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Fast, Accurate Detection of Explosives
It doesn't come easy writes "Fast, highly reliable detection of residues that could indicate the presence of explosives and other hazardous materials inside luggage is now possible with technology under development at Purdue University. Recent improvements to a previously developed prototype have proven successful at detecting at the picogram (trillionths of a gram) level in lab tests, about 1,000 times less material than previously required. From the article: 'In the amount of time it requires to take a breath, this technology can sniff the surface of a piece of luggage and determine whether a hazardous substance is likely to be inside, based on residual chemicals brushed from the hand of someone loading the suitcase.'"
Ok, here's something I've always wondered about. If you have these exquisitly sensitive machines that can detect even a few molecules of material, aren't they by the same token super-vulnerable to being attacked by "chaffing" or overloading?
Couldn't a bad guy simple walk around the airport with some material on his shoes and permanently, for all time, destroy the effectiveness of the instruments? I mean, how could one possibly clean a whole airport down to a few molecules worth of the stuff?
Isn't that a *huge* hole in any "super sensitive" chemical detection system?
now, when I fly, I have to worry not just about whether I handled matches or toy cap guns or went to the shooting range in the last 24 hours, but also whether my neighbor, my dog, or the taxi driver handled any nitrate-laden deli meat in the last month.
Good luck to explosives manufacturers - there go your chances of ever flying again!
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
This is certain, just like the current TSA baggage screening, to be used to justify unlawful searches for drugs and other contraband. In fact, just like those baggage searches, this will undoubtedly become the #1 use of this technology, in fact I would bet good money that it is part of the intent of the people funding the development of this stuff. Just wait and see.
People fly because they want to go somewhere as fast as possible. With recent rules and regulations regarding airports, it's been becoming slower and slower to fly anywhere. Perhaps with the advancement in technology such as this, we can slowly relieve the stress of having to fly somewhere.
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
Expect every airport to be shut down for a week after the 4th of July.
So what I'm saying is that it can be blasted, but the recovery time should be reasonable. That means that the airports will need to take some precautions like not having big fluffy couches around that will carry the "smell" for months.
Of course I am not a chemist, I just felt like having a Cliff Claven moment.
Storm
Yes, it's vulnerable to false positives -- for example, some construction workers are going to have to go through the slow way every time they fly.
That's okay, though -- the positive thing here is that the initial check can be made much much faster. Most luggage and most people can just be zipped through (they'll hardly need to stop walking!)... which leaves more resources available to help the inevitable false positives get processed in the old, slow way (with the little explosive-check tabs, or a search by hand) as efficiently as possible.
That's what matters, isn't it? Speeding the whole thing up, to make a reliable screening feasible.
I actually can't take any airlines anywhere, but if I could, I don't think I would enjoy having to put up with all this extra security.
Frank Sinatra died before that old standard could be updated.
Come fly with me. Come fly, let's fly away.
The whole idea of air travel was about living on a cloud in that rarified air.
These days, not so much.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
The last time I flew it was from a friend's outdoor wedding. Apparently the chemical sensors didn't like the outdoors-ness of my shoes, and because I was flying from scenic Colorado the security officers were used to this.
TSA Agent: "Been outdoors much? Hiked through the woods?"
Me: "Yes, some friends had a wedding in the middle of a field."
TSA Agent: "Thought so. Happens all the time."
They took my shoes and, after they failed to go boom, brought them back. I'm not bothered by this at all, but I wonder how many false positives people in these places have to deal with. Current detectors use neutron activation to detect the nitrogen in explosvies and, apparently, fertilizers used by the hotel grounds staff. Hopefully this will fix that particular problem.
Here's a possible countermeasure.
Construct your bomb. Shrink wrap it in plastic, taking care to get as little explosive residue on the outside as possible. Take it away from the bomb construction area, and wash the outside with strong soap etc. Give the result to another person.
They take it to somewhere clean of explosives residue, shrink wrap it in another layer, and carefully wash it, then hand it off to a third person who repeats the entire process again.
If you can reduce the explosives residues detectable by a factor of 100 or 1000 each time you do this, it can't take many iterations to reach undetectability - so long as the plastic is impervious to leakage. (Of course, then you need some way to program your hermetically sealed bomb. Also, you've forced many more people to become involved, which greatly increases the chance of betrayal before the bomb reaches its target.)
If this is practical, it must already have been tried to defeat drug-sniffing dogs. Does anyone have any ideas?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I wonder as to how useful this technology will be in the fight against terrorism. If you were a terrorist, would you carry your kit with you on the plane or would you aquire all the materials locally when you arrive at your destination? I imagine crime networks who plan to set off bombs have their own stockpile of ingredients that they get from their own country and build them when they need them. Or am I completely off the mark and some regions don't have access to certain materials and need to import/smuggle them?
