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T-Ray Camera Sees Through Clothes, Preserves Privacy
Quite a few readers are sending in stories about ThruVision's products, slated to be demonstrated in Britain next week, that are claimed to use Terahertz radiation ("T-rays") to detect foreign objects under clothing, without revealing body details, from a distance of 25 meters and while the subject is in motion. T-rays lie on the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwaves, and are the subject of lively research efforts worldwide. ThruVision says it developed its products in cooperation with the European Space Agency.
Everyone knows the real threat is breast milk and hand cream. Why are we scanning bodies for weapons when there are people trying to get on the plane with Starbucks coffee??
.... it detects foreign objects? a tampon? or only objects RIGHT under clothes? Cause we all seen news of drugs hidden inside human orifices.
...so long as you redefine privacy to mean exclusively "photographic images of your body", and exclude anything else including the contents of your own pockets. That's a pretty narrow definition of privacy. So narrow, in fact, that it stops being privacy at all.
The "naught bits" might not be very clear, but a lot of people would be unhappy with security guards looking at images of you like the one shown in this article. Would you be happy with some guy looking at a picture of your teenage daughter like this?
Last year they installed a device at Airport Schiphol in Amsterdam, that can also scan through your clothes to see what's beneath it. Read the article [url=http://www.dutchamsterdam.nl/174-amsterdam-airport-body-scanning]here[/url]. Some articles on the internet claim that "The Security Scan scanner is based on a technology that uses millimeterwaves. The waves will persist over clothing, and are reflected by the skin. Also other materials, such as plastic, metal, wood, iron, ceramics, etc. reflect the waves. This will help to detect suspicious objects." More information can also be found here.
To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it , requires brains.
Time to make some aluminum foil underpants to go with your hat.
)9TSS
Any deice that attempts to see things you have decided to conceal is a threat to privacy. Just because I choose to conceal something doesn't make me a terrorist, I could be concealing an external bladder bag (or any other kind of medical device), women (and guys, I suppose) may have given themselves some non-surgical "enhancements". There are all sorts of things I may be concealing that are no threat to anyone, but could embarrass me if they were made known to others.
No, the question here isn't whether this is a threat to privacy or not - it is. The question here should be is it a threat we're prepared to accept. How much of our privacy are we going to give up for a sense of security?
They can do what they want, but they'll never see through my tinfoil overall. I even have a catheter, so I never have to go pee. They've got cameras in the toilets, too!
I'm an infovore...
Planes hijacking using knifes cannot happen again. The 9/11 was a one-time event. Before it, in case of plane hi-jacking, passengers sat quietly, waiting for the hijackers to finish their negotiations. After 9/11, taking back the control of a plane at the risk of getting hurt is the most intelligent course of action. This is what apparently happened on UAF93. Now you can't hijack a plane without anything short of an automatic gun.
All this craziness about uber-security is just useless, the only risk today is the risk of bombing and it is already hard enough to bring a big engine in the cabin. Bombings are far easier by bringing a car full of explosives into a crowded area...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
How can anybody claim that something that can tell if I'm wearing nipple rings or a Prince Albert, or a variety of medical devices from colostomy bags to artificial breasts "preserves privacy"?
It's a really unfortunate choice of names, this "T-ray." Inevitably, it wants to make a person associate these waves with x-rays. Photons are photons, but as far as these guys go healthwise, it's pretty certain they'll have more in common with radio or microwaves than x-rays. Heck, the reason they call them x-rays and gamma rays in the first place is because they're in the regime where it makes sense to talk about photons as particles, rather than waves. And they call them "radio waves" and "microwaves" because THEY are down in the more wave-like regime. Just call it "millimeter wave" and be done with it, before we get people claiming they're getting ARS from T-ray devices.
(Let us not forget that a single terahertz-range photon carries about 4meV of energy. That's little-m milli, not big-M mega. These guys might cause some heating, but they're not going to be ionizing many atoms in your body.)
Am I the only one wondering, for example, why the hell they're selling glass bottles in the shops past the security check (just smash one of those and you have a potentially deadly weapon) when they won't even let anyone bring their own beverages?
Link with pictures here
What I'm carrying beneath my clothes is private. My privacy is not limited to just how well Nature has gifted the size and shape of my body's outline.
This device could be better for some limited security tasks like scanning for weapons at building entrances. But let's not pretend that it's a cureall for invading privacy somehow without invading privacy. If we do. then it'll be in use everywhere, and privacy will be as gone as the emperor's new clothes.
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make install -not war