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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.
Anyone care to google: Funhouse mirror p0rn? Because I sense rule 34...
Ok, so now figure out how to make that image without exposing me to extra radiation.
Honestly, this whole thing is a joke and just shows how becoming too PC is a weakness. If we would just profile we wouldn't need half the security we have.
They'd still cause cancer deaths at a rate exceeding the terrorist threat.
As we can see here, the TSA doesn't like even blurry crotches. All that stuff we heard about "blurring the private areas" was a lie by the TSA and John Pistole because here we have someone who had to get patted down anyway because of a blurred crotch.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
"A group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) raised concerns about the 'potential serious health risks' from the scanners in a letter sent to the White House Office of Science and Technology in April... 'While the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high,' they wrote."
Continued - http://www.prisonplanet.com/naked-body-scanners-may-be-dangerous-scientists.html
Updated - http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-naked-scanners-airports-dangerous-scientists.html
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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"
Then the TSA will be swamped with job applications from fetishists who like funhouse-distorted body images...
"Will you look at the size of her feet!!"
"... 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
The only real question now is, what goofy item will be used as a mailbomb next that gets forbidden for air travel next month? Purses? Dentures? Artificial limbs? Anything is possible and nothing is too ridiculous for the TSA to think as a serious threat!
I am embarrassed by people. Not because they're outraged about the scanners. But because it's over a little virtual nudity.
Worry about the incredible cost in hardware and training. Worry about some idiot cranking up the power, or a hardware flaw doing it for them. Worry about the infinite spiral of ineffective hoops in the security theater. Worry about what you're going to have to supper.
But, good grief, stop with the omg-naked and think-of-the-children crap.
"'a 6-year-old could do the same thing with Photoshop... It's probably a few weeks' modification of the program.'"
There are six-year olds who can undertake a multi-week programming project?
I can't believe my parents were wasting my time making me read Dr. Seuss when I could have been doing this shit!
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
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.
Airport scanners are a joke. Unless they can detect anything in and out of a person's body they can and will be bypassed when needed. So here's the plan, rather than creating a softcore security theater, we copy the security methods of countries that do it effectively. Namely, Israel.
Of course we could just keep doing crazier and crazier scans as people progressively game the system, only to fail because their devices are faulty, not because they really had any trouble getting on the plane.
there is absolutely no need for prison security in the airport for regular people just trying to travel. It is a just a big scam by Michael Chertoff and Rapiscan Systems to sell naked scanners to the tsa for billions in profits. I bet if they were not allowed to make any money they would no longer be pushing their use.
First of all, the presentation of that article on WashingtonPost.com was 4 pages of absolute horror.
Second, I heard this stick figure display was already being done in Europe, but it still doesn't make me feel safer or less worried about anything.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I mean, these are average Americans we're talking about. Most of my countrymen and women are already distorted into something grotesque so that there isn't anything exciting or titillating about them. But seriously, though... if there were mass boycotts of the airlines for even a couple of days in protest over the scanners, I bet we'd see them removed right quick. Economics trump national security, after all. Plus, apparently economics are a national security issue in this post-cold war, post-columbine, post-9/11 world.
It would also be "less objectionable" if we were not exposed to significant dose of ionizing radiation.
http://www.npr.org/assets/news/2010/05/17/concern.pdf
The problem is the screening, not what pictures are taken. The screening is unnecessary, an annoyance and an invade of privacy. Even if all pictures are distorted, blurred or are just icons, the screener scans me naked. And that for a 1 in a million chance that a terrorist could possible hide a bomb between his legs? More people die because of a lighting bolts.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
This misses the point. First (and least important), if you can distort the images, you can undistort them.
More importantly: people finally seem to be waking up to this simple fact: The government has no right to search you unless it has probable cause and a warrant. TSA, in fact, does not even have the right to demand an id. The right to interstate travel without government interference has been upheld by the courts: flying is a right, not a privilege. Nude scanners (even if distorted) and genital gropes violate your fourth amendment rights. Trying to make this violation more palatable is the wrong approach.
The right approach is to eliminate the TSA (and all of its regulations) and let the airlines and airports be responsible for their own security. As private companies, they have an interest in finding ways to guarantee security without humiliating their customers.
Fourth amendment, folks, use it or lose it.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
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."
The government really needs to stop getting ideas from bad 80's action flicks.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Do I trust the scanner to:
- Actually mangle the image?
- Not save a "raw" image internally or transmitted someplace?
- Actually be mangled as described in front of out-of-sight invisible surveillance agent?
