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."
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
Anyway, mass spectrometry is an interesting technology that works very very well in the lab. The question is how practical can they make this machine? How much does it cost? TFA talks about how terrorism is mega expesive, so I get the feeling that they are just trying to lessen the sticker shock. And as the saying goes, no matter how idiotproof they make the device, TSA will just make a better idiot.
Fortunately (according to the manufacturer) this machine finds more than your run of the mill explosives, it can also find drugs:
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
DHS certainly proved what they can and can not do with the Katarina disaster. It appears to be a bloated bureaucracy with the only goal being the promotion of politcal agenda's. Not sure which is worse, a dozen disparate federal agencies that did not talk to each other but at least knew how to do their jobs or one monolithic incompetent bureaucracy.
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.
> OK - don't use the super sensitive machine and let *ONE* terrorist through. See what I'm saying?
Yes. You're suggesting we use a system where we check 2000 people a day. You'll be checking a few people every minute, and by checking I mean looking through all their stuff, asking them questions etc. You'd probably need 20 people working all the time. And given that the components of explosive are stuff like sugar, hair spray etc, you'd have to limit precisely which components you look for, and then people will just make bombs out of those things anyway.
I think 70 on a flight is a VERY low estimate... considering 747s can carry several hundred people. And there is no WAY the false positve rate will be that low in real life. As another poster commented ascitone (sp?) is the primary ingrediant in nailpolish remover, and can react with high concentration hydrogyn peroxide to make a powerfull explosive. So any and every woman who walks by this machene who has remoed their nailpolish in the last 24 hours will touch it off, shake hands with her and you might be flaged as well. Every florist or farmer or even backyard gardener or wall-mart employee who works with nitrogen based fertilizer will be makred and pulled over. There are an absolutely ABSURD number of chemicals used every day that can be mixed to become a bomb.
How long does it take to strip search someone, unpack and repack every item of carry on AND call back their checked luggage to search that.... half an hour? an hour? now if you're really lucky they will catch all of the false positives early enough that your flight isn't delayed.... if youre not lucky they will catch them just minutes before the flight is due to take off (not everyone follows the "get here 3 hours early" rule) and your flight is delayed for several hours. And since your gate is still full, the plane who was to disembark at it is now also delayed until a gate can be freed up. and this is just at one airport, if legislated into every airport in the states it will clog up air travel like nothing else seen.
One of my friends did research on a project similar to this. It is pretty awesome the level of accuracy that they could get from extremely small samples.
I didn't RTFA, but from hearing what he said about it is that it can do the detection in a decent sized area (~1 sq. meter or so) pretty quickly (less than 10 sec). So, it could scan the area of a person + carry on in probably less than 20-30 seconds. If they did this right after you walked through the metal detectors, I doublt it would take that much additional time.
I for one would rather have a *slightly* longer wait to get on the plane in exchange for liquids, etc.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Nobody has found terrorists at any point in history with chemical analysis machines, and they've been in use for years (they can't detect a ceramic knife). The incident at Heathrow was taken care of by good old-fashioned detective work.
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.
If it's really easy to hijack/blow up a plane, then any jerk can do it. If it doesn't take much planning for a terrorist to pull it off, your detectives will have hard time catching the terrorists during the planning stage. If, however, you need special planning overcome obstacles, your investigators have much more time to catch the terrorists while they do the research/recruitment to execute their plans. In addition, the harder you make it for the terrorists, the more likely they are to simply screw up and get caught.
Or, in a move to increase tie-ups and add confusion, make a concealed misting device and go through the area where people are waiting to check their baggage, misting random luggage and carryons with small concentrations of just those volatiles, to ensure that as many people as possible get caught in the explosives sniffer. Meanwhile, the actual bomb had casting resin poured over it and allowed to cure completely, eliminating any avenue for the escape of these VOCs...
Of course, if the bad guys are clever enough to seed the sidewalks in front of the airport with compounds known to be flagged, the whole system breaks down for a long, long time.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.