Slashdot Mirror
New Explosive Detection Tech
cruci writes to tell us Yahoo! is reporting that a New Zealand company, Syft, has developed a new way to detect many different kinds of explosives (and their individual ingredients) in real time. Designed for what the company calls "photocopier simplicity", CEO Geoff Peck claims that the technology is ready to deploy immediately and is already deployed in some ports and hospitals. From the article: "The Voice100(TM) employs Selected Ion Flow Tube - Mass Spectrometry (SIFT-MS). While SIFT-MS has been in academic use for more than 20 years, Syft Technologies is the first company to offer a commercial instrument with the full discriminating analytical power of a laboratory-grade mass spectrometer."
to detect explosions in airports. It is easy to use. Anyone interested?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
"The Voice100(TM) employs Selected Ion Flow Tube..."
It's a bunch of tubes I tell you!
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?
You have to look at the false positive and negative rates for detection. If you have a test that is 99.99% specific, it will still fail in practical use in an airport, as that means that 1 out of 10,000 people will come up positive. If you have a lot of people going through you will still have a big problem (London had over a million flights last year). This is the same issue as using automatic detection of terrorists – It's one thing to match/no match a known ID (e.g. biometric passport) to a person; it's another to match every passer by to every known terrorist.
Going back to chemical detection: this level of sensitivity will mean that every person runs the risk of coming up positive eventually. This amounts probably about 100,000 people in the U.S., and lots more elsewhere in the world.
IANAC (I am not a chemist) but this guy seems to make a pretty solid arguement: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200608/msg00087.html
Resonance cascade.
Here's a schematic
It also says that it can detect compounds in the ppb levels out of breath (in real time). What I am wondering is how large/portable this machine is. Could a baggage handler walk around with it and wand things, or would you need to put all the bags through the machine on a conveyor belt?
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Not the U.S. I think we made it adequately clear that our DHS doesn't exist to improve homeland security, rather just to scare the citizenry.
Someone had to do it.
OK, I've got to put something in here to post. What a waste of perfectly good electrons. :)
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Hmmm... What if you are standing close by some fellow planning on blowing the plane out of the sky, and you are first in line at the Mass-Spectrometer? In all the brew-haha of you getting tackled/cuffed/cavity-searched, the terror monger walks right in...
D'oh!
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
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>The Voice100(TM) instrument's core feature is its ability to continuously detect and quantify the concentration of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in whole air.
In other words, if the bad guy's dumb enough to make his explosive before passing through the screening station, he gets picked up.
But since hydrogen peroxide isn't an organic compound, Abdul walks up to the scanner and it says "Nothing to see here. Move along."
And since acetone is a VOC, when Mohammed walks up to the scanner, the scanner screams bloody murder... which would be fine, except that it also probably screams bloody murder for every woman with a bottle of nail polish remover in her purse. So Mohammed gets told to move along, too.
*blam*
Airlines are like democracies: We have to destroy them to save them.
And how high will the fee that is added to the cost of a ticket going to be to pay for this?
Try to light all suspicious materials on fire. Nice and cheap (all you need is some guy you pay minimum wage with a handheld lighter). For larger items, have a can of hairspray handy to use as a cheap flamethrower.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
While we are at it, why don't we check athletes at the airport for doping drugs before they compete in important sporting events. Maybe take away their plane ticket if the detector smells the synthetics from their sweat glands.
You know, kill two birds with one stone. Heck, I bet that this machine could establish paternity as well.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This technology, as well as some others I have seen, has a major problem. All the terrorists have to do is spend some time seeding the people in line with small amounts of powdered explosives. Make the detector go off on every one. The minimum wage security person decides the unit is broke; his almost minimum wage manager puts in the fix request which will take weeks. In the mean time, it is back to business as usual.
This is a mess and a waist of time.
Next you know, they will be selling them to your boss to check you as you come to work.
Be careful, if the government can get it, the private sector can get it and they do not have to honnor your rights.
My ass spectrometer could detect explosive diarrhea years ago.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
1- High profile terror case/natural disaster/act of God has just occurred
2- Previously unknown company proposes its bulletproof and cheap product which they claim have been proposing for years
3- Get suckers to invest in your product by tapping into people's irrational fears that naturally follow 1-
4- Profit!!!
