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Making Airport Scanners Less Objectionable
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that one of the researchers who helped develop the software for the scanners says there is a simple fix that would make scanning less objectionable. The fix would distort the images captured on full-body scanners so they look like reflections in a fun-house mirror, but any potentially dangerous objects would be clearly revealed, says Willard 'Bill' Wattenburg, a former nuclear weapons designer at the Livermore lab. 'Why not just distort the image into something grotesque so that there isn't anything titillating or exciting about it?' asks Wattenburg, adding that the modification is so simple that 'a 6-year-old could do the same thing with Photoshop... It's probably a few weeks' modification of the program.' Wattenburg said he was rebuffed when he offered the concept to Department of Homeland Security officials four years ago. A TSA official said the agency is working on development of scanner technology that would reduce the image to a 'generic icon, a generic stick figure' that would still reveal potentially dangerous items." Reader FleaPlus points out an unintended consequence: some transportation economists believe that the TSA's new invasive techniques may lead to more deaths as more people use road transportation to avoid flying — much more dangerous by the mile than air travel.
If a 6 year old could do it in Photoshop, then the same 6 year old probably could undo it too. Just run the distortion with opposite paramaters (shrink where you stretched, and stretch where you shrank) and you end up with the original image again.
I seem to recall a few years ago, a police agency cracking a child pr0n case by undoing a distortion made on the perpetrator's face in the images.
"When I grow up, I want to be a weirdo"
"... assuming that the radiation in a backscatter X-ray is about a hundredth the dose of a dental X-ray, we find that a backscatter X-ray increases the odds of dying from cancer by about 16 ten millionths of one percent. That suggests that for every billion passengers screened with backscatter radiation, about 16 will die from cancer as a result." "Given that there will be 600 million airplane passengers per year, that makes the machines deadlier than the terrorists." http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/11/tsa_backscatter.html
Seriously, since 9/11 we have gone from a "let the hijackers land where they want and don't fuss" mentality to a "kill the fucker" sport mentality. Hijackings, at least on US flights are a thing of the past. Sure, ok, finding an explosive is a good thing, but at what cost? The chances of being on a plane with a bomb are so tiny it isn't even worth worrying about.
Lets go back to metal detectors to get the obvious and maybe walk bomb sniffing dogs through often enough to deter would-be "terrorists". Oh, and scan checked luggage all you want, just stop stealing from it, ok?
Nude photos and fondling my (and everyone elses) man bits isn't making me feel safer, it's just making me want to fly less and make me loathe my government even more. I'm spending less and the government is spending more. What a great recipe.
the tsa is already being swamped by pedophiles and sex offenders asking for applications.
This would still not make it any less objectionable from my perspective. As long as the distortion is occurring in software, it isn't acceptable. As long as the non-distorted data exists for even a microsecond on some hard drive somewhere, the data can be:
And that's assuming that they don't just tell us that they're applying this distortion while not really doing so. Given the number of lies the TSA has told about these things so far, I don't trust these people as far as I can throw them.
Only one thing will make these less objectionable: not using them. If you're going to blur the heck out of the image anyway, why not replace those $170,000 machines with $4,000 infrared-based thermal imaging cameras and be done with it? They're 1/42nd the cost, and they do the blurring in hardware due to the nature of the energy emissions being detected. They're also much faster than the TSA's expensive toys---you could walk through like you do a metal detector instead of having to wait for a scan---and they're passive, so there's no exposure to dangerous ionizing radiation (and before you say that this is a small amount of radiation, I'll point out that no amount of ionizing radiation is safe according to BEIR VII from the National Academies of Science).
No, these unholy abominations have to go. They're a fundamental invasion of our privacy, and a perfect example of wasteful government spending.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Italy has decided to dump the full body scanners because they are slow and ineffective.
http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/international/italy-to-abandon-airport-body-scanner-project
http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/italy-to-abandon-airport-body-scanners-20100924-15pgu.html
http://www.euronews.net/2010/09/23/italian-airport-security-axing-body-scanners/
Seems to me that ought be a clear signal that they are just security theater.
if it is true, and flying is already safer than road travel, then why do we need all the security?
Because folks have an irrational fear of flying. I mean, do you really need a live demonstration by a flight attendant on how to place the clip into the buckle? These procedures were written back in the day when Buddy Holly was a passenger.
Ascribing it to a malevolent elite (reptilians?) makes the problem intractible. It's easier to solve when you realise that the people making these horrible decisions are the same kind of hacked-together animal brain as the rest of us, operating on similar drives toward similar objectives. That's not to say there aren't malevolent entities amoungst them, but those are the parasites, not the organism, and certainly not the pathology.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Like blowing themselves up in the security checkpoint line, for example.
the last line of the summary says it all
if it is true, and flying is already safer than road travel, then why do we need all the security?