Fire. In all my experience as a pyromaniac, it has quickly and with 99.99% accuracy told me whether or not a substance was flammable.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID =165701001&printable=true
I'm surprised - very surprised - that there's no reference to the recent bombings in Bali in the article post. I mean, an article about instantly detecting explosives, three days after a serious terrorist attack... I can't help but feel that if it had been Hawaii and US citizens killed rather than Bali and Indonesian/Australian citizens killed this link would have been made.
Anyway, this is an interesting development, but should not lead us to stop traditional methods of bomb detection, particularly searches and x-rays. These machines sound wonderful *so long as* you are using an explosive with which they are familiar.
Read Pynchon.
Just spray a fine aerosol containing traces of the target molecules. Everyone in the airport terminal will trigger the detectors...
"More people rode the CTA today than will pass through O'hare and Midway over the entire Thanksgiving weekend. Yet the feds only provide a penny per passenger for security on buses or trains... compared to seven or eight bucks for each plane passenger."
Doesn't really make sense, does it?
End transmission.
I work in a mine. Nitrate laden dust is generated each day during the blast, and that dust gets everywhere and on everyone. So I have explosive residue in my clothes, hair and (probably) luggage.
Guess what happens when my crew walks into the airport to fly into the minesite for our two week shift?
-AD
This is specifically about *airport* security. It's about keeping the planes safe. A terrorist seeking to blow up an airliner would have a tough time if he acquired his supplies at his destination.
Of course, this brings up the point that even if we *did* manage to make planes super-safe, it remains simply impossible to protect all of the other soft targets all over the country. There are so many legitimate uses of explosive materials and the ingredients thereof that they can't all be secured, and any place that people are in large numbers is a potential target (including any school, stadium, office building, church, theater, etc.)... BUT Americans are nervous about planes after 9/11, so even though seeing the same attack again is unlikely, it makes constituents feel safer if we pump lots of money into airport security.
It's a shame that this is how we go about "waging the war on terrorism", but that's how the world works.
..., or if not dumb, sometimes careless or hasty (remember, these are human beings, not demons from Hell).
Most people continue to lock their doors even though their locks can be defeated using tiny pieces of steel or great big pieces of steel; they're still at an advantage compared to people with open doors, and they've established habits that will serve them well once they wise up and get better locks and frames.
Haven't the perps all switched to much softer targets by now?
If they still want to attack airplanes, they'll do it with shoulder-launched missles, like they tried in Kenya right after 9/11.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So if I happens to eat a couple slice of salami the night before
and touch my luggage, the rent-a-cop at the airport going to
put me in jail?
anginas are vulnerable to chaffing. lol. Oh, Vaginine. Whatever.
Wait until it goes off. The detection rate is superb....
I suggest you read Slashdot
If you have a little one who's still in diapers, he or she leaks nitrates all over the place (in urine); my daughter's car seat used to set off explosives detectors even though we'd cleaned it.
As for chaffing. I don't think this machine was meant to analyze the atmosphere of the entire airport. You just swab the bag and run it through the machine. There are ways to make the readings meaningless, but this would indicate some fishy behavior and cause for "other" means of investigation (ie "Bend over, son.").
This would be a real boon for forensic science in general, if they've managed to make one for a relatively cheap price in addition to its size. Now you don't have to wait for the lab, you can bring it with you.
I used to study (for a class project) Nuclear Quadropole Resonance (aka NQR) which was pretty good at stuff like this. It was slow and power consumptive, which were definite downsides, but it could detect not only trace amounts of explosives, but could detect what type of explosive it was. This would be particularly useful in some of the above examples (4th of July) where you could set your scanner to go off if it picked up C4, or TNT, or whatever, but not the stuff in black cats (if these are the same chemical, my deepest apologies).
:).
We mainly studied it as a replacement to the current stick-and-metal-detector landmine detecting plan, which has a false alarm rate of about 200-300 false positives to every actual landmine or unexploded ordinance (UXO) found. And, with new plastic landmines, NQR was the only way to go. There is a reason UN deminers have a serious injury or death so often.
Regardless, something like this is needed so people with bombs can't get on airplanes, and people with large belt buckles can
Aside from the obvious: sticking your bomb in tupperware, washing crap, gloves, etc... the other glaring obviousity(my word) here is that, what are we really talking about when we say 'explosive residue' or whatever they are calling it?
/incidentally flying cars would help solve this matter easily
with all of the different chemicals and things you can make bombs out of, are we really to believe there is some there some sort of magic test out there that can really determine and detect every possible type of whatever that could be used to construct bombs. it's almost guaranteed that this thing will have severe limitations or tremendous amounts of false positives.
