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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."
"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
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.
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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.
Series of Tubes
Cynical Idealist
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
i've got to ask, what's the origin of all thes internet = tubes comments?
No, no you dont.
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.
By calling a terrorist Mohammed, you are profiling. Why not call him John. John Mohammed.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I'm not interested unless it detects these: http://img.2dehands.nl/f/normal/10427705-dell-lati tude-d600.jpg
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.
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