is a real outsider attack)
The IRA also did a very different kind of 'terrorism', they gave warnings in almost all cases, so it wasn't exactly big news when it happened. They tending to hit buildings instead of people (sure people died, but not in concentrated numbers like this case, in most situations). And besides, if they reported heavily on the IRA activities, it would lead to debate on the topic, and since England has more then its fair share of atrocities on that topic, they certainly don't like to spark debate. The other issue is that the IRA was a 'brittish only' issue, were as middle eastern terrorists are obviously going to reported more heavily on in the American media, which makes everything seem far far larger scale.
QinetiQ stands to make £150,000 to £2 million per station
That's quite some gap.
Makes perfect sense if the £150,000 is the figure given by the government and £2 million is the fugure arrived at by everyone else. The government lives in a dream land when it comes to the figures that they think everyone else will believe. It's almost like they WANT to destroy any credibility they have left.
If youve ever used the underground extensively youll be aware that a) Its a nightmare getting in/out at many stations at peak hours. b) On off-peak hours gates are often unmanned/broken meaning you can just walk right on. c) Many stations have gates that you can just jump over to enter/exit. d) Once in the underground system you can transfer between lines without going through any gates.
All the above means that any form of scanning system would be so easy to circumvent as to be entirely useless....unless they were to more than TRIPLE the manpower at non-central stations...and trust me that NO-ONE will be happy at seeing these costs passed onto them via ticket price increases.
BLAM!
Then, of course, there's the problem of needing a scanner at every bus stop too -- and what do you do about bazookas? A missile defence system on every double-decker bus?
All this is going to do is annoy the passengers and force Al Quaida to bomb places like Heerrods on Christmas eve (or worse yet -- boxing day!)
Oh yeah -- and inconvenience passengers.
And give the security 'droid a woody.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
...will have heard about a Private Equity company known as Carlyle Group. This is one of biggest and most profitable Private Equity firms in the world. The shareholders include the Bush family, the bin Laden family and former British PM John Major may still be their Chairman. It's a bit like Milo Minderbinder's outfit in Catch 22, where everyone benefits, because everyone is a part of the syndicate. Well anyway they own QinitiQ. And please don't assume that I am suggesting anything other than the fact that the war on terror, has been quite profitable for some parties involved.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
Indeed, the IRA conduct 'Gentlemans' terrorism. They have an agreed list of targets and code words formulated with the police, and when an explosive is planted at one, a note is sent to the police with that code work (in theory).
Then, the police evacuate the area, the bomb explodes (you'll hardly ever see an IRA bomb defused, and that would break the trust between police and the IRA), the point is made, life moves on.
This is the problem with the terrorists of the 21st centuty: they deliberately target civilian targets with as little warning as possible, so as to increase the civilian death toll and instill as much 'I might die tomorrow' fear as possible.
The problem they are likely to find with the results of this week's attack is two-fold: Firstly, there were relatively few deaths (FAR fewer than the Paddington rail-crash, for example); Secondly, their attack hasn't heavily influenced the public conciousness.
However, politicians seem not to have appreciated this. If they truely do spend this money on these sensors (something I *highly* doubt), this will be pure waste: the public won't feel any more safe (personally, I would feel *violated* by this measure) and it will most likely have not effect on reducing terrorism.
The recent wave of terrorist attacks has had one main theme: they try to be unconventional. All of the governments of the afflicted countries have been quick to bolt the stable door behind the horse - but they've not yet thought of the pig pen.
1. allow democratic secession of any region that does not want to be part of your country;
2. do not meddle in internal affairs of other countries unless officially asked to.
2.a. when you *do* meddle in internal affairs of other countries, do so in a pacifying way -- offer a negotiation table to all interested parties.
3. don't condone predatory commercial practices by your onw nationals;
4. respect minorities inside *and* outside your country.
It's quite simple, really.
Follow the recipe and *no* terrorists will *ever* want to bomb your country.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Dogs and pigs both have extremely well developed senses of smell. Both are intelligent animals and could be trained to detect explosives. The cost would be a mere fraction of the two million pounds quoted by QinetiQ. Pigs are used in many countries to find valuable buried fungi. Dogs can find and recognise people by their smell. To start finding the murderers I'd start looking for the explosives. Perhaps now is the time for the Law to be 'adjusted' so that in times of emergency a mans home is not quite the castle is was before 07-JUL-2005.
When it comes to terrorism the following saying couldn't have been more true: A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears! - Michel de Montaigne.
If you let your life revolve around an instance of terror then you had made living in terror the rest your whole life.
It seems that most of us Londoners have forgotten the lessons we learnt from the IRA. Ten years ago, you would never, ever let an unattended bag go ignored, and you would never leave bags unattended. [...] I would also like to add a personal view on this, which is; these guys are pathetic. We have grown up with the IRA, and there is nothing special about these. Why the fuss?