Your question goes to the heart of half the waste in human society - humans are REALLY BAD at risk assessment. We'd be better off scaling back airport security and putting a tenth of the saved resources into looking for plots, if at the same time we seriously enforced traffic safety laws (including speeding, reckless/aggressive driving, and seat belt use), and hey, while we're at it, stop feeding our kids so much high fructose corn syrup.
Get into the habit of looking both ways before crossing a street (even one-way streets), wash your hands before eating, use a damn condom! Wear a helmet on your bike or motorcycle.
All of these simple precautions will do more to save lives than subjecting people to more invasive searches at airports.
But that won't happen, so just go back to pounding Jagermeister and thinking, "nah, I'm okay to drive".
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
But the "per mile" argument is absolutely relevant when assessing the increased number of deaths caused by people opting to drive instead of fly. The danger of flying scales (roughly) with the number of takeoffs and landings that are performed. The danger of driving scales with the number of miles driven. When you look at the actual numbers, it turns out that flying is safer for any distance over which people practically take planes (even for flights of 30 minutes in the air, the number of miles covered is such that driving the same distance would be more dangerous).
So the point is there is a subset of flights for which a person has to make a rational choice: should I go by plane (which is fast in the air but still takes quite awhile because I have to get there early, there is airport security, risk of delays, ground transportation to my final destination on the other end, etc.) or should I go by car (which might take a bit longer but is more fully under my control). As flying becomes more and more annoying, more people will decide to take their car (at least for a certain subset of trips), which will increase the number of deaths overall.
This is a problem. It's also a problem that the radiation from a backscatter x-ray machine increases your odds of dying from cancer. And because terrorist deaths are so rare, it turns out that the scanners will probably increase the number of deaths overall, since they will create more cancer deaths than they can possibly solve by reducing terrorism deaths.
So the scanners increase the death-rate in the US in at least two ways.
the last line of the summary says it all
may lead to more deaths as more people to use road transportation to avoid flying — much more dangerous by the mile than air travel.
if it is true, and flying is already safer than road travel, then why do we need all the security?
TFA didn't give any guesstimates of numbers, so I ran a few. If 5% of the 800 billion air miles in this country (as of Sept 09 to Aug 10) are replaced by highway miles, then that's something like 500 extra highway deaths. I'm using NHTSA and BTS statistics on fatality rates and air travel statistics.
Naturally there are a lot of assumptions, like just how many air miles we might lose to people not willing to go through the enhanced intrusiveness and increased wait times. Certainly, not every lost air mile is made up with a highway mile. Many people would drive to a nearer vacation spot. Business that would have been conducted face-to-face might happen another way. Some people might just skip the trip altogether.
Nevertheless, if the deaths are in the hundreds then that could easily exceed the lost of a single plane. These deaths would be spread out though throughout the year and across the country, so wouldn't make the news. So we'd feel safer even though statistically aren't.
I am not a crackpot.
My wife and I were talking about this yesterday. We would rather be one of the many thousands of people a screener sees "naked" instead of one of the people being publicly fondled.
That's pretty much how they're counting on you thinking. Naturally a public groping is less appealing than a quasi-anonymous screening. However, your tacit agreement that this type of search is necessary in the first place puts you at a disadvantage to start with for it means you've dismissed option 3 out-of-hand.
That also leads to suggestions like those in TFA -- not to eliminate the searches, but to make them "less invasive". Too many people seem to think that the major issue here is nudity. A subset of people claim to be concerned about the radiation, but I think many of them are doing this to avoid sounding too radical about the real issue: for me (and I think many others), the issue is "unreasonable search" -- and as long as we continue to consent to the searches, they're allowed to do them.
Of course, you're free to fall in line and know your place. As for me, I'll speak with my wallet and contacting my representatives. I've already stopped flying unless the drive was more than 12 hours -- after all, 12 hours is close to break-even when you factor in flight time and security. (One one recent occasion I drove 500 miles and made it home before my flying colleagues.) I can and will stretch that to 24 hours, even though it inconveniences the hell out of me.
I'm just glad that the media is picking up on this issue. I only hope their attention span lasts longer than it takes for some administrator to soothe them by saying the searches will be "less invasive" from now on.
So? Who cares? If there ever was a use for Plato's noble lie, it's this. I'm spreading that shit around, because maybe it'll make people wake up a little bit.
Also: your chances of dying in a hijacking are something like one in a million or less. What are your chances of getting skin cancer from this device? If they're greater than one in a million (which is entirely possible), then it is not worthwhile to use these devices.
This is the same reason why the new breast cancer screening recommendations for women over age 50 say that they should get mammograms only once every two years, instead of once a year - the chances of detecting breast cancer are outweighed by the chances of causing breast cancer when you take a mammogram once a year.