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Nuclear Scanning Catches a Radioactive Cat On I-5
Jeff recommends Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat's story from a community meeting with Northwest border control agents. Seems their monitoring for dirty bombs from the median of Interstate 5 caught a car transporting a radioactive cat. "It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear 'dirty bombs.' They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident. 'Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour... Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]. The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot.' Did he find a nuke? 'Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier.'"
Schrodinger
Schrödinger cat is not amused
Now, how do you explain that you've just had radiation treatment to the mindless TSA buffoon who's found you're radioactive?
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Please, please, please, somebody tag this catscan.
I heard it hated to be observed.
Did the cat have any superpowers?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I assume they promptly cut the cat open - it could, after all, have been transporting fissile material in it's body. You never know with those feline terrorists.
Emitting nuclear radiation is the equivilent of shouting "hey, here, look in my vehicle. I've got something NUCLEAR!" No wonder there's no privacy. I'm sure if the vehicle was glowing no one would feel bad about them being pulled over. This just happens to glow in a very different way.
...until some law-abiding citizen going about his lawful business gets stopped and accosted for no reason beyond "the machine said so" during a routine blanket surveillance sweep. Enjoy the slide into a police state.
have 18 half-lives.
(captcha: murders)
I cannot believe this hasn't reared its head then. I would think with all the folks being radiated on for cancer treatment, or do cats get a greater dose as a result of their massive size? It just doesn't add up.
I think it isn't much of a privacy problem to detect radioactivity in the wild.
When people do this on their own with their own crappy tools and the authorities wanted to regulate that, everyone was saying 'uh oh'.
Now, when it turns out the authorities do it with state of art machinery, everyone goes 'uh oh' again.
Hey, when Joe the Concerned Neighbour did it to you, he didn't tell you either!
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Holy smokes! Isotopes everywhere!
I'm surprised they needed a detector to find something that, by definition, comprises all of matter.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Obligatory fortune quote: A radioactive cat has 18 half-lives :P
1. I'm remodeling my house. I go down to Home Despot/Slowes and buy a dozen smoke detectors. Would I get pulled over for being a suspected terrorist?
2. I'm a cancer patient undergoing radiation therapy. What can be done to prevent the horror of being pulled over by the KGB? Would it be reasonable to issue "radiology patient" tags, like they issue handicapped tags for the handicapped?
3. What is the false positive rate of such monitoring? Here, we have a cute example of a sick cat setting off a false positive. What about other incidents like this that fail to get into the newspaper?
Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
You mean they didn't just invent the cat scanner?
Passivly monitoring traffic for this kind of thing is harmless, and i'm sure no one would mind as long as the agent used a little common sense and didn't immediately assume the person in the car was osama.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I have not heard of border agents doing this before, and it's interesting how sensitive this tech is, but this isn't as uncommon as you'd think. I know of a small village that is getting federal funding to install such sensors along a main road, which eventually leads to an airport.
Considering that they are looking for dirty bombs which are of little to no threat, they did very well to catch a potentially dangerous radioactive feline. Someone could have received a very nasty scratch.
Wikipedia on the dirty bomb: At levels created from most probable sources, not enough radiation would be present to cause severe illness or death. A test explosion and subsequent calculations done by the United States Department of Energy found that assuming nothing is done to clean up the affected area and everyone stays in the affected area for one year, the radiation exposure would be "fairly high", but not fatal.[1] Recent analysis of the Chernobyl accident fallout confirms this, showing that the effect on many people in the surrounding area, although not those in close proximity, was almost negligible.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
The summary says the car was populated by a "cat", but doesn't mention if there was a human driver. Either that, or the car was driven by a 60's beatnik with a fondness for Jazz music. "Hey dude, I just pulled over this radiocative cat, man, I mean he was smokin'."
Cosmic.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I agree with the agent on this one myself, if it was my job I would have done the same. You guys would rather live in a private state, I would rather live in a safe one.
If a car drove passed and showed up as carrying radioactive material the last thing I would of expected it to be is a cat!
We should all start carrying around smoke detectors to drive these people nuts :)
2 can play games.
Safer than sorry, right? Credit to 'em for being able to detect even that.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
maybe the terrorist hates cats too and is using the "cancer" as a decoy. Now he can kill 2 birds with one stone. Dirty cat bomb.
..........FULL STOP.
I, for one, welcome our radioactive terrorist cat overlords.
{puts out a saucer of milk}
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat
OMG, they measured and saw it! the paradox is solved!
I remember reading something about them discovering a truck loaded with contaminated steel at the gate of some federal facility. Sometimes radiation sources, like cobalt-60, get mixed in with scrap metal that is going to be recycled. The steel plants are scared to death that they will accidentally melt down a load of scrap that contains a radiation source, resulting in a lot of spoiled steel and a huge decontamination bill. They have their own radiation detectors to check incoming material.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
1) Depends on the design of the detector. There's no chance the alpha particles from the Am-241 will be detected, as the cardboard box the smoke alarms are in will stop those, but the photons might be. The cat's scan residue (rimshot, please, along with everyone else in this discussion--but I would guess it's Tc-99 residue from a Tc-99m scan) was picked up by this detector system, so assumedly the Am-241 gammas might as well. That said, I don't know what activity is usually used smoke detectors (and I'm too lazy to look it up), or what activity is usually administered to cats during vet. nuclear med. procedures; questions like these are ones of quantity. You might well be stopped. From their perspective, you might well be buying twelve Am-241 sources to line the casing of a bomb.