Just in case there are any chemical physicists reading this...
Assumedly, if this system is small enough to be backpack-sized, it's not a time-of-flight mass spec... right? The article's short on details on the actual mass spec--they seem to focus on their ionization technique more than on the spectrometer itself. But, then again, I guess that's where they're focusing their research.
I'm not too impressed by this "reactive chemical spray" system, but maybe that's because I'd be more concerned with airborne rather than adsorbed/adhered molecules. It seems needlessly destructive to be spraying corrosives onto a person's luggage, unless we're talking, like, microgram quantities--although if you're just taking off a few molecular layers, and if the reactive components are rarefied in a less reactive gas, maybe it's not a big deal. Still, couldn't the same sort of "wipes" that you see used with modern airport ion mobility spectrometers be used to spare travelers from being exposed to these "reactive" compounds? Too, it seems a bad idea to require that airports keep machines sitting around in terminals with cylinders of reactive gasses. Once again, the quantities one would be dealing with are what concern me.
They mention that their system suffers low selectivity. Selectivity, from what I understand, is pretty important in other fields, like nerve-gas detection, for instance, in order to force down false positives. What's keeping their system at a low rate of false positives as they claim?
I suppose I could read their papers; this article really is just a press release, after all. Being a lasers sort of guy, I guess maybe I'm just biased towards photoionization.
Also, even though this isn't really germane to my post here, I found another press release here is an article from just about a year ago that talks about this same DESI system.
1. open suitcase
2. put on sterile surgical gloves
3. place bagged explosives into suitcase
4. remove gloves
5. close suitcase
Someone remind me what the point of this whizz-bang technology is again?
The point is to make such a bombing more difficult. Keep in mind that a group of terrorists involved in this sort of action is often small, acting hastily (to avoid detection), and can only trust so many people. Assuming a four man terrorist cell, you figure at least two are going to be involved in the construction of the bomb, and it's likely that others will be involved in acquiring the parts/materials.
You'll never create a perfect security system, like you'll never make a perfectly secure OS (yes, I'm a mac user, and even I'll admit it). The point isn't perfection - it's to make it more difficult so that even the slightest error will result in detection. And people operating quickly and striving for secrecy are more likely to make small errors. Take the case of the Lockerbie bombers - they may have gotten away with it if (and this is as memory serves... forgive me if I'm not 100% correct on this) they hadn't wrapped the bombs in sweaters purchased across the street from a Libyan embassy. Then there's Timothy McVeigh, who was busted (again, I believe...) for driving a get away car with an out of date tag. It's the small screw-ups that get these people.
I am not sure what the exact method is. I do know that vdov.net has a member that is recentl minted into the Cook lab.
Hmmm ... can they also detect whther my laptop runs any Windog pseudo-OS without turning it on?
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Has it ever occurred to you that the war on terror's refined capacities to detect explosives could also be used to suppress a "rebellious" majority population? (that is to say, to enforce a dictatorship in the USA?)
Just pointing out that the Bush administration has made more war against civil liberties, privacy and personal freedoms than any administration in my lifetime, and that Bush's election really looked like it was tampered, and that the 911 incident LOOKS ALOT LIKE HITLER'S RISE TO POWER. (read about the BURNING OF THE REICHSTAG)
http://www.shoaheducation.com/reichstag.html
The patriot act is just that -- a bunch of right wing police state warmongers taking away our privacy and then ACTING as if they were patriots in the process. That is to say, the patriot act is just that: an ACT.
And terror suppression in Iraq would also train the American military to suppress pro freedom American partisans.
To be honest, the term "homeland security" just makes the country feel less like my own home. It has a vague nuerolinguistic programming sound to it. It sounds antiforeign and hyperguarded. For starters, no American uses the term "homeland."
I really don't like bombs, but if the govt turns against us then those bombs detected with the new tech would just be the "friendly" ones.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
*Cheese releases fumes that many chemical sniffers will register as those of an explosive. **Kitty litter is often slightly radioactive. It's probably a beta emitter - alpha gets absorbed too easily - but I can't find a definitive source of information.
If these new detectors can detect a nanogram of stilton, but still miss people with semi-automatics, then I don't see we've gained much. Unless there's a plan to use the next NASA mission to the moon to verify its composition is not, as Google claim, swiss cheese.
Of course, we could run into other problems. Will there be false alarms from residue? A lot of Americans do own guns, which means residue on the sorts of scale we're talking about is certainly possible. The security guards are also armed, which means there will be a background reading from those weapons. If cheese is still detected, then not only will we have to deal with actual pieces of cheese, but also any person who has eaten cheese in the past month.