Because it's Al-Qaeda, not the IRA. No-one outside the UK gave a damn about IRA attacks, so they were kept in perspective.
With Al-Qaeda, you have 9/11. You also have the fact that everyone knows about them, and that the Americans have felt the effects of their attacks.
Matter of fact, the Americans allowed IRA fundraising (they eventually outlawed them because their criminal activity was becoming an inconvenience). This is the same IRA that tried to kill the British Prime Minister around that time (Margaret Thatcher).....
The more I think about this, the more damn crack-headed it seems. An anti-democratic terrorist organisation comes close to killing the leader of one of America's closest allies, and they *still* allow them to raise funds on their soil?!
Bear this in mind the next time you hear an American complaining about lack of cooperation against terrorism.
Frankly, it doesn't say much about Thatcher that this was never an issue, but personally I never liked her anyway. Not that this is the point.
And on another subject; what the *hell* is going on with Britain allowing hate-preaching mullahs and so on, to remain in the country? It's been claimed that they can't send them back to countries with the death penalty or where they would be at serious risk of persecution.
Well, at least be ******* consistent about it; the British government is sending people (who have done *nothing* to endanger British security) back to Zimbabwe, laughably claiming that they won't face persecution or death when the evidence is blatantly to the contrary. And yet, they're allowing these hate-preaching vermin to remain in the country.
So; any claims of not wanting to breach human rights (or at least human rights legislation) are complete hypocrisy. Frankly, no-one's "right" to asylum should stretch as far as allowing them to incite against, nor to create security risks towards the society that grants it to them.
If there's any case for detention centres, those guys should be the ones going in them, not the children of ordinary refugees. Though it'd probably be a lot easier to deport the hatemongers back to where they came from, outside the protection of the society they despise so much.
Anyway, back to the bombs; this was significant, and it sucks that people died; but it wasn't 9/11. Disruption was the aim, and if we let people like that dictate how we run our lives, they win.
If we don't, they lose.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Now I realize that it's other people we should be afraid of. Other people who want us to act the way they want, or kill us if we don't cooperate. So to defend ourselves from them, we put expensive security devices in markets, subways and other crowded places.
How about pollution? Pollution kills more people than terrorists. How about smoking? People are afraid from terrorists, but they aren't afraid to smoke cigarettes, or breathe the polluted air that surrounds them, or even eat food with tons of additives and chemical stuff.
Doesn't anyone realise how screwed up this is? People are crazy, just plain crazy...
Stop invading other countries and pull out of the ones you've already invaded. It's cheaper, it's much more ethical, and it's going to give you a far safer solution.
Are we more safe because they spent longer searching me than nearly everybody else on the plane? I'm gonna go with a no.
Here's another affirmation of the ineffectiveness of the situation, but from the other angle. I was in the military during '01 and '02, and went to PSAB (in Saudi Arabia) a couple months after 9/11. Anyhow, I packed a big duffel and a small gym bag, the former was checked and the latter was carried. I went through the Oklahoma City airport security, through the Air Base's security, and back through security in Boston (IIRC), only to THEN have someone tell me "I think I see a knife in your bag."
I'd been carrying a ~7-inch boot knife in an outer pocket of my carry-on bag on flights that spanned half the globe (aka, full of jet fuel) which was not concealed in any way except for simply being in a pocket of a duffel filled with socks, books, munchies, and a few electronic gizmos. It still took them close to 10 additional minutes to decide to physically search the bag and an additional 5 beyond that to actually find it (after they'd emptied all pockets except the one it was in).
Feeling safer yet? As for me, I say just do nothing, let people arm themselves if they want to shoulder the responsibility and liability, and go on about your daily life. You might be hit by a car, or you might be blown up by a terrorist. Odds are the car will get you many times over before the terrorist even has a chance.
...I have regained my consciousness about the subject.
locks are for honest people. What we make we can break.
terrorism will be removed when the excuses for supporting such is no longer existing.
And supporting such can come even from those claiming to be the good guys on any side, but who benefit off the existance of "terrorism"
whats the real excuse for 9/11? do a google search on "trillion dollar bet" and read the transcript
do we know how to remove "terrorism"?
do a google on '"what the world wants" world games' to see how some military spending can be better used against "terrorism".
The most terrorism I have seen in my life is from the Bush administration banging war drums, 24 hours a day on ever news channel.
Was the anthrax letters used to get the new media to say what the Bush Administration wanted them to? Richard Jewell was wrongly blamed for the 1996 olympic park bombing..... Does anyone know the name of the us military person they tried to blame for the anthrax letters?
I'm just barely old enough to remember some war time propaganda against russia.... funny how today thru the internet we all now know the truth about the people of russia.... they are just like us.
Did the politicians and military leaders really belived the bull shit propoganda they were preaching? One thing is certain the world doesn't need this sort of Bull Shit.
Now we have a phantom evil called terrorism.