2) I was under the impression that oncologists were in the habit of doing just that--giving "doctor's notes" to patients with outpatient implanted brachytherapy seeds or devices. Being treated with a linear accelerator would not be likely to leave a perceptible amount of radiation in your body (photoneutrons from high energy linacs might cause some activation, but I don't think that it's generally a serious concern as far as setting off radiation alarms). Would it also bother you that you might well set off radiation alarms at nuclear power plants, if you happened to work at one, while being treated for your cancer?
3) From a machine perspective, this was not a false positive. From a judicial/social standpoint, it was. I don't have much more to add beyond that.
... just how radioactive was this cat? If it's sufficiently radioactive to show up at quite a distance in a moving vehicle, how much full-body radiation are the people around the cat getting?
I do not want a hot cat sitting in my lap.
In Soviet Russia... Radioactive Cat scans you!
[The Universe] has gone offline.
Nothing really new here. State troopers in west Texas have been doing this for years. In the oilfield, use of neutron sources for bond logs and other useful isotopes like iodine 131 are used for doing injection well analysis, and hey, lots of oil wells in the area.
More than once I have heard the story of survey truck headed down the highway, not properly carrying placards, cop pulling them over because their Gieger counter went off. Not sure it would pick up a radioactive cat, but the sources involved with my story were only a few millicurie and inside a lead containment vessel, so...
1. Are you calling the OP a copycat?
2. You must be mew here. Your caterwauling will get you nowhere; here at slashdot, you must live under the cat's foot.
3. Don't be such a sourpuss.
The fear of a dirty bomb is not that people will die--not many would probably die from the blast, or the radiation. Dirty bombs are nothing more than panic weapons. The public is, by and large, so terrified of anything "nuclear" that a large radiation dispersal device going off in a crowded area would cause literal waves of _redoubled_ panic as soon as someone realized and communicated that the bomb had radioactive isotopes inside it. Justifiably or not, it would then be a blind panic--these people would be running from something they can't see or smell, and probably don't understand in the slightest. Now, being informed about radiation won't keep it from bringing you harm if you happen to be exposed to it, probably wouldn't be much comfort if a radioactive bomb exploded across the street, and won't give you instantaneous wind-direction and plume information; it might help to allay the fears of those who're outside the blast zone, and might help ease the process of relocating back into the contaminated region.
Sure, they're not weapons that'll kill millions of people at a stroke, but isn't one of the common themes of life that the most striking, obvious, and dramatic dangers aren't always the ones that should merit the most respect and attention?
For those of you who might be interested in reading about these types of incidents--I'm fascinated by them myself--you should try the IAEA's reports. They've produced briefs on accidents such as these, including some irradiator incidents, some industrial radiography incidents, and some incidents of sources being sold as/in scrap metal.
Here's several serially-related thoughts ...
Regardless of the truth of this story it has the effect of making life more difficult for any would-be dirty bomb makers, forcing them to work very much harder to hide their isotope decay signals.
Of course, by the same token, this kind of story makes it more likely that dirty bomb makers will tend to be that much harder to find in the future.
As far as the privacy and homeland security jackbooted gomer issues go: bullshit. It's wholly appropriate and frankly expected that we do this kind of monitoring. Whinging about this seems a little contrived. Radiological hazards are the only hazard that comes to mind, that we can wholly passively and remotely detect. As the article points out, we can even characterize indvidual isotopes. A modern friggin technological miracle and people are complaining. What. Ever.
Now then. Characterizing isotopes (claimed in the article) tends to let us rule out non-bomb materials, since theraputic radiochemicals tend to decay within a couple of days and are hence not really suitable for dirty bombs.
WHICH leads me to believe the original cited story is bullshit, since the officer would have known he was looking at medical radiation.
Great story, though.
Pointless busy work costs taxpayer money. If a dirty bomb is ever detonated it will be very easy to clean up (you can find the bits with geiger counters) and isn't likely to inspire a lot of terror unless there was far more active material inside than you would need for a real bomb. A dirty bomb is interesting speculation that leading nuclear physicists couldn't work out how to build to be an effective weapon - then it transformed into a handy little Red under the bed for political stunts. There are far more interesting bits of science fiction to worry about and real threats as well. A bomb that actually kills people would inspire far more terror when it goes off than one that gives increased cancer risks to a small number of people.
What are the uses of radioactive cats? Hmmm... gaming the system of course....
Strictly speaking as a security paranoid individual here.. one could have many decoy cars with radioactive cats lead the real vehicle that contains, er, well that contains something else, namely, that which won't be named here.
Too many false positives will likely dampen their responses. The watchers, not the cats.
It's now the watchers that need watching. ALL government people, who ever they are and whatever role they play in ANY level or BRANCH of government MUST BE VIDEO and AUDIO recorded for their actions to be valid government actions. In addition these videos and audios must be published in REALTIME to the PUBLIC and replicated to government watch dog web sites set up by any interested party (such as the ALCU or GreenPeace or _fill_in_the_blank_). This provides a proper and valid check on the people who are acting on behalf of the abstract notion of government. Remember real people are pretending that they are the government; they must be watched for corruption and overstepping their bounds. By video recording everything they do they will constrain their actions.
Remember the US Constitution was simply a written piece of paper signed by a tiny group of people. The US Government is a myth created by a declaration. It starts with "WE THE PEOPLE" - THUS WE THE PEOPLE can easily override CONGRESS and the PRESIDENT by a NATIONAL REFERENDUM LEAD BY THE PEOPLE WITHOUT ANY ASSISTANCE FROM ANY BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT! That's right, a people's referendum taken up and get out there getting signatures to override your governments at ALL LEVELS.
The same goes for most other counties in the world.
IF the leaders want a surveillance state, let's put them and all their underlings and supporters and funders and power brokers etc... under 24x366 surveillance for the entire public to see! Unedited of course! N million C-SPAN channels... For every camera they put on us, have ten cameras put on them!
I don't know what they were, but speculated that they were radiation detectors.
There are detectors buried in the road near the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A while back I read about a case where a hospital radiation source accidentally got made into rebar, which was loaded onto a truck bound for the US. The driver had a friend who worked at Los Alamos, so he drove up there to visit, setting off all the detectors which were meant to detect the transport of radioactive material away from LANL.p
Request your free CD of my piano music.
A cat with cancer was receiving radiation therapy? Don't get me wrong, I love cats and animals in general, but who pays possibly thousands of dollars for cat radiation therapy? Sad to consider that there are probably thousands of -people- in the US needing such treatment who don't have the means to pay for it. Every day our priorities seem to be more screwed up in this country. But then, the masses seem to care more about every detail of Brittney Spears life than starving children in Appalachia and our inner cities, so go figure. I think we're all fscked.
C: The man didn't have the right form.
S: What man?
C: The man from the cat detector van.
S: The looney detector van, you mean.
C: Look, it's people like you what cause unrest.
S: What cat detector van?
C: The cat detector van from the Ministry of Housinge.
S: Housinge?
C: It was spelt like that on the van (I'm very observant!). I never seen so
many bleeding aerials. The man said that their equipment could pinpoint
a purr at four hundred yards! And Eric, being such a happy cat, was a
piece of cake.
S: How much did you pay for this?
C: Sixty quid, and eight for the fruit-bat.
S: What fruit-bat?
C: Eric the fruit-bat.
S: Are all your pets called Eric?
My father once was given a tracer, which is a very small doses of radioactive diagnostic drink. It makes you slightly more radioactive than normal. Maybe 6 or 8 times as much as normal, which is still very low and can be easily dealt with by a human. It is a lot, a lot less than when obtaining a cancer treatment. Two days later he walked into a science fair. People could hold their finger on a Geiger-Teller to measure the radioactivity of their body. My father lined up as well. The two people before made the loudspeakers do: '...tick........tick...tick..........tick..................tick....' When is was my fathers turn it went: 'TICK!TICK!TICK!TICK!TICK!TICK.' and you saw some people behind him step out of line.
A lot of my family is from Oak Ridge TN, where the nuclear payload for the atomic bombs dropped in WWII was fabricated there is now a national lab.
It's common knowledge that frogs are a problem for the feds around there. That's amphibians, not the French.
Here's the problem. Frogs live in the ponds by the cooling towers. The frogs are radioactive. The frogs jump out on the road and get squished. There are then lots of radioactive tires rolling in and out of town. The multi-million doallar system purchased to keep people from sneaking radioactive material out of the area is therefore useless.
Why the hell is the water in the coolant ponds radioactive? Isn't that a bad sign? Nobody cares, they are all used to it by now. The thing with the frogs sure is funny though.
I had (most of) my thyroid out due to papillary cancer two weeks ago. In a few months, they are supposed to ablate the remaining parts with radioiodine (enough that I can't be around people for two or three days). I am going to feel like hell, and honestly, if someone stopped me and searched my car on that day, I think I'd get a pass on my flipout.
The owner existed in a quantum state: either he exists or he doesn't! LOLz!
She said all the pine needles in the woods near Oak Ridge are highly radioactive.
She also monitored the lobsters caught in the Pacific next to the San Onofre plant near San Diego. Once they sent up extra lobsters: some to assay, and some to eat!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I hope they put the thing in cat handcuffs.
The really sad thing about this story is there are over 40 million people, including kids, in America who have no medical insurance coverage whatsoever. If they have cancer they are free to die and noone cares a damn about them. There are hundreds of millions of people in the Third World getting no medical service at all for lack of doctors and poverty.
Yet, american cats are being radiation treated and apparently no slashdotters notice how crazy that is. One of the reasons so many people worldwide are terrified by the americans. The idea of humanism and solidarity seems to be missing entirely from the anglo-saxon ethos and the media cultivates thinly veiled vulgar social-darwinist ideas.
Perhaps the title should have been "Nuclear Scanning Catches Cat On I-131"...
Iodine-131 is a stupidly popular isotope if there ever was one, and my money is on this being the culprit. It's used for targeting the thyroid, as it's very aggressively absorbed by it.
I'm seeing a few posts pondering how much money they must be shelling out for these detectors at the borders and on highways. The thing is, it's really not that exotic or even expensive. Firstly, the characteristic lines [from the radiation of these radioisotopes] on the multi-channel analyzers I've used are quite clear and definitive, and even a large number of possible isotopes can usually be narrowed down by hand in a few minutes. Authorities looking for a dirty bomb would probably be looking at a quite limited number of possible radioisotopes, meaning fewer signatures to search for.
