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Scientists Question Safety of New Airport Scanners
An anonymous reader sends this quote from a story at NPR about the accelerated deployment of new scanning machines at airports:
"Fifty-two of these state-of-the-art machines are already scanning passengers at 23 US airports. By the end of 2011, there will be 1,000 machines and two out of every three passengers will be asked to step into one of the new machines for a six-second head-to-toe scan before boarding. About half of these machines will be so-called X-ray back-scatter scanners. They use low-energy X-rays to peer beneath passengers' clothing. That has some scientists worried. ... The San Francisco group thinks both the machine's manufacturer, Rapiscan, and government officials have miscalculated the dose that the X-ray scanners deliver to the skin — where nearly all the radiation is concentrated. The stated dose — about .02 microsieverts, a medical unit of radiation — is averaged over the whole body, members of the UCSF group said in interviews. But they maintain that if the dose is calculated as what gets deposited in the skin, the number would be higher, though how much higher is unclear."
The fact that we soon may not be able to board an airplane without a government bureaucrat looking at our cocks is ample proof that the terrorists won. Fucking FUD -- all that we needed after 9/11 was a locked cockpit door.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Regardless of the health issues, why should I be electronically strip-searched when the next terrorist is going to shove explosives up his ass and remove/detonate them during flight?
What invasion of privacy is going to happen after that event?
And the worms ate into his brain.
There's already been studies looking at changes in gene expression following millimeter-wave irradiation of skin: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18302488
Overall, given the reviews of the literature it's still unclear whether there's a potential for long-term health damage.
However, even if there was, I doubt anyone will care. The security theater must be kept up, even if it means that people would be harmed by repeated exposure.
"Sir, we will protect you from yourself, even if it kills you".
I don't honestly care whether there's a real medical issue here. I don't care if it takes Fox News-style "gotcha" tactics to make the hysterical cries of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" echo up and down the corridors of the powerful.
Anything that kills this program needs to be seized upon, hyped, spun into something it's probably truthfully not - the lies and paranoia that have been eating away at us like a cancer need to be repurposed toward actually helping us.
--Ryv
You can't build a jobs program around a locked cockpit door.
As someone who has done a fair share of work in airports (digital signage) and has been badged in a couple of term, I can say this from observation and from talking to people in the airports and the TSA, the issue is not the passengers, it's the workers. The passengers are checked to ridiculous measures, but if you work at an airport your protocols are entirely different. All the tarmac entrances and any "employee only" entrance isn't guarded by the TSA, but rather independent security companies hired by the airports themselves, so every airports strictness at these points are anywhere from stricter or far more lax, especially if you're a regular employee that they recognize. I have had to throw gear into the back of an electricians truck many many a time and driven it onto the tarmac without them opening or even swabbing the boxes. At that point I am less then 30ft away from a 767.
All this extra effort at the checkpoints is to keep up what most people here already know what it is. The illusion of absolute safety in a system where it can never be guaranteed 100%.
Because if I wanted theater, I'd have bought a different ticket.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You are correct. One of the highest radiation dose jobs in the world is pilot, followed by co-pilot and flight attendant. This is drilled into those taking radiation safety courses. Of course, one must be aware of the different affects the specific energy particles/rays have on DNA to give a complete picture of the long term hazards. Interestingly enough, the NPR piece, which had an expert stating that they were not worried about excessive x-ray dosages from equipment malfunction, was immediately followed by one on the accidental excessive x-ray doses from medical scanners. Whoops!
Completely agreed. I don't know which is worse - the fact that people can't accept that the risk from terrorism is minimal, or the fact that an awful lot of this is simply security theatre which probably won't be exposed as such because the threat is minimal.
I've mentioned it a few times before, but one of the major reasons I refuse to believe the sincerity of measures like this scanning technology is that one can purchase large glass bottles in any airport departure lounge. A glass bottle is a far more effective weapon than many of the other items that they'll confiscate from hand luggage, yet I've never even seen the issue mentioned.
Fail.
The thing that makes an aircraft so interesting as a target is because it can fly anywhere. If you can't reach the cockpit the aircraft is no more intresting as a target than for example a train or a bus.
For some reason we don't need to strip-search bus or train passengers so to me it sure seems like this would solve the problem.
You see, one of the best ways to be protected is to not be a target.
Would you make your 5-year-old child smoke a cigarette?
Maybe. Are all of his friends doing it?
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
The terrorists haven't won. "The terrorists" have nebulous and ill-defined victory conditions which vary greatly from terrorist to terrorist - if they even have a clear idea of what they want. But you can be sure that "Waste Americans' time at the airport" wasn't the objective.
You have lost, but it's not a zero-sum game.
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