There is no doubt we need a good, functioning weapons detector. I am rather hoping these guys have figured out how to build one. If I am skeptical, it is because I want to see better evidence that they really HAVE figured out how to build one.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
IIRC, in Michael Crichton's book Congo, a rival company managed to put traces of turnip on employee's suitcases, forcing them to be detained as their baggage triggered sensors looking for illegal drug smuggling. Could there be many other false positives in nature concerning such equipment? I don't want to set off the radiation alarms because I had broccoli in my dinner.
they'll just get one person to put it in one bag, then someone else to put it into another bag, then a third person to actually load this package into the real luggage... and a completely clean person to do the carrying. Then there'll be no traces on the outside of the actual luggage
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
So what happens if somebody farts in line, won't that low level explosive set off alarms too?
is way better.
"The development provides instantaneous results, gives no false positives, can be used remotely and is portable --"...
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
The beauty of NQR is that it is a bulk detector, not a trace detector. As several people have pointed out, it is easy to pick up explosive residues which could trigger trace detectors. You are correct in that NQR can determine explosive composition (e.g. RDX, PETN, etc).
It seems to me that you could certainly circumvent this easily enough, with just some social engineering. Carry a lot of sniffer-activating things in your luggage. Travel 15 times on the route, or until you reliably know the security people.
After 15 times, the conversation goes like so:
You: "Hi Steve."
Security: "Hi John."
Detector : beeep! bip! beep! bip! beep! BEEEEEEEP!
You: "Damn detector. Can't they tone those things down a little?"
Security: "Every time you go through, these things go off."
(opens luggage)
Security: "Cheese, fertiliser, and trinitite. Again."
You: "Well, a man's got to earn a living some way. Isn't there some form or something I can fill out to get out of this?"
Security: "Nope. Everyone gets checked."
(closes luggage)
Security: "Off you go."
Travel 15 times without the bomb so everyone gets to know you.
The 16th time, travel with the bomb concealed somewhere in your luggage, but
leave the cheese , fertiliser and trinitite on top. Odds are pretty good that you'll get on that plane.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
My mother gets frisked at airports because her artificial knee sets off the metal detectors.
How is a more sensitive explosives detector going to make things safer ?
The minimum-wage morons are going to simply twist it to max sensitivity and annoy people with the false positives.
I could only see this being useful in a line of filters. OK, so potential passenger #213 turns up positive for nitrates... focus or pay close attention to the next scan on passenger #213. A positive might not mean immediately detaining somebody or even much slowing their progress, but rather discreetly adding some checks as they go through the proces.
Not that I really thing this won't be used stupidly, but hey one could hope.
Really, if you want to know if someone's a terrorist, just
ask them! These people are evil, but no-ones evil enough
to lie to a US airport security guard are they?!?
return 0; }
I don't know about you but its like a bomb going off everytime i look at the price of the ticket.
This is 2005, the so called "terrorist" attack was 2001.
Where are all the other attacks since then? We've had one series, the anthrax mailings, using official US army brand anthrax. Not abduls discount bugs, US Army brand. hmmmm no arrests either...isn't that convenient, and why look, the first guy nailed was a journalist of the yellow press in the middle of writing an expose of the drunk and stoned twins, and the other folks? Opposition leaders and influential newsies, and well, congress in general as the important "enabling act" was up for a vote, and gee whizz, it seemed to pass after the scared washington enough. Did some guy named mohammed really do that?
How hard is it really to do attacks in the US? Any commando with a minimum of simple basic training in assymetrical warfare could pull off one attack per day in some random area, even just plain old arson, and probably never get caught, just keep moving. And that is just one person, where are all the "sleepers" they used to talk about, what exactly are they waiting for again? The secret signal? It's not a secret anymore, there's some big wars going on, so I repeat, where are these "terrorists"?
This whole scenario is to get the herd dumbed down and terrorized into accepting fascist military rule, and they have suceeded. So in hat sense it is terrorism, but 99.999% of the people out there just refuse to actually look at the raw data as compared to what the propoganda masters feed them. This is Reichstagg Fire vs 2.0 stable. It is beyond obvious.
This will make my ticket more expensive, and prove itself utterly useless. I semi-quote:
1. "this technology can sniff the surface"
and
2. "the hand of someone loading the suitcase"
Regarding 1:
It would be fairly obvious to any terrorist to
a) wash the luggage surface.
b) wash their own hands.
Regarding 2:
If the above wasn't obvious to a to terrorists it is now. This is a good thing, because the alternative - terrorist with dirty hands - is a lot worse. Puns a side, I mean it.