In this case, 1- is obviously the UK terror plot to blow up planes by smuggling explosives onto the plane (like that's gonna work, but whatever gets the thinkofthechildren crowd going)...
"And since acetone is a VOC, when Mohammed walks up to the scanner, the scanner screams bloody murder... which would be fine, except that it also probably screams bloody murder for every woman with a bottle of nail polish remover in her purse. So Mohammed gets told to move along, too."
Your argument is predicated on the idea that nail polish remover is pure acetone. It's not. Any terrorist sneaking a liquid bomb on board has to keep not only quantity (do we have enough to accomplish what we want?). But purity (is our ingredients pure enough to get the reaction we want). It's not a stretch to have a machine that'll match specific ingredients mixed in a particular purity to known items in near real-time.* Anything outside those parameters is suspect (the exclusion rule).
*Similiar to what happens in a forensic lab.
By calling a terrorist Mohammed, you are profiling. Why not call him John. John Mohammed.
How about this...
..... ....
Are you ready for it?
Stop invading countries for the wrong reasons!! Maybe then they'll stop thinking about blowing us all up!! Instead of motivating ourselves to find better technology to find explosives, how about motivating the "terrorists" into NOT killing all of us by actually working with them to resolve our differences instead of battling on, invading and taking over their land in the name of "Democracy and Freedom" (READ: power and money)?
Could it ever work? Would we ever try this tactic?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
We should be detecting bombers not bombs. Bombs form a nearly endless variety. Bombers are an easier class of object to detect, I believe. The fact that the bombers try to hide the bombs on their person or in their carry on luggage suggests they they themselves don't fear the system's scruitiny. In the old days they had to figure out ways of getting the bomb on the aircraft without them being anywhere near it. How times have changed.
how about a detector that screens out people susceptible to claustrophobia and panic attacks, which could lead to passenger airplanes being diverted and escorted by fighter airplanes...?
There is nothing specific to the technique that prevents it from recognizing things that are not organic. This is just a highlighted capability. It is like assuming that Vista doesn't have a calculator because you haven't seen it mentioned in press releases.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
If you'll notice, it's not the folks who are researching pure "explosives detection" who are making the advances, it's folks who have been working on all sorts of other tech (mostly in the private sector) who are getting things done.
You want dramatic, practical scientific advances? Don't fund it with government money.
Note that it was a New Zealand company, not the New Zealand government, in the article...
Before anybody gets too excited, note that this is a Press Release from the Manufacturer of the device. Yahoo isn't "reporting" anything-- they are simply forwarding a Press Release from the PRNewswire.
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http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060816/lnw002.html?.v
This company is certainly not the first company to promote an easy-to-use bomb detector, or to talk about how their product is better then the competitor's products.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Thinking "Plane go boom"!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Can it detect calculators? Also, hugely bad form for the parent. He changed MoHammed to Abdul.
Lets just hope there isn't a residence cascade
I will forever be a student.
How about ... Stop invading countries for the wrong reasons!! Maybe then they'll stop thinking about blowing us all up!!
Too late. (Has been at LEAST since the "Monica Missiles".)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So if you injure yourself changing your motor oil after fertilizing your yard, you're going to have a LOT of trouble at the emergency room.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"You are correct that this detection methods are nearly useless by themselves. Any terrorist will know about them and figure out a way around them. However, the more hoops you make the terrorists jump through, the more likely your detectives will be able to find them."
A valid point most here are forgetting. Would anyone here connect their computer to the internet and just depend on ACLs or permission bits to defend that machine? Of course not. So why does anyone think that security is going to depend on just these machines? Security if it's any good is going to make all the technology and techniques complimentry. The weaknesses of one are met by the strengths of another. False positives overall go down.
I object! You are merely playing into populist stances by using such a stereotypical last name!
... "Mohammed Doe"
You should instead use a last name like "Doe"
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
This reads like the most disturbing piece of marketing fluff I have ever seen in analytical chem. I have seen things that are close, but they were in product brochures and never claimed to be news.
Nak.
If it can "quantify the concentration of volatile organic compounds" in the air, it can determine if there is a sufficient quantity to produce a dangerous reaction. Somehow, I suspect that a bottle of nail polish remover does not contain enough acetone to be a real threat, but IANAC (...chemist) so I could be wrong.