No, I don't. They've already been caught lying on all these issues, actually.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The problem is not that anybody will see the naked images, the problem is not even that these scanners are probably worse for your health than the terrorists, the problem is even not that somebody is touching 'your junk' and the problem is even not that none of these procedures are making anything any safer (they are not.)
The problem is that you are a human being, and if you allow yourself to be treated like cattle, they will.
The problem is that those Freedoms and Liberties are eroding and you are allowing them to take the Freedoms and Liberties away.
People died and killed others for this kind of stuff because it matters. You only have one life, do you want to be cattle or a human?
You can't handle the truth.
While it's most likely true that more people are driving vs flying for the holidays, I don't think the TSA is the reason. It's often cheaper to drive and, for flights under 2 to 2 1/2 hours, the time is basically the same [including drive time to airport, luggage pickup, and, yes, security screening]. I'm extremely doubtful that the airlines are losing business due to the TSA [not that they're not losing business because of other reasons: bad service, increased costs (i.e. luggage fees), decreased routes]. I seriously question anyone who says they're not flying because of the TSA's new scanners and pat downs. Most likely, they wouldn't be flying for other reasons. This is not to say there are not potential health concerns with the new full-body imagers, those do have to be addressed, especially to pilots and flight attendants.
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 to use road transportation to avoid flying -- much more dangerous by the mile than air travel.
That's ok think about all the carbon dioxide that won't be released into the atmosphere, the little polars won't drown and the low lands won't flood. Why do you hate polar bears?
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
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.
This article is missing the point. The naked pictures on the airport scanners are just a portion of the problem. There is also the issue of the amount of radiation that the skin is exposed in these machines is dangerous. And then the issue of why members of congress and other politicians get to skip the machines and the groping. The whole thing is so wrong at so many levels.
This solution from the producer is just him making sure that his product is still the solution.
We the people don't want the solution, and whoever he bribed to make this decision should be fired.
Enough is enough.. Everyone should just stop flying altogether as there are no alternative way of flying without this invasive crap. If there was an airport A where this happened and airport B where things were normal, no one would go to airport A.. but this is happening at EVERY SINGLE AIRPORT.
911 happened because people were used to allowing the "terrorist" to take the airplane wherever they wanted, becayse they'd stay safe, now if this happened, everyone would kill the terrorist because otherwise the terrorist might kill them all.
Why do stupid people always get to make stupid choices that affects billions of travelers every year?
Hate this crap..
I know a great way to make them less objectionable in the U.S. Don't use them to violate my 4th amendment rights.
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
Put it this way: I bet you can think of at least one person you'd like to get in the scanner for a few minutes....
No sig today...
If you really think another bomb will be hidden in someone's jock and you don't trust the security personnel then don't fly. You're welcome to use other means of transportation, like trains, buses, boats, and cars, all of which are statistically less safe.
Better yet, get over yourself, your body really isn't 'titllating" enough for a TSA officer to lose their job over. They have access to pr0n too.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
How long until terrorists start detonating bombs in the long waiting lines at the airport? Maybe everyone that wants to fly should first agree to have their home searched before they can buy a ticket.
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
I want hot women TSA agents. Not only would that make it NOT be a problem, it would make it a BONUS.
Oh and to be fair, ripped guys for the ladies. Just recruit a bunch of Jersey guidos and throw some (more) oil on them.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you have less muslims flying because sexual assault at airports, it's going to make screening easier and more effective.
I'd rather have a "must eat bacon" requirement.
So, your argument boils down to: if we drop the theater and go back to metal detectors only, then 9/11 style hijackings in the US would be "common" again (mind you they only ever happened once on US soil, hence the date describing them)? Also mind you, they had no explosives, etc. Just box cutters.
Sorry, but no. Case in point, even with "enhanced" security we still had shoe and underpants bomber "terrorists" get through. Security hasn't gained us anything. Awareness of the fact that not all hijackings end up in safe landings has forced the public's hand in dealing with the threat in the air. We all but kill them now.
The attitude shift _alone_ will stop hijackings. Now random bombs in bags, ok, screen bags with dogs and sending them through scanners. Problem pretty much solved, or at least reduced to near zero, just as it was before.
how much would it cost to simply put well trained police on the planes? a couple of people, trained in hand to hand combat, and good with knives and stuff.
new sig
Yes, so easy a "6-year old could do the same thing", and yet:
"The Livermore laboratory sent off a final application to the U.S. Patent Office on Nov. 23, 2006"
That provides insight to the absurdity of the patent process. Take something obvious, simple, and widely used, then say "Look! This is a brand new technique, just because no one has applied these algorithms to these sorts of images before."