A dirty luggage would contaminate the environment around it, this means
a) the gloves or hands of airport personell - the someone mentioned above
b) nearby luggages packed with the dirty luggage
c) trollies, tracks and so on
all of which would render tracking the right dirty luggage more difficult.
At least we'll be able to tell who has been near someone carrying explosives.
If you work in a quarry, travelling's about to get a whole lot harder...
Insert
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Apparently at the cost of coherent thought, judging by your post.
Wow, you studied NQR?? I thought that I was at one of the few academic institutions that cared about NQR in the slightest bit. My MS thesis in ElecEng is based off of it. Or was what you did more like a report, not experimental research? Just curious.
NQR is only power hungry if pulsed. You can also do Continuous Wave (CW) NQR, which takes hardly any power... but then takes even longer to scan.
You're wrong though, in that it can typically detect trace amounts - it is possible, but you need a high fill factor in the the coil. To detect just trace amounts, you need to pass the particles through a really small coil.
Also, yes, it can do identification of compounds, however the problem is that C4, RDX, TNT, etc... all have widely different quadrupole transition frequencies. For instance, the RDX (nu-) line is around 3 MHz or so, while TNT's best line is all the way down near 500 kHz. This is a huge problem for a single system, because you need to tune the whole detection apparatus to within the bandwidth of the coil used for transmit and detection. For a simplish copper coil, you're looking at scan range of something like a 30kHz bandwidth. No problem, right? Wrong. The line(s) are most likely not where you hope they'll be.
You really want a homogeneous crystaline structure of the substance - something amorphous, or with varying crystal structure, will tend to have a wider line. The QR lines of many things tend to be around about 1kHz full-width half maximum (FWHM) for a nice uniform single crystal structure. If you don't have that simple single nice crystaline structure, the line "widens" and, in doing so, gives off a much weaker energy signal.
Now, take into account that the quadrupole transition frequencies SHIFT dependant upon temperature. (Some as greatly as 1kHz per Kelvin.) Basic experimental NQR research tends to use liquid nitrogen (77 K) to get the test substance at a nice equilibrium, giving a consistant and narrow lineshape. (Its cheap, convenient, and pretty safe.) In room temperature, the sample's temp can vary pretty greatly - don't run experiemts on hot or cold days, the thing needs to be at a near constant - which shifts the transition freq of the nuclei all over the place, and therefore broadens the line, weakening the return singal energy.
In regards to the Bomb vs Belt-Buckles thing: Large metal objects are obstacles to NQR. (as are peizo-electric things.) Since NQR is essentially the transmission and reception of radio waves, metal things just reflect the pulses, saturating the reciever, and tell you nothing else except "Hey! That's METAL!" - a really complex and expensive metal detector (or peizo-electric detector.)
We'd been working on exactly what you must have read up on for the class project - anti-persobnel and anti-tank plastic landmine explosvies detection. Unfortunately, we lost funding for the research on 9/11 when our paperwork was destroyed in the Pentagon. After that, landmines weren't considered a Homeland Security threat. Oh, but !@#!@# ANTHRAX was... so that's my line of research for my thesis. Pointless, imnsho, and unlikely to work anyways.
Aside : Our last source of funding, a well known bagillion-$ corporation, realized that it couldn't sell NQR explosives detectors to the TSA/DHS for the profit margin that it is accustomed to. They then cut funding - my tuition and living expenses! So now, I'm not only doing research that will cocluse with "Don't bother trying this, ever," but our USEFUL research that could easily save many lives/limbs every year has been pushed aside.
If anyone wants to help those UN peacekeepers hunting for landmines, we could sure use some research monies.
Dude, you are entirely out of touch (bad pun, down!)...the Homeland Security Act changed the type of gloves that are used for airpot cavity searches. The new gloves are not exactly rubber.
The last time I checked, Bush can only serve two terms. So much for the Hitler comparison, unless he somehow gets 75% of the country to vote for a constitutional amendment.
You really shouldn't worry so much. I mean, considering how much value the average American places on their constitutionally protected right to watch porn and smoke dope in the privacy of their own home, there would be a violent revolution as soon as there was even a hint that people might be deprived of such fundamental necessities.
"The unicode stuff in the latest version is working fabulously well. My russian mafia friends are ecstatic."
It's posts like these on /. and around the Internet that are starting to push me further and further away from the left side of politics and /. itself. For instance this story is about a specific technology used to find traces of chemicals. It doesn't have an inkling of political skewing about it.
/.) groupthink supports irrationality, conspiracy theory and poorly thought out historical analogies. Is the Bush admin doing a bad job? Yes I totally agree. But I don't think we are ever going to be taken serious in our claims or actions to change the system when some of our fellow progressives are completely irrational in the way that they present themselves.
So now we have the parents post (currently modded +4 interesting) who claims that this new technology could be used to suppress the population. The parent never bothers to extrapolate on how this technology in the article could be used for the purpose of suppression of course. We are just supposed to accept the fact that it will sometime in the future under the guise of a totalitarian government. Notice how we are supposed to just accept his didactic terms the parent lays out? That's called propaganda.
The parent is why I'm moving away from the left. It seems the lefts (and
The parent post is pretty offtopic from the subject at hand but I had to respond.
Mix sawdust and glycerine and burn them. Spread the ashes on the bottoms of your shoes.
The machines will go apeshit.
Too much sensitivity is a bad thing. Ask anyone who is hypersensitive to cologne or perfume.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Sorry buddy, but you need to get your facts straight. 98 out of the the 100 Senators voted in favor of the Patriot Act in 2001. Right Wing Warmongers, eh? Like, Kerry, Leiberman, Edwards, Hillard Clinton, Kennedy, and Feinstein, eh? Source
To be honest, the term "homeland security" just makes the country feel less like my own home. It has a vague nuerolinguistic programming sound to it. It sounds antiforeign and hyperguarded. For starters, no American uses the term "homeland."
The term Homeland Security sounds like another politically correct nonsensical term being forced out of the Government that provides no obvious answer as to what it does. That's not something you can blame on just Republicans, bub.
If the government turns AGAINST us? Really, what have you been smoking? This isn't 1984. Bush sucks as a President, we get it. He's not Hitler. Hell, he isn't SMART enough to be another Hitler.
As for civil liberties, this isn't in your lifetime, but read up about the Alien and Sedation Act sometime.
You'd better hope that it's as accurate as they claim. May I point the honourable gentlemen at the evidence provided against the Guildford Four and the victims of Bloody Sunday. The "explosive traces" could easily have come from a pack of playing cards!
http://www.answers.com/topic/bloody-sunday
Disclaimer: I am neither Irish, nor an Irish Republican supporter
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
So a friend of a friend is a firearms enthusiast, and had a duffle bag that he used to carry a bunch of guns and ammo when he went off shooting targets or Bambi's mother or whatever. Later he used that same duffle bag as carry-on luggage when he was flying somewhere, and he got lucky and got his bag swabbed by security. The machine was Not Happy about what it found, because in fact there _was_ explosive residue on the bag, and much hand inspection occurred. From what I remember, they did let him and his get on the plane; not sure if they let him hand-carry the bag or made him check it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Many airports are carpeted, at least in some areas, and cleaning up moving walkways is probably not that easy either, especially the rubber-tread ones. Then there's the luggage rack on the parking shuttle busses... If you've got a super-sensitive machine, and somebody wanted to overload it, there are way too many opportunities.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Great, so the system can detect farmers and gardeners at longer ranges?
The UK/France Channel Tunnel security checks use guards with cotton gloves to wipe around the inside of passengers' cars. The gloves are then analysed by computer- this means a complete explosives search can be done in two minutes, rather than having to rip the car's body panels apart. Unfortunately, this has a huge false positive rate for anyone who's been in contact with fertilizers; my uncle, who is a keen gardener, got questioned at the end of an SMG for quite a while before he mentioned that he'd been carrying bags of nitrate fertilzer in his trunk just a few days prior.
Whilst that's inconvenient for gardeners and farmers, its also a safety risk for the rest of the passengers; after all, it gives a convenient alibi for saboteurs. I certainly wouldn't want to board a train in the same carriage as the Falls Road Allotment Society.
These toys provide useful indicators of where to concentrate resources on, but they should never replace good old fashioned trained security staff.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
While I'm just a lowly analytical chemistry student, I did hear about the DESI systems and the new DART last week. The DART's certainly the more impressive of the two:
"DART works by applying an electrical potential to a gas such as nitrogen or helium to form a plasma of excited-state atoms and molecules that then interact with the sample and the atmosphere. Several different ionization mechanisms are possible, and operating conditions can be manipulated to favor one over the others.
For example, proton transfer is the dominant mechanism of positive ionization. This type of ionization occurs when metastable helium atoms react with water in the atmosphere to produce ionized water clusters that can protonate the sample molecule, forming positively charged ions.
Under different conditions, electrons also can be formed if the carrier gas can form metastable species with high enough internal energy. For example, helium reacts with atmospheric water to form negative-ion clusters of oxygen and water that in turn react with analytes to form negatively charged ions.
In the negative-ionization mode, nitrate and nitrite ions are not produced because, in DART, plasma formation from the carrier gas is isolated from the air. Those ions can interfere with the detection of nitrogen-based explosives and reduce the sensitivity of anion detection."