One of these happens to be iodine-131, not only because it's so readily and stubbornly absorbed by the body, but also because it's produced in relatively large quantities in the spent fuel of nuclear reactors and isolated for medical use.
"Feed cat Plutonium pellets with kibble. Wrap cat in detcord. Place timer on cat and set for five minutes. Release mouse on crowded street. Release cat after mouse. Run. Remember to face Mecca at 4:29 after you release cat." "Oh, don't forget to plug ears."
Hey, that piece of information ought to be classified and you ought to keep your trap shut instead of blathering out in open like this.
..and that is why you must never discuss confidential or "could be potentially confidential" stuff on slashdot.
If the terrorists read about this, then they would plan like below:
1. Come to Oak Ridge, TN with an empty 2-tonner truck.
2. Squash and drive over thousands of radioactive frogs in a matter of weeks shouting their usual battle cry "death to infi..."etc.
3. Buy a Geiger counter locally and check for enough radioactivity.
4. Skip to Mexico/border country and get a dirty bomb (I was watching "Goldfinger" Bond movie yesterday), the iodine kind which emits less radioactivity.
5. Load onto this radioactive-tired truck (of course you would be stupid enough to drive out from TN all the way to Mexico on same tires and expect same radioactivity. So you stove away the tires and buy new/used ones which are NOT radioactive to drive to mexico. When you drive back you latch on the radioactive tires).
6. Border guards stop your truck since it seems to be glowing with radioactivity. They look at the tires and the tired guys at wheel. Of course the terrorists would be telling the truth about Oak Ridge TN and telling them they had just made a delivery to that place. They can also produce a newspaper clipping or something which proves even the frogs are radioactive and ask the border guards to talk to the Sherrif there to prove it.
7. Border guards allow the truck with "Medical Cargo" to enter US.
8. About two weeks later somewhere an incident happens....
9. Bush gets elected for a 3rd Time after tearing up the constitutionand is actually seen on Fox News using it as toilet paper to wipe cheney's ass with it.
10. Cheney asks "So?"
There, see the probabilities of imagination?
The KGB was right.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
So, how much does it cost per year to detect radio-active cats? Wouldn't it be cheaper to put up a sign saying "Radio-active materials are monitored" and spin a lie a couple of times a year using a story such as "We detected a radio-active cat, aren't we clever?"
it is hundreds of dollars, not thousands. The reality is that America and Europe are charged top dollar for everything compared to other countries("sensitivity for the poor"), and then within our countries , humans are charged 10-100x what animals are charged for the same procedures with the exact same equipment.
The interesting things about this, is how it is changing our society. For example, A Tamiflu dose in the west costs something like $10-20. But in Asia, the same company is charging 5 cents a dose. So now, locals are buying it in bulk and giving it to their chickens. And this year, they have found that a new strain of avian flu making its way through the chickens has shown resistance to it. IOW, the stockpiles of tamiflu that has been built up to protect society is heading towards worthless.
As to the masses carrying about Spears, yes, that happens. I also see ppl caring about Appalachia, our inner cities, Iraq, and even Tibet. Ppl are capable of caring about more than 1 thing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Has the terrorist been locked up to keep us all safe from his radioactive animals?
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Thanks homeland security!
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate
If I ran a rich and powerful investigative agency but didn't have the resources to search every vehicle I would plant a plausible story in the news which implied that my department did in fact have devices so sensitive that we could detect hidden contraband, from a distance, with ease.
That way even if the bad people had the stuff, they would think twice before transporting it. If they believed the story, that would be almost as disruptive to the bad people as if we actually had such a device.
Maybe such a device exists, but could some knowledgeable person here explain if it is possible, instead of everyone just accepting the story at face value.
A friend of mine was undergoing medical tests last year and he was stopped at the entrance to the San Diego city dump when getting rid of some trash. Not freeway speeds, of course, but he was in a moving, closed vehicle. Apparently people dump radioactive stuff.
Especially if the cat didn't use the litter box.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Radioactive Cats --- Are some Hot Pussy!!!
As far as jokes go.
But once when I worked for NIH I ran into a postdoc working on a slate bench out in the open no protection, not even an apron. And then I heard a really loud buzzing noise. Kind of like a pager in a jar (it was 1999 so people still had pagers) it was super loud. So I came around the corner and saw it was a Geiger Counter. "it's hot." was all the researcher had to say.
These things are not like you see in sci-fi movies. And some isotopes, especially those selected for medical and research uses are in the bright-hot-loud category, but otherwise 'sort of harmless'
--Shaddup and support your local PBS station Plan for it
Instead, I find that most comments are Insightful and Informative.
Come on people, a RADIOACTIVE CAT!
Oh well, I guess this may be given an Insightful too...
So now we know what was in the back of the car in Repo Man...
I haz it.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
And the detectors go nuts when homer simpson drives by.
Ok, check this out.... there are people that have health insurance and also get their cats health insurance or can otherwise pick up the cost of giving a cat radiotherapy.
This is my sig.
Please note Slashdot != Digg/Reddit ... wtf???
Cop: Whatcha got in the trunk?
Parnell: Oh... You don't wanna look in there.
Best Slashdot Co
You know perfectly well that the news would be: "Manhattan has been contaminated with radioactive Uranium dust.". Lines like "The radiation level is entirely harmless." and "There is no reason to panic, the radioactive dust will not affect your health." might appear in the article, but it would be after the "continued on A7" hyperlink.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
But more importantly, this is an innocent person that was harassed by the Homeland Insecurity types over something he'd done legitimately. What a waste of time and effort.
If someone really does have a radiological weapon, all he has to do now is shield it in layers of lead to escape detection -- or have a radiological cat as a decoy.
I suppose they'll harass people who just underwent cancer treatment as well. Wow. I feel so secure now.
Of course, chemical-based bombs can do a lot of damage as well, but obviously this detector won't pick that up. What a waste of taxpayer's dollars.
Low-tech can always thwart high-tech, anytime. The would-be terrorist on a shoestring budget can always find a low-tech way to circumvent these million-dollar high tech measures. Meanwhile, some egg-heads in government revel in the false sense of security they now have.
Of course, it begs to reason how much of a real "treat" of "terrorism" there really is. Oh, but the big government contractors are loving the windfall from the paranoia. Well, that's the US for ya. Fear for Profit! Yeah, the American Way.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Did they change the date for April Fools day along with the start of Daylight Savings Time? It's so easy for a so-called journalist to get your guys started.
Spider-Cat, Spider-Cat, does whatever a Spider-Cat does.
My cat was recently treated for a hyperactive thyroid. The vet injected the cat with radioactive iodine and kept the cat in isolation for two weeks.
After I was allowed to take the cat home, I was told to avoid having the cat sit on my lap, and I had to collect the cat's litter box scoopings and store them outside for two weeks. The vet told me if I discard the litter box contents into the trash, I would probably get a visit from homeland security. Evidently, they also scan garbage, and if they find any radioactive trash, HS tries to figure out where it came from.
If they trace it back to your house, they will show up with a warrant to search the premises.
When I told her she must be joking, she told me it happened to one of her clients.
That's creepy on a bunch of levels - the fact that HS can trace garbage back to your house, and the fact that HS can "pay you a visit" after snooping through your garbage.
-ted
Hot Frogs on the Loose
Lyrics to Everything Possible: Fred Small in Concert
All lyrics Copyright Fred Small except "Rodney King's Blessing" By the light of the Tennessee moon
From the bilious bubbles of a black lagoon
They make a hound dog howl a SWAT team swoon
Hot frogs on the loose
They've multiplied since '53
Slurping nuclear debris
Amphibious fabulous fancy free
Hot frogs on the loose
CHORUS:
Hippity hoppity here they come
Radioactive lookin' for fun
If you kiss 'em look out for the tongue
Hot frogs on the loose more verses at the link above.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How do you stop an exploding cat?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
So, if you're messing about building a dirty bomb, you should get a "doctor" to write you a note in case you're pulled over.
Well I can relate one story I know of directly.
This past summer one of our employees was going from Canada to the US via car, crossing at Port Huron, MI. He was going to a conference in Michigan and had a couple other people speaking at this conference with him. When they got to the border, an alarm went off and they were all hauled into the security office.
After several hours they were let go after the guards contacted the doctor of one of the women in the car, and confirmed she had indeed ungergone a stress test with the radioactive fluid earlier that day.
This was the womens own fault as the Doctors office had told her she should not do any international travelling for a couple of days, becuase of this very reason, but she did not listen.
Until you observed it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
is that the radiation detectors actually work, unlike other projects paid for by this government. Once you have something that actually detects what it's supposed to detect, getting the false positive rate down is just an engineering detail.
just a ghost in the machine.
four words:
lead lined shipping container
how you going to stop that until it is in newport news virginia or elizabeth new jersey and it is too late?
signed,
the taxpayers funding your security projects
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How many times have you read on Slashdot...
The Administration should be spending money on nuclear detectors instead of spending money on (insert favorite bitching canard here).
Or maybe it's a bureaucratic matter-antimatter reaction.
Yeah, please tell us how that conversation goes.
Something tells me you won't be able to record it.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Chernobyl was not designed to disperse hazardous material, but chances are that it was a lot bigger and had a lot more radioactive material than somebody might be able to fit into a suitcase or possibly even a car. To compete on scale, I'd imagine that terrorists wouldn't only need a "dirty" bomb, they'd need a rather large one (and possibly very obvious, moreso than the levels of radiation coming from a cat or cancer patient).
My father is an immigration inspector on the Canadian border. Apparently this is not uncommon and people are usually surprised when he asks them if they have had any recent medical tests. The only news here is that it was a cat this time.
The detectors are very sensitive. Aparently the steel in many shipping containers built in China sets it off because the chinese are recycling a lot of the steel that was in now-decommissioned nuclear reactors.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The radiation story is just a cover. I heard that the cat knew where the bucket was.
I don't think it was a false positive, no? Wasn't it detecting exactly what it was meant to detect, on some broad spectrum; pun intended, I suppose.
I guess, the false part comes into play with the concept of explosive/dirty bombs... however, in reality, the detector detected what it was meant to.
I have it on good authority that he thinks of nothing but murder all day.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Here are a few video footages showing Toonces, the driving cat. However, he is a crappy driver.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Having been working on such a project for the last 8 months, I can personally tell you the cost is Ginormous!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Something similar happened to me about ten years ago. My toddler aged daughter was undergoing nuclear scans to track her cancer treatments, and I was told that for the next 48 hours I should wear gloves when changing her diapers. A week later I get a call from some "government agency" asking why my garbage was emitting radioactivity! After I explained about the underlying medical issues, (including the fact that I-131 has a half-life of a couple days) there was no further problem.
But here's the kicker, since I use a community dumpster, the only way the could identify me was to get the information from mail in my (presumably radioactive) trash.
I learned two things from the encounter,
1 - I need to get a shredder.
2 - That someone has what may be the worst job in the world... radioactive dumpster diving.
Here is the real story. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-MYF8Du08s
a sampling here and there are investigated
a**holes sends 3 shipping containers, odds are at least 2 make it to destination
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Love.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Whatever they do, I hope they don't make that cat angry. Making irradiated people angry is a bad idea and this might apply to cats as well. It might lead to smashing.
When that cat starts tossing around tank, remember that I called it.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
.. a health risk to the OPERATOR :) Just like those old radar speed guns and xray machines and so on :)
I for one would not like to be an airport xray scanner operator or one of these device operators.
Sit back knowing they are probably neutering themselves.
There was a story in the New York Times a few years back about this guy who had received a certain type of chemotherapy and kept getting stopped by the police in the NYC subway. Can't find the link now, but it seemed that it was only this type of treatment that was causing the problem -- it sucks for the poor guy who was getting hassled, but it would be a disaster if a wider band of chemo treatments set off the alerts.
What got me was that the NRC regulations allow patients to go home if the exposure to others would be less than 100 milli-rem, whereas the maximum offsite exposure for a nuclear generating station is 5 milli-rem per year.
I once worked with a guy who had worked in the Navy as a nuclear power technician. He then went into the civilian world as a technician for nuclear power plants. During the course of one of his workdays, it was necessary for him to visit the utility company's coal-fired power plant. He didn't think anything of it and left his personal dosimeter attached as he went through the plant. He told me that his dosimeter recorded enough RADs in that conventional power plant to register as LETHAL.
This was back in 1993.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
I have yet to see any evidence at all that a "dirty bomb" is anything more than a crazy nightmare cooked up by an American paranoid whackjob. Do we really think "the terrorists" are going to use something like that? It seems like a huge amount of effort, with a huge risk of detection, for an effect that could just as easily be achieved in other ways. See for instance, 9/11.
What about a Repo Man going into outer space?
Causing Chaos Everywhere,
Nik J.
The strange world of a loner, in a populous city, drowning in society
</satire>
Once we perfect the technology required to herd cats, we will be able to achieve a critical mass of radioactive felines, triggering an explosion.
(diabolical_laugh.mp3)
Have gnu, will travel.
What's really sad is that this family is probably now on a terror watch list, even though it's obvious that it was all a mix-up. Homeland Security is so bored because there's no actual terrorism to deal with that they'll just be devoting their resources to harassing innocent people and refusing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.
I'm dead serious, these people are probably all having their phones warrantlessly wiretapped and their emails read by some orderly in an FBI data center.
Can we just get over this terrorism nonsense, disband the department of homeland security, and get on with our lives?
America spends so much (and many times way too much) in defending Americans within US against dirty bombs...but it is not exactly news that the Iranians or whoever it is in the Middle East who wish to harm Americans with dirty bombs will have no need to take the trouble of travelling such long distances to do this...they just cross the border and hey, there are some 150,000 Americans for the taking!
Talk of misplaced priorities...
I just wanted to express my sincere thanks the United States of America for looking out for us citizens in this manner.
The possibilites of a radiological device getting through have been discussed in the past, but this is the first time I have heard that we are actually doing something concrete about it. Nuclear technology in the wrong hands is very dangerous on many levels.
I was unaware that the technology had evolved to this state and I must say, I'm very impressed. (Belive me, I work in the high technology fields, but not in the nuclear sciences, and to me this is a cool feat.)
I'm sorry that this person was inconvienced, but I do belive there are more important issues at stake here.
I also want to personally thank my Brother John and my two cousins Tom and Tony who are all doing their part to protect this great country of ours.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
however, i'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop
nuclear terrorism is the Real Deal. and what i mean by that is, sure, you can topple some towers in new york city, kill thousands of people, life goes on, real estate prices in manhattan actually increase
but if you create a chernobyl style green zone permanently off limits to human habitation out of a previously densely populated area, then you're really onto something in terms of bang for your buck
in other words, i'm not too concerned about explosion attacks, chemical attacks, even biological attacks. a few months later, everything is washed up. but nuclear attacks bear a mark of permanence on the order of thousands of years
so our vigilance against them seem most vital too me
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That also shows how much difficulty HIPAA imposed for how little gain....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
That's one hot pussy!
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Killing people is NOT the main goal of terrorists.
It's a happy side effect, but the main goal of TERRORists is to achieve the sort of thing that happened after 9/11, i.e. making us all paranoid, afraid, cowering behind our government who begins to take our freedom away.
In other words, THE TERRORISTS WON, AMERICA. 9/11, in comparison to something like a fucking nuke dropped in NYC, didn't kill tons of people, but holy crap, the effect of it.
Get over your fear.
When U.S. citizens were children, most didn't learn their civics lessons. They didn't need to because they were going to be Pro Football or Baseball players, or actresses, or pick any other excuse you would like. They don't bat an eyelash now when they hear "if you have nothing to hide" or "we are benevolent protectors" (except to wonder what the word benevolent means.) Henry David Thoreau said that people will get exactly the kind of government they deserve, and that is indeed what the U.S. citizens have received.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
CATch...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
... but no one will be laughing when that cat leaves a "dirty bomb" in your slippers!
(captcha: woofer)
Patients are given paperwork to prove that they have had nuclear medicine tests (what isotope and how much activity.) Nuclear power plant workers set off the detectors when they go back to work after Tl/Tc99m stress tests all the time down here in Fl. Longer lived isotopes like I131 for thyroid cancer ablation lasts quite a long time in the body (long biological half life with an 8 day half life.) All the major highways into NYC have detectors. Old news people...
Henry David Thoreau said that people will get exactly the kind of government they deserve, and that is indeed what the U.S. citizens have received.
I believe the next generation is getting exactly what their parents deserve. There seems to be about a generation of lag time between fuckup and consequence. Perhaps that's why we're losing our freedoms, we have no reason to care as it'll be our kids' problem. We certainly are a greedy species.
Priceless
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Why the fuck do you assume that your ignorance of such an event means that no such event took place?
And why did people moderate this ignorant, fallacious comment up, rather than down?
You can't take the sky from me...
Was it one of these cats? Radio Active Cats
I quote others only in order the better to express myself. -- Michel de Montaigne
Radiation monitoring is useful and non invasive. Unlike real domestic spying, it only identifies things that can actually be harmful. Equipment operators have a simple purpose and can be adequately trained to distinguish real threats from false alarms but every alarm is worth following. People don't have to be identified and personal information never has to be tracked to stop threats.
Radio isotope monitoring has long been done at borders and in waste disposal. These are last ditch portions of defense in depth to protect the public from real danger. Powerful sources are required for industry and medicine. They are supposed to be carefully tracked from creation to disposal but you can never be sure. There have been several ugly incidents outside the US and at least one where an isotope ended up smelted into something that was later caught at the US border. When everything else fails, road and garbage checks help.
While nothing is impossible for a corrupt administration to abuse, this is not it. The real end of civil liberty comes from tracking and harassing dissidents and creating mechanism to lock them up.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
So, now the real terrorists will simply have their buddies drive a half mile ahead of them with a radioactive cat??
Although there is a big element of security theater to scanning freeways for radiation sources, I must point out that a lead or steel box thick enough to hide a warhead would be very heavy.
The state patrol and border security already specifically watches for vehicles that appear to be overloaded (non-commercial vehicles in particular), and large commercial freight vehicles are inspected at weigh stations, so many clandestine ways to transport a nuke are made very dangerous for terrorists as long as random scanning necessitates the use of shielding.*
* Depending on the size of the warhead, of course. More primitive warheads tend to be larger. Your mileage may vary. Do not drive with nuclear warheads under the influence of intoxicating chemicals. Nuclear warheads are for external use only. Nuclear weapons may cause minor skin irritation, high winds, and conversion to ash. If a rash, extra limbs, or super powers develop as a result of nuclear weapons, immediately discontinue use and see your doctor. Not available in all areas.
Were the agents foolish enough to look in the trunk?
Well at least this was the TSA and not a Repo Man
as one who firmly opposes the Patriot Act and the disintegration of privacy and civil liberties in our country, I must say that I find nothing wrong with our government checking for radioactive material. In our day and age where 99% of national security is simply 'theatre' designed to make you FEEL safe rather than actually BE safe (ahem, airport 'security'?), it's nice to know that there is a program out there that actually intends the opposite and isn't simply squandering time and taxpayer money playing mind games with us. In testing for radioactivity they are NOT conducting strip- or cavity searches nor your search engine history or phone records, nor monitoring anything, other than levels of radioactivity. This practice in & of itself is what this country NEEDS as part of REAL security. & in regards to us 'knowing' about it.. I don't care if I KNOW they are testing for radioactivity. How obnoxious that would be to be driving along the freeway to see signs saying 'warning, you are being scanned for radioactivity'. In fact I'd be more offended by that, as one could perceive that as fear-mongering and additional 'theatre' as psychological civil obedience conditioning. There's really no reason for me to know, and if our government is TRULY trying to protect me as they clearly are in this case I can objectively understand. Now, this is not to say that I don't want to know about OTHER types of surveillance, especially video, or believe that other types of surveillance, especially warrantless wiretapping, aren't intrusive, unconstitutional, and really just ways for introduce new domestic control under the guise of national security. I'm just saying in the case of radioactive material, hell, do you really need to know? Do you really care?
I think your humour detector is broken, twitter. Maybe it was smelted the last time you threw a tantrum over Vista market share numbers or something.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
And it detected that small amount? Wow....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It doesn't seem to me that they get too many false positives. There aren't that many legitimate and harmless sources of radiation to be detected. If this does get too many false positives, then they would stop doing it, wouldn't they? The fact that they are still doing it is irrefutable proof that they aren't getting too many false positives to handle.
