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"No Scan, No Fly" At Heathrow and Manchester
An anonymous reader writes "It is now compulsory for people selected for a full body scan to take part, or they will not be allowed to fly from Heathrow or Manchester airports. There is no optional pat down. Also, a rule which meant that people under 18 were not allowed to participate in the body scanner trial has been overturned by the government. There is no mention of blurring out the genitals, however reports a few years back said X-ray backscatter devices aren't effective unless the genitals of people going through them are visible."
as I don't live there, I don't have to either.
I guess this will mean this islander nation is more of an islaneder by now. any UK person I'll meet, I can be sure they conceded in having their genitals exposed to some underpaid 'security' asshole
what a bunch of perverts...
The health effects of millimeter wave scanning are what we should be worried about - there's an unknown risk but a high possible impact: imagine if in 10 years time millions of people start developing melanomas as a result of being scanned.
The x-ray backscatter machines are much less worrying; we've had 100(?) years of experience with X-rays and we understand what x-rays can do to DNA.
But we have very little experience of mm level radiation.
What I've seen in the press is cheerleading. 'Experts say there is little cause to worry' with unknown experts talking in vague generalities. I've seen articles saying that the energy involved is less than the energy emitted by a cell-phone. That may well be the case, but it's not in the cell-phone spectrum, and even a little energy in the wrong place can do a lot of damage. Just see what a match can do to a pile of paper*.
Of course it's impossible to completely prove something is safe. But I don't think we don't have empirical evidence that it's safe. Or at least - I've not seen it.
I absolutely have not made an exhaustive search for literature on the health effects of mm radiation, and I'm not an expert. In the brief searches I have made I have seen that there's a lot of scare-noise based on what seems like only a few sources which imo are not applicable. What I don't see is a long list of studies. And even more striking is that that non-existent list of studies is not full of papers saying 'we found no observable effects'**.
But I have found that it's possible to cook bacteria with mm waves! Maybe this is a hint that there's a potential problem. And in the diagrams of atmospheric absorption of radiation that I've looked at, for example, it looks like mm waves are mostly absorbed, which suggests that we'd have little evolved defense to mm wave damage.
What I'd really like to see is a series of mm wave experts saying things like 'we've studied the health effects of mm wave scanners for 10 years now, and I'd have no qualms about subjecting my three month old baby to a scan because I'm confident that there's no health risk associated.'
* Pedants: yes, I know the energies involved are different orders of magnitude - it's a metaphor.
** It's quite possible I was looking in the wrong place. I'd be very pleased to see a detailed response with a link to this list.
but I refuse to be treated like a criminal just 'cos those in charge are trying to convince us of the existence of these so-called phantom terrorists!
Then you should be happy about these body scanners... they sure make the process much more swift, and you don't need to worry about being randomly selected for a lengthy pat-down when you're already running late for your flight. Terrorists do exist, and sure you can say "they won" because of what airport security is turning into, but guess what... they'd win even more if airport security wasn't this strict.
I'm sorry, I thought this thread was about airport security measures, not US domestic terrorism in general. You may be surprised to know that Al Qaida has also targeted trains in UK and Europe.
Sure, the US has no shortage of homegrown crackpots, I can't imagine why you'd take pride in that as if you'd scored more points at a football game ?