Link
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Every third codger who goes to visit the grandkids is gonna ring that bell. They won't be carrying is so much as sweating it out. You can't get people to take showers before the come to public places and even so it's not like you can wash this off anyway. It's in their bloodstream. Bubbling like the smell of hot coffee. An actively breathing Human will pump more nitro particles into the air then a inert hidden bomb ever could.
Not to mention, nitrates and glycerin often mix in regular people's bowels. Not quite to explosive levels (this don't not include patrons of Taco Bell). Glycerin is in foods but more common in quantity as a lubricant or laxative.
A sniffer would be worthless.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
.. I have to get 'registered' with the DHS if i want to DIY my own clean room?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Facilities that deploy this technology will almost undoubtedly: a) invest in high quality cleaning technology, b) renovate so as to ensure that all surfaces are relatively easy to clean. Besides, someone "chaffing" an airport is the kind of event would sufficiently rare as to warrant a several days of airport closure and a heavy duty cleaning. After all, it's basically a terrorist act, ableit one with no human casualties -- but it would certainly spread terror, wouldn't you agree?
I have been grilled constantly everytime I or colleagues fly. One was brutally "disappeared" at gunpoint and no one would admit to having detained him for days, and anyone asking about him was interrogated and threatened. Turns out he made some random other passenger nervous and they complained - He looked too ethnic for the old bat and she mentioned it to a TSA guy.
I have never been interrogated so heavily as when they discovered a book in a foreign language in this utterly whitebread middle-aged caucasian professionals bag. They wanted to detain me until they searched my HOUSE. My god, I have a dictionary in freaking German. How Unamerican is that? Apparently enough to have guns pointed at me.
Lightening up, my ass.
Get a Catapillar baseball cap, a GW Bush tattoo, and act like you can't read too well. Just talk about Fox news and drool a bit. Then they might consider you 'safe' enough to be a good American.
Now, all a bomb-carrying-person has to do is to chaff the airport so that the trace amounts coming from his bomb is the same (zero'ed) trace amount in the airport's environment.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
What really gets me is that now we ALL have to take our shoes off, every goddamned time. And it's because the never-to-be-repeated crazy-as-a-loon Richard Reid tried to put a bomb in his shoes. Nobody's going to try that again. But because it was a possibility, we have to line up for this faux-security inspection of our shoes. Seriously, wtf? It's one more illusion of security that accomplishes nothing but pissing off those of us who know better.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
if not for the +1, informative "how to make an undetectable bomb", at least for the +1, insightful "be kind to other people, dont invade their homes with your troops and you'll be just fine".
Is this anything like Implant Sciences' Quantum Sniffer? http://www.runonideas.com/imx
and http://www.implantsciences.com/
This thing is suppose to be able to quicky detect trace elements used in bombs.
images.google.com - "spiked glove". That's all it took. So the part to worry about is that there are enough gloves like that for Google images to find. But thanks for your concern. ;)
I looked into tech like this recently for a research project. While there has been improvements in sniffing and x-ray technology it isn't the same as directly detecting the chemicals involved. These guys have something that directly detects the chemicals. Seems like a better solution to me.
Then again, if you're a terrorist, just stick your dynamite into some VENISON SAUSAGES. Probably will work for you.
GE has a system already in place at some airports (I've seen it at the Logan's Delta terminal) which puffs air at people to detect explosives. It sounds like this technology being "developed" is just an extension of that. The GE product is for people and is similar (and I think also acts as) a metal detector instead of being only for luggage. http://www.geindustrial.com/presscenter/home?actio n=pressReleaseDetail&business=infra&newsId=352&Dt_ Lo=YES
One of my coworkers recently took the train (KC -> Chicago and back). Total transit time was 7 hours -- roughly the same as driving, but without having to, well, drive. Cost of the ticket was around $70 one way, which is probably around what gas would cost (depending on vehicle, etc.. etc...). The only problem with trains is the schedule. Maybe with increased ridership, more routes, etc.. will be added? Time will tell.
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
This summer I flew from Regan National to DFW with a gun case containing an LCD monitor. Did not encounter a single problem. The gun case smelled of cleaning fluids and gun powder. It even got swabbed on the way back to Regan, where as by chance I also lost my drivers license while in Dallas. So there I was a non identified person carrying a gun case through an airport. It was fun. The case got swabbed, I did tell the lady that it was a gun case and would probably return a positive, yet it did not. I went on my merry way! So ya no faith in these tests...but hey if it makes the lady next to me shut up, Im down with it.