Give me a break.
Better known as 318230.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWIHv7a6luY GET HIM!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I mean, what's the big deal about someone touching your junk? We all go to the doctors (by choice), even 12 year olds. You really think that the TSA guys (or girls) really get a kick out of fondling some guy? They have a job to do, its not to harass us, its to make sure no one is carrying bombs onto the airplane. If one of them is being inappropriate, they will get fired, and I betcha it will happen faster than in the catholic diocese.
Any poor soul that gets a rush out of viewing those body scans needs to move to a larger city where getting laid is more than a twice in a life time experience.
The airlines USED to be massive campaign contributors (up there with the best of em). But they seem to have basically rolled over and accepted whatever crap the government decides to implement even when its putting them out of business.
You or I or Muhammed al-Jihadi could still board a plane with a smuggled knife up your ass -- the metal detector would catch it but not the porno scan or sexual assault. However, it wouldn't be effective since cockpit doors are now locked. That's the one effective security measure that was implemented.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Entirely agree. Good point. Locking the cockpit was a good and most likely effective post-9/11 change. I'd support keeping those in place. Everything else however...
I travel a reasonable amount and for the last 20 years haven't been able to walk through a metal detector anywhere. I have enough metal parts to excite most scrapyards. I know security is a little bit of a placebo for the public. But what is the alternative? Let anyone walk on with anything? This light measure of security means that we at least stop some of the armatures and make the pros look for easier targets (and their are lots!). I continually see people getting upset over being searched. Why? Should we simply racially profile and only search those that "look" guilty? Look at the "Old" man that just boarded a plane with a great makeup job. My take is that when they search me, and they ALWAYS do because my cyborg joints and parts, I feel like they are actually catching the obvious. When someone is searched, I am not sure why they are getting upset. The reasons are: Look guilty, interesting items, a random number, or a targeted demographic. At least there is some measure of security. To these workers, they don't necessarily think YOU are guilty, you just have something (even the random number) that has triggered a search. The problem I see is the perception that the security people are not viewed as professionals. The media has us convinced that they are all unemployed street junkies that got the only job they could. So far everyone that has searched me, and I fly 3 - 4 times per year, has been more than professional and discrete. If we as a public helped them instead of fighting them, security would probably increase. The media could choose to help, but it easier to find fault than help. Think about how many people fly each day, how many "Terror" incidents there are. Are they successful? When there is a failure, how much is it publicized? When there is a success, where is the publicity? We also need to decide how much security is worth. Are you willing to spend and extra $20 per flight for enhanced security? What really scared me was last Christmas there was an orange alert, and for the first time I walked clean through the scanner without a sound in Cancun. Personally I'm up for the $20.
Case in point, even with "enhanced" security we still had shoe and underpants bomber "terrorists" get through.
To be fair, those guys didn't get body scanned or shoe-checked. Would the new regime have caught them at the airport?
Now random bombs in bags, ok, screen bags with dogs and sending them through scanners.
Bags already go through scanners. The only way to avoid the scanner is to have the bomb on your body, or inside an object that is too large to scan (child buggy?).
When the three most popular stories ever (and others in the top-10) were political, I'd say the users made their opinion clear.
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Lots of politics, yet no KDawnson there.
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None of them could possibly carry enough insurance to defend themselves from the lawsuit that would come when a terrorist did get through. Not only do you have 100+ wrongful death suits, but depending on where (and on what) the plane crashes, you could also be responsible for hundreds of millions more.
No insurance company would cover it at a rate which the airlines could afford. This means either (a) airlines don't fly, (b) the risk is uninsured and passed on to the rest of us, manifested in a few individuals randomly (unfairly, and non-free-market-like), or (c) the government just underwrites it gratis, which means that it is passed on to the rest of us at large.
No sir. Airline security is a public good, and therefore ought be implemented or heavily regulated by public agencies. Figure out the right security policy, and then it won't matter much if TSA is public or private, since airlines and airports can currently hire private companies to do their security, subject to (virtually) identical TSA requirements on search.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
A bomb sniffing dog is better than any human/machine combo, they are also a lot cheaper. Metal detectors get the obvious knives/guns/etc. Xray machines look at baggage (allow the dogs to sniff that too). What have we left out? Besides the billion dollar security industry profits?
If the objection here is that somebody will see your bits, distortion won't help that. When I was a teen, distortion didn't stop me from "enjoying" the scrambled channels after 1AM.