Interestingly I don't think the article tried to show this justifying post-9/11 heightened security. In fact it says:
I am opposed to many parts of the "Patriot Act" (should have been called the "King George Returns" act I think). Surveillance of radioactive sources in high-traffic points has been going on before 9/11 and I fully support it. For one thing you are emitting radiation outside your car. That type of surveillance doesn't invade your privacy. It also seems quite easy to explain legitimate sources of radiation such as the cat.
a**holes sends 3 shipping containers, odds are at least 2 make it to destination
And the one that doesn't leads to their arrest.
radiation monitors should have to be used like thermal imagers. You would need probable cause or a warrant.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
signaling da polees
That's an interesting analogy but it does not hold water, even in the most controversial case: airborn dope searching. There's nothing harmful about thermal energy and radiation monitoring is only applied to public areas.
The health implication is the most important distinction. Sources that can be detected at 80 feet and 70 MPH are a real health hazard. Hospital release orders will tell you to stay away from relatives for a while. Situations where thermal energy can be harmful are outlawed as arson.
The other distinction is also important. The government does not, to my knowledge, look for radiation sources in residential neighborhoods with airborn equipment. I have read about some fruitless searching for sources "lost" in Katrina and I'm told that there are satellites that could be used for the purpose. Arguments can be made against such searches but the direct public health implications of large sources would go a long way to counter them.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
They were right to come visiting you terrorist you :)
Shit- we all know that!
But more importantly-
Was the cat alive?
or dead?
We've been waiting about 75 years now for an answer!
.
- aqk
F U
I bet they confiscated his Time Sweeper too. Just great.
I for one welcome our new radioactive-cat overlords.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
The cat might have not been harmful, but the "radiation" is and if in a human would be. They didn't know the radiation was in anything let alone a cat until they followed up on it- they only knew it was there.
Another of the direct differences is that thermal imaging in which a warrant is needed is used specifically to look into private places like through the closed windows and so on.
Now with radiation monitoring, there is no localization in this same way. You can pinpoint the source but your looking through the public space for it like you said. Even in residential neighborhoods, you aren't looking into private places, just the public space around it. This would be akin to playing the radio so loud it could be heard a block away and expecting the cops to get a warrant before knocking on your door and asking you to turn it down or get a disturbing the peace citation.
I suppose there would be times a warrant is needed. But on the public streets when a radiation detection unit operated by competent personnel is going off, you wouldn't. I Think this can be somewhat summed up with does a firefighter (a government agent) need a warrant to enter your private residence when it is on fire and there is a danger to a citizen who is trapped in there. Of course the answer is no. I think we both agree on this, I just wanted to offer some more plain associations to why you where right.
Actually, I think it can be summed up with firefighter quite nicely. They would need a warrant or permission to go into a private house and inspect the wiring for a potential fire threat. This would include using thermal imaging to suspect a threat existed. They wouldn't need a warrant or permission if the fire alarm is going off indicating a danger to someone of the community in general.
Oh wait! I know what happened! In some cases, government agencies have simply decided to throw out the constitution and just randomly make up a new term and a new rule in direct violation of the fourth amendment of the constitution , to wit your reasonable suspicion (which, of course, in this case isn't reasonable at all; my point to begin with.) Luckily for them, they are right. They can get away with such Unamerican and illegal behavior, because the country is full of ignorant people like you.
Going back to your initial admonishment that I should "get my facts straight", my post content come from:
- An actual understanding of elementary school level civics
- Real world experience, having actually challenged and won illegal searches in courts of law
- The ability to understand that the fourth amendment is a better source than wikipedia
I would, however, like to thank you for making it so easy to trounce your absurd post while simultaneously (possibly) educating people who aren't morons on the evils of spouting off at the mouth when you are clueless and have no experience and a flawed understanding of basic concepts of law.Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Well, think about that for a moment. And let me give you a similar scenario, one that happened to me a lot. Someone out of the blue calls the police on you because she thinks you're "suspicious". You've done nothing wrong at all, but someone thinks you did. The cops come and bother you. Perhaps they make you late getting to the airport and miss your flight. Or perhaps you were on your way to pick up your kids. Or who knows? But the police officer pulls you over and ties up 30 or more minutes of your time while he does a background check on you to make sure you're not some sort of criminal. When you complain to him about this, he says to you, "Well, I agree with what you say, but how can I make a determination without pulling you over and checking you out?"
Suppose that kept happening to you over and over and over and over again. Someone phones the cops on you. You've done nothing wrong at all. Cops come and disrupts your life and check you out. Sometimes they're polite. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they actually may put you in handcuffs. And on an on. But they "have to do this because they need to 'check you out.'"
Would you be happy with this treatment? Would you really be OK with it because they have a "need" to see if you're a criminal or not? Be honest.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Yesterday, I had I-131 treatment for my thyroid in the morning. In the afternoon, I got pulled over by the New York State Police in my little town of 3,000 people, for being radioactive. I had no idea these sensors were being used, let alone in rural areas! I thought it was pretty funny. I do have a letter from the doctor, but left it at home. I knew I would need it at the airport or government buildings, but not to pick my kids up from school! I did some research, and found that the federal government gave a grant to New York state for 13 mobile radiation detection units housed in SUVs, to patrol upstate New York.
P.S. I liked the joke about the Persian cat.