Yes, there is a vivid enample of the skunk effect two weekends ago on Capital Mall in Washington D.C. Homeland Security sniffers (they are vague about the details) detected the disease bacteria called tularemia. Its not sure whether this was natural occuring soil bacteria kicked up by crowds during a large protest that weekend. Else it could have come in on some rural vistor's boots. In the worst scenario it could have intentionally planted by someone wanting to start an epidemic via a crowd.
I had a discussion long ago with a person that had a great idea. If you was going to fly, ALL lugage was shipped by truck a few days in advance. When you arrived to get on the plane, you are lead to a room, stripped of all clothes ran thru a "decontamination room" and given a disposable jump suit. Everyone flew in these jumpsuits with no other items allowed on the plane. (I think flying naked may be even more secure but the view would be SCARY!!) but with all lugage shoes and clothes shipped on ground based trucks and every passanger flying without even their own clothes, there would be safty in the air. Course I would prefeer even fewer planes in the sky (I like to watch the stars, not planes at night.)
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
Great. So if go to the rifle range before boarding a flight, I can expect traces of GSR to be found on my person, followed by the requisite hauled-by-the-tits-out-of-line and interrogated-for-hours routines?
GG Homeland Security!
-- often wrong; never in doubt
Now quickly deploy this in the entrance of every subway tunnel in London, every pizzaria, disco, Bus station in Isreal and Bala.
You are overestimating the extent to which security people will follow procedure in order to cover their asses. There have been multiple times where I have been singled out for screening for stupid reasons, and the security people knew it. However, they didn't want to be the ones that broke procedure and let someone talk them into skipping the in-depth search. Like the time where a flight was canceled and everyone was given one-way tickets on other flights. The computer marked the one-way tickets as high risk (as normal), so everyone who got moved off that flight had to go through the full search. Stupid, but the guards know thier job isn't to think - they get fired for that.
Furthermore, even at a high level, what are they supposed to do? Let everyone through? Ground all flights leaving the airport until everything is decontaminated, or the source is found? I would assume that if someone did this as a means of concealing a device, then he would make the contaminated as high as the detectable level that he was carring.
Hey, I'm with you. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a distinct group of "bad guys", the f'ing terrorists, and once we found them and killed them off there wouldn't be any more?
And wouldn't it be nice if Americans, the good guys, were a rational group of people who realized that even if terrorists blew up a plane once a month, flying would still be safer than driving?
Alas, that is not the world we live in. In fact, terrorists and Americans and everyone else are all, in fact, people. All acting independantly based on faulty logic and strong emotions, and reacting to what everyone else is doing. People start planning and committing "terrorist" actions in response to other actions, because they are attacked or they just *think* their group is being attacked. If they get fired up by a very charismatic leader they may race ahead, fuelled by rage, or if the leader is sick today and not convincing they may start to have doubts.
Some people will be angry enough to plan and commit terrorist acts one day, but not the next day. Or they might have already changed their minds but cannot see how to get out of it now.
People may feel more confident about flying even if the security measures are useless, but LOOK useful. Or because of the words of someone on TV who doesn't know either way, people may suddenly feel that flying is too dangerous, and the economy will be affected, possibly seriously. Notice how the actual security of the planes is irrelevant here, unless a successful attack actually happens.
I think we'd all be a little happier if the whereabouts of all those dangerous gardeners and farmers were known.
Does no one use plain old MPI anymore? Light isn't exactly compact to produce, but it's so easy to work with--tunable, directional, all sorts of nice properties.
As someone who was nearly caught in an airport shutdown due to firecracker residue on someone's luggage, I'd suggest avoiding flying around the Fourth of July.
You'd probably agree that destroying some infrastructure, even if not populated, qualifies as a terrorist act right? Blowing up an unoccupied power station? No one dies, but it causes big problems.
Terrorist acts aren't just about death -- they're about making people _afraid_, so that they capitulate to some political end.
The heart patient papers won't do diddly. You can have papers from the Surgeon General saying you are on cancer treatments and are exposed to radioactive isotopes. They will strip search you, anyway, as they do to patients now when they blip the hidden radiation detectors in NYC.
So the paper-forging terrorists don't get a free ride; real patients get tons of freedom-infringing hassle.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
What really gets me is that now we ALL have to take our shoes off, every goddamned time. And it's because the never-to-be-repeated crazy-as-a-loon Richard Reid tried to put a bomb in his shoes.
What's worse is we can't bring lighters because Reid couldn't get his matches to work and was too stupid to light his shoes in the rest room. TSA didn't want the lighter ban. It was done because some stupid congressman wanted to look tough on "terrorist".
RTFA? What FA?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
I thought the difference was that high grade explosives could detonate (though some can also deflagrate) and low grade explosives deflagrate (i.e. burn?)
explosives
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
http://www.isracast.com/tech_news/081004_tech.htm It also looks interesting don't you think?