Of the percentage of the population of the world... something around 6 billion... isn't that a lot of military spending, tax payer revenue, being spent on what is some fraction of something quite less than even 1%?
1) Create a problem that otherwise doesn't exist.
promote (provide excuse) and motivate terrorism indirectly so as to be safe from proof.
2) Create expensive but incomplete solutions to the fabricated problem.
3) profit!
Don't we all really know who the terrorist participants are?
Well, actually all my british friends (who are okay, thank $DEITY) don't seem to be longing for sympathy.
The lack of panic and hysteria is amazing - they are angry and the Londoners are quite annoyed about the inconveniencies and that somebody really tried to kill them, yes, but they seem to be calm in general.
Calmer even than my Spanish freinds who didn't freakt out after the Madrid bombings.
Maybe the history of local terror groups and WW2 still are present in the subconscious of old Europeans, thus we already know that we can be killed on home ground?
Well, I live in Germany which was flattened in big parts in WW2 for obvious reasons and in the eighties we had the RAF as a (compared to the ETA and IRA) minor local terror group.
So people of my age (mid 30) grew up with the tales of the war's bombings and the idea of having your own, local terrorists.
I'm wondering how we will react when the bombing/whatever in Frankfurt/Cologne/Düsseldorf/Berlin/wherever finally happens.
Actually I think we'll be quite okay, but what I'm really afraid of is that our emergency services and structures will be proven a lot less effective than in Spain or England. There will be a lot more chaos and a lot more deaths because of this.
And this is something that is definitively avoidable.
k2r.
Actually, we don't all put up with it for air travel. I won't even consider flying if it's less than a 10 hour drive, because I don't like having my privacy invaded, I don't like being told I can't carry a knife, and I won't put up with it if it's even remotely avoidable.
I haven't flown since 2001. Now, I wasn't a weekly flyer before, but the increased security HAS cost the airlines money from me, and I won't fly again unless I have to until they reduce security. I would rather take the risk than put up with the hassle and lack of privacy.
Oh boy am I sick and tired of the damned hand-wringing and wailing frenzy that the British media have entered into. Their job is to tell us the bloody news, not try and tell us how to feel.
All the vox-pops of sooty and bloody faced people being asked "how do you feel" and "describe what you saw" is totally pandering to the masses and everyone's car crash morbid interested in disasters. It does no one any favours.
Just report the incidents, the counts of injured and dead, but let's not follow grief stricken relatives around the hospitals hoping for news of lost loved ones. The only people this serves is the terrorists themselves, by "bigging up" their escapades, when what we should be doing is showing them out disgust and contempt, by carrying on with our lives.
If we, as a nation, shrug our shoulders, and carry on we, as a nation, will have won this round. The opening of a condolences books here there and everywhere is just encouraging people's recreational grief. Let those who have lost loved ones grieve in peace, and let those of us who have not lost people in this outrage simply be outraged.
Let's open an Outrage Book instead! Now that's something I'd sign up to.
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
If:
... I daresay we'd probably allow fundraising for al Qaeda here.
Pretty? No. But that's how democratic societies work. As long as the threat is distant, and some significant percentage of the voting public identifies with the people behind it, all the incentives politicians care about point them towards just ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away.
Read my blog.
Security against terrorism will always have the tendency of preventing a certain type of attack from happening _again_. Since you can't protect against everything, you should at least force the terrorists to become more creative by protecting against the vectors of attack they've used in the past.
SPAM
I really wish the world was as fischer - price / tinker toy simple as you imagine it to be. Live a few more decades, read the news and lots more history and perhaps you will lose your "peace at any cost" mentality.
I found this slightly offensive.
I am not a kid whom you can treat with such condencendence.
I am a 35yo, father of one, street-savvy person.
I know what is to live in other countries, and I know too what is to live in a ghetto (Brazilian favelas).
Be more respectful, please.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
A person is reasonable and intelligent but people are dumb stupid and panicky.
There were people in the tube carriage I was in when a bomb blew up in the train which was passing us in the opposite direction, near Edgware Road station. I regret to inform you that contrary to your description, those people reacted as well as you could possibly expect any person to react. Everyone was shit-scared, me included, frozen with fear for the first minute or two, waiting for a second bomb to possibly go off. But then after that, the behaviour of all the people around me was admirable. We stayed calm, comforted each other, talked, tried to get our minds off the awful truth (which no one voiced - it's amazing how many plausible alternative possibilities you can come up with to deny that it's a bomb, even after you saw the flash, heard the loud bang, and breathed the nasty black smoke).
Those people waited patiently to be evacuated, waited a whole 45 minutes in this unnerving train with that nasty toxic smell, with screams of agony coming from the nearby train and no coherent information coming from anywhere, with no guarantee that any of us would get out of there alive, as there could have been a second bomb, for all we knew.
So I think you should grow a bit of respect for people, dumbass.
Daniel
Carpe Diem