However, given enough women carrying enough nail polish remover on board the aircraft, I suppose it could be a problem...
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
"photocopier simplicity",
yes but can it copy your butt? i thought not.
fake
Unfortunately, no one can be told what my sig is...
You want Red Team? Have the CalTech prank-of-the-year be an airplane removal. You'd have hundreds in a matter of hours.
Proof of point: tell me how they're going to stop people from taking ferrite, aluminum, and magnesium on planes.
Instead we get programs to prevent baby bottles.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"Slashdotters are so quick to point out perceived flaws in new technology."
Surprised? Don't be. Note well that technology they perceive that will be used against them get the treatment. Technology they perceive to benefit them don't.e.g. P2P. Nice to know that slashdotters aren't above the "sheep" they so roundly condemn.
I work in a chemistry lab where we regularly synthesis small quantities of explosives. Last weekend I took a flight and (very stupidly) wore the same shoes that I normally wear to work. They swabbed my shoes down and passed me through without a second glance. It didn't occur to me until after I was through security that there was surely some trace amount of explosives on my shoes that should have been detectable. Upon further reflection I realized that the detector was probably only set to look for a few certain common explosives, and the explosive compounds that we work with in my lab are relatively esoteric.
I think that the very narrow specificity of these machines is a major problem. You might be able to detect the 20 most common explosives, but it would be trivially easy for any competent organic chemist to come up with a new explosive that the detector wouldn't be looking for. Perhaps the detectors that we have now look for nitroglycerin, but what about nitroglycerin with an extra methyl group hung off the end of the carbon chain? Or an ethyl group? Or an isopropyl group? What if instead of ammonium nitrate you used butyl-ammonium nitrate? Or butyl ammonium with some other, less common oxidizer like permanganate/perchlorate/whatever? Do you see my point? You could make a slight modification to almost any existing explosive and render it undetectable to these bomb scanners, because the scanners only look for things that they have been specifically trained to look for. They have no capability to actually examine the structure of a molecule and judge whether it's explosive or not. It's kind of like using a "knife detector" that has been set to look for the most common brands of knifes, when in fact you could sharpen almost anything into a knife with a little effort.
They invented the Tricorder....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
This is going to be another profitable tool that will be misused. The current state of the art sniffers that try to detect explosives will show a positive result if lotion was applied due to glycerin. If you ever test positive, the screeners will try to get you to say you used lotion so they can get you one your way and they can get on with their lives with as little paperwork as possible.
Next time you go through the airport, use some lotion and spill some on your luggage. Let the fun ensue!
Photocopier simplicity, eh? I can see it now: "Bomb Ingredient Jam in detection device. Please open Door 2A and follow the instructions on the label inside of the door to clear the jam." Don't forget to turn knob 4C three complete rotations! But it doesnt' matter how many compartments you open, there is *always* one more page buried in there somewhere. And then the job restarts who knows where, and you'll get partial results of "0.396 bombs found".
I don't know what kind of photocopiers they have in New Zealand, but saying "Photocopier simplicity" is a sure way to make me avoid your product for being too complicated.
Whole point of the plot in Britain was that multiple Muslims, working in concert, bring in chemicals that are safe/inert/legal by themselves, but that can be combined in flight to make the kaboom. A guy with an unloaded gun is harmless. A guy with a bullet in his pocket is harmless. If the two of them happen to be working together, you have a problem.
Mass spectrometers are much better than 99.99% accurate. Down to parts per billion is fairly common, and the pre Mass Spectrometer stage (gas, liquid chromatograph, or in this case, selected ion flow tube) manipulates out compounds you don't want to analyse. That doesn't mean you set the trigger level of the number of molecules at 1, or 10 molecules, you set it at a level which would indicate that there are quantities of explosives present.
The nice thing about this tech is it's very fast compared to gcms or lcms. I wouldn't count it out, it looks interesting.
Deleted
so, OK, in this conspiracy theory of theirs, there's bad guys with trinary liquid explosives, if you mix them up you can make an explosive. so allegedly what you do is to then take all the liquids from the passengers and just have them dump them out on a trash can right there in front of everyone. Ya know, "mixing all that stuff up " making who knows what for chemicals.