Again, i'm presented with a meaningless statement concerning the relative risks of car travel vrs flying. Please note: We do NOT choose travel methods based on mileage!!!! To say that air travel is markedly safer than by automobile is to ignore a simple fact: we choose the mode based on *time* to get there, NOT the distance! I might choose a vacay travel time that is reasonable based on total available vacation time. A month in Australia from Boston is worth spending many hours in flight. Death rates MUST be stated in 'deaths per hour in the conveyance' , not in fatalities per mile! When i do see such figures, then i'll pay attention... but i assure you that the numbers will not be such as to make flying seen to be so enormously safe.
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
...if you really think I'm a potential threat, then arrest me. If you want to treat me like a criminal, then stop doing a half-assed job of it and violating my Fourth and Ninth Amendment rights in the process.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Its pretty easy to take a fun house image and unmorph it back into a the source image.
Once somebody does the work and makes the first program that does it, anybody can unmorph.
People would like to see the scans of celebs.
The real problem that isn't being addressed by turning body scan images into funhouse images is that if one is using active scanning that involves either X-rays or THz radio frequencies is that it is effectively a form of assault (leaving completely aside any "illegal search" arguments).
X-rays break chemical bonds. Breaking bonds in water (much of the human body) creates hydroxyl radicals which attack DNA. Some of these attacks explicitly create or contribute to the creation of DNA double strand breaks. Repair of DNA double strand breaks corrupts the genome [1]. THz wave have recently been found to create DNA "bubbles" which will contribute to the formation of DNA double strand breaks [2].
So there is no way that these "active" searches can be done without causing damage to the individual being "searched". The only "searches" likely to be non- or minimally-hazardous are metal detectors which use magnetism or chemical sniffers which would detect the presence of hazardous materials. One might also be able to develop a non-hazardous scan based on NMR technology but I don't think we are going to see such scanners soon at airports.
1. The WRN and DCLRE1C (Artemis) genes are key actors in DSB repair and have exonuclease activity. They will chew up DNA bases in order to create strand ends which can be effectively be ligated (sewn together). This in turn produces indels (insertions & deletions) which have played a role in evolution (as seen by the hundreds of thousands of indels being found in individual human genomes) as well as in individuals where they contribute to the formation of cancer [3] and/or aging [4].
2. Bubbles (strand separation) in DNA increases the distance between single-strand breaks on opposite strands which allows the DNA to "melt" effectively producing a DNA double strand break.
3. Studies of cancer genomes have found that indels may be involved in 15-25% of cancers which have currently been sequenced.
4. Misrepaired double strand breaks accumulate over time and gradually corrupt the genome -- so if they don't occur in cancer genes they end up producing a dysfunctional genome and a generally accelerating decline in cell function.
The FAA allows babies in laps, despite knowing full well that moms can't hold on to them during turbulence. The FAA's thoughtful policy is because they would rather have the child in a safe airplane than in an unsafe car because the extra plane seat was too expensive. If the FAA can see things this way, the TSA should be able to see that killing shy people through auto accidents, or killing conformists with radiation, or just sapping their life away standing in a line, is worse than having a lesser number die from terrorism. Maybe.
If they want to see us, then they should continuously display the image of the head of homeland security, the TSA, whatever agent is currently in the booth looking at us, and whatever agents are assigned to pat-downs to each passenger who goes through the scanner.
No, hijacking don't work anymore since every passenger knows they will die if they leave the hijackers alone. Even if you take away the sealed cockpit door (which isnt even a real nuissance, so keep it), you would need incredibly overwhelming force to subdue hundreds of passenger who know their only chance of survival is killing you. now you would probably need to get about 100 guys onto a plane and get into a full-scale wrestling match and choke every single passenger to death before you have control of the plane.
The mentality change in the passenger caused by 9-11 is preventing hijackings, not the security checks
People, what a bunch of bastards
The underpants bomber was on a terrorist watchlist and was flying without a passport. The US government intervened to let him board the plane anyway.
I didn't know if I should have laughed or cried when I saw this article.. but it just illustrates the problem with our country.. those who make the rules don't have to follow them.
http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/nation-world-news/incoming-speaker-boehner-avoids-airport-pad-down-1008368.html/
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I know someone who's married to a Turkish guy. She gets extra screening every time she flies.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Talk about te Law of Unintended Consequences. As I looked at the immense queue of people waiting to get through security I thought, "what a great place for a suicide bomber to detonate himself". You don't have to bring down an airlplane to create terror of flying. Fucking TSA morons.
sig: pv qid
Doesn't matter, you can just go to a restaurant after the security check point and grab a knife.