No one seeing anything even remotely wrong with this picture? Does that sound even remotely sane, or have any comon sense to it, or is it *theater*? And, if you look close, they sorta hint around they "had agents" inside. Yep, I am sure they did, it's called "agents provacateurs" and is another time honored trick. You egg someone on to do something stupid, in this case, potentially criminaly stupid. Is that...wise?
It's yet another scam, they tried this one to get the israeli war and the genocide of lebanon off the front pages, look at the damn timing. And to make blair and bush and crew look "tough on terrorists" and "look, we really are working on this" and so forth.
scam. conjob. Yet another misdirection for the little peepuls.
Now I have no doubt eventually you'll see a lot of islamics keep trying to bring the war to the US and the UK. Want to know why? They are sick of the support given to that racist ripoff ill conceived and badly run criminal mafia nation, that apartheid regime known as israel. Remember, the nation that never signed the NPT and is known to have built nukes illegally? Where by both US and UK laws they shouldn't be traded with, let along "supported"?
Give it up, Israel ceased being "the good guys" around 60 years ago now. Irgun, stern gang, look it up. USS Liberty, look it up. Transfers of high tecv given to them to CHINA. Look it up. Criminal mobster run nation, and unfortunately always has been, screwing their neighbors and mostly screwing their own citizens. Their entire nation was based on a *blatant* ripoff of stealing islamic/arabic lands and wealth by a group of *europeans*. Look at history how this came about, follow it back as far as you can to see the "greater zion" movement. See who was behind it, see how some of them collaborated with hitler to make it worse than it had to be during the war. do some research beyond your governmental approved text books. See how the "allies" ignored what was going on in ww2 at the camps. Follow the money trails and the political influence trails back, then turn around and go forward all the way to today. See any crooks and liars?
Please explain why this is a good idea, why anone should accept it, and why germany and italy weren't forced to give up some of THEIR lands for the new "jewish homeland" after ww2 and the atrocities they committed? Why were these other folks picked out, what did they do?
The plan is to keep goading that islamic tiger until they react, keep poking sticks at them, over and over and over again, then they can go SEE, TOLDYASO! And use that as an excuse to go apeshit on them, and eventually it's GOING to go nuclear.
Heglian dialectic, look it up. The globalists have used the same dodge over and over again and the herds always fall for it, because it's more convenient than thinking for yourself.
And meanwhile, back at civilization, they get all this bogus police state action passed into law and common acceptance, and the herds go b-a-a-a-a and m-o-o-o-o-o.
If you fall for the war on terrorism bullshit you haven't been paying any attention and are just blindly swallowing these governmental lies and lies of ommission and their near comical little political melodramas theh concot. If you go along with that airplane big brother shit you are a herd animal. Just say NO.
What would YOU do if for the past one hundred years two nations were constantly meddling in your nations affairs? Grab some history books and see what the UK and USA have been doing. Would you accept them and their proxy immigrants as "the good guys" if it was you and your
can it spot a Dell?
just take all the laptops marked DELL...
Also, log to a database and crossreference unusual amounts of certain chemicals with another database with ingredients for known explosive compounds and you should have an idea if something is "brewing" ;)
Lo, and behold, September 11, 2001 shows up and a group of dedicated people does what "no one would ever anticipate" and hijack several planes with nothing more than metal box-cutters. Yes, that's right. The blades in box-cutters are made of metal. Yes, that's right. The hijackers were carrying legitimate identification. Yes, that's right. They all passed through the rigorous inspections that we had all been told would make us safe way back in the 1970s.
What makes you think this new set of intrusions, even given better technology, will make the skies any safer?
If someone is serious about hijacking one or more planes, there is NOTHING the TSA can do about it.
Until after the fact, when they impose NEW regulations to make the skies safe once again.
Geez, they never learn.
But, boy, do they ever earn.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Think about this one: Who's profiting from all these "terror scares"?
Stop the brainwash
While such things do influence people for the worse, this is not the root cause. The root cause of Islamic facism and terrorism is due to a couple of things. First we need to acknowledge that the largest Islamic country in the world is Indonesia which does not seem to produce large numbers of terrorists and suicide bombers. Therefore the root cause cannot be Islam itself. Rather the root cause has more to do with the fact that the Arab world (not necessarily the Islamic world) is, in terms of thinking, almost a century behind the rest of the world. Repressive regimes (which we prop up) create essentially a gang-neighborhood environment. In fact terrorism is caused by the same things that the inner-city gang problems are caused by. Instead of drugs and rap music we have extreme religious points of view that people turn to to get a sense of belonging and value, even though these things are ultimately destructive and cause a chain of violence. All of these factors combine to cause Arabs in particular to feel that they are victims. They are victims of Israel, victims of the US, victims of the west. Even if the US was not in Iraq, and if Israel did not exist, many would still feel this way. It's really a way of avoiding responsibility for one's own actions (you caused me to blow myself up in your city because you're oppressing me).
So the combination of having one's society be so far behind the rest of the world and the feeling of victimhood are the real root causes. Sure our foreign policy doesn't help things, but on the other hand I don't see that changing anytime soon. There is no ethical way the US can abandon Israel. There is, however, lots we can do to build good will in the Arab world (and no, abandoning Iraq will *not* foster good will on the part of the Arab world).
Designed for what the company calls "photocopier simplicity"
Great, so now we'll have to pry TSA goons' asses out of the machine after they decide to scan them.
It was live video on CNN today that they found a suspicious container shipment, and they didn't have the bomb-detecting equipment there.
I should point out, like many other professionals, that it is fairly easy to make said explosives undetectable using a clean room with non-permeable plastic sealant. Still works just as well in going boom, of course, but you need to have an oxygen-rich explosive or one that requires certain ignitors. Also, certain "safe" chemicals, when mixed, or ignited beyond a certain thermal limit, will still explode real good, and if you have a nice "dirty bomb" payload, it still works fine.
Don't believe all the industry hype, you never will be safe, but you don't have to live in fear. More people die of sunstroke in northern states than have ever been at risk from terrorist bombs in the USA.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Er... look down. If Mohammed happens to be wearing nail polish, you can probably let him off the hook..
The reason that most if not all airline travellers fly on commercial airliners is not because they love to fly on commercial airliners - they do it because it's more convenient/economical than the alternatives.
Once commercial air travel becomes massively inconvenient due to measures taken to satisfy the need for travellers to 'feel secure', many will decide to stay home or find other alternatives. I wonder how many have already crossed that line. You'll never hear about these people, since they won't be on any boob tube news interviews at the airport (you know, the endless stream of drooling morons saying "as long as it helps me know that the security is working, it's ok" on the evening news after every incident and ensuing restriction on our freedom to travel.)
I knew - once 9/11 came down - that flying would become more hassle than I am willing to endure (I wasn't particularly willing to endure the hassle before 9/11, but the 'security' measures since then have pushed it over the line for me, personally.) I've not flown since, and it's not due to any fear of terrorism - it's the fact that I'm not a criminal, and that I'm not interested in being probed, sniffed, tested, questioned, interrogated, or otherwise harrassed in order to help make the rest of my fellow passengers feel secure.
It's none of your damn business what's in my luggage. If you are in fear over what others may be carrying, then stay off the damn plane.
Resin is chock full of VOC and will probably set the sensor off as well. It is also porous and will still let VOC's out over time.
Incidently if I was fresh from either of two hobbies I would set this detector off quite admirably. Boat building and resin, or the shooting range and gunpowder smoke residue. I'd have to shower AND make sure that I was not wearing any article of clothing that I wore or handled during earlier activity.
Fall and hunting season are going to cause a shock with this one!
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
Nail polish remover and other volatile liquids were banned before the "liquid explosive" panic.
Surely we're forgetting something important here? If we prevent terrorists from blowing up planes, won't they just go elsewhere? Hell, they could even get to the airport and blow themselves up before they get to the security check.
Also, if they get to the detector at say a London tube station and it goes off, who's to say they can't just knife the bloke operating it, run in and blow themselves up in the crowds? Are they gonna put armed police at every single detector? Even at an airport they could just blow themselves up at the security desk which is bound to have a massive queue behind it and loads of people surrounding it in general.
Terrorism will only be properly dealt with when certain countries admit to their own terrorist acts around the world and realise violence answered with violence only spews forth more.. you guessed it, violence. Such a simple principal with an enormous historical precident, and yet people never learn.
Hmm, I read that title as "New Explosive Detonation Tech". Maybe not the best idea for hospitals...