What matters now is a hijacking is no longer safe for passengers, it used to be a slight layover at some random mid-eastern airport while the demands got sorted, hence no one did anything on 9-11 (at first) - however, those hijackings changed the game. Now passengers understand *they* have to deal with it, thus a 3-5 man hijacking is no longer easy to do, since you have some 150-300 people who might object to it.
They keep comparing these to X-Rays that you get at the hospital. If that is so then I have a major problem with that. Hospitals require X-Ray techs to go to school for what...1 year maybe more and then be certified? How long are TSA employees trained, maybe 3 weeks if lucky, in a lot of cases 1 week. I don't know that seems a bit messed up to me.
http://xraytechnicianschools.org/
The question I have is who controls the TSA. It is the belief of the American public that they elect representatives who then control the government. But, the TSA and Homeland Security in general seem not to be controlled by our elected representatives. I have yet to hear anyone outside the TSA who think these measures are necessary or valuable. Congressmen are fighting against it. Yet, the Homeland Security and the TSA don’t seem to care at all. They just continue to spout their “for your own good” refrain and do whatever they want. When the house to house searches and the interment of liberals start that will be for our on good too and we might no be able to stop it. The entire mentality of safety at all costs is costing our freedom.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
If you remove the security, do you really think terrorists wouldn't notice and exploit it again? Read up on history, once hijackings were extremely common UNTIL rigorous security measures put an end to them.
No, hijackings were extremely common until United Airlines Flight 93 put an end to them.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
but what about frequent fliers, maybe they dont want repeated exposure to harmful xray radiations
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Just when I don't think I can never read a dumber story on a Monday morning, along comes this. And people wonder why I hide from the news over the weekends.
Any one do the obvious "can't they just distort my junk to look bigger" joke yet?
Do you happen to have a reference for that?
(Not that I disbelieve you, it just seems very odd and I'd like to learn more about the background...)
I do not actually care if anyone sees me naked (been to nude beaches before). So what?
My concern is RADIATION. HOSPITALS can't get their radiation stuff working as it should (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/when-radiation-treatment-turns-deadly/ & http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html), so how am I supposed to trust that TSA will keep the radiation levels in check? No thanks, pat down for me, and hopefully for so many others that the airports will come to a crawl until these scanners are eliminated.
Alas, from the comments I read here and elsewhere, we have a population of big chickens that prefers convenience ("I'd rather go through the scanners than get a pat down"), so probably the scanners are here to stay. They will distort the pictures but still subject millions of people to unneeded radiation for nothing. Well, we evidently have (as a people) the government we deserve.
"WITH the security checks hijackings have become a thing of the past and finding a bom is a very small chance. "
Uhm. No.
Underpants bomber and shoe bomber were not caught by TSA. They were caught by passengers.
The wikipedia page talks about the "well dressed man" and congressional testimony revealed that various TLAs knew about him and intentionally chose not to revoke his passport or put him on the no-fly list.
As someone else said, "who controls the TSA?" From the appearances of things, nobody. Either that, or the Executive branch has a lot to answer for.
I don't care if this makes it 'less' objectionable. In my mind, it doesn't. It's largely the principle of the matter to which I protest, but the implications are thus:
* The backscatter radiation is of highly questionable health implications. There are many places in the world where microwaves have not been adopted (for good reason): they change the molecular structure of fats and destroy vitamins. Aside from the direct radiation impact said 'scanners' have on our bodies, what are they doing to our fat and vitamin content?
* Inconvenience
* I'm paying how much for all of this?
From now on, I'm driving or taking the train. It will mean several things to me and my family:
* I'm investing (yes, investing) in a larger vehicle with a diesel engine. Something old but reliable (think: Chevy/Ford vans). My family will be able to drive in comfort at nominal per-mile cost.
* When not driving, we will be taking the train. Somehow (where it is available) long-distance train fares remain relatively low (eg. $150/person for a Denver-San Francisco round trip) - though there are implications such as vehicle storage to contend with here, as well.
* As a result of the time requirements (our families live on the coasts; we're in the Black Hills), we will not be traveling as often.
Their security theater was somewhat tolerable before. It was just barely quicker to fly 500 miles than it was to drive (eg. Rapid City to Omaha), but cost a bit more. Now, it appears to take significantly longer, it's more inconvenient in a dozen different ways in addition to time, and cost is through the roof.
I suspect that if we got the FAA and the TSA out of things, air transit would once again be cheap and reliable. But that will never happen.
I think it's time to see this country instead of just flying over it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
backscatter machines are useless in detecting anything beyond knives and guns which are already pretty well done by the existing metal detectors. These machines are just a boondoggle for the industrial-security comlex. They do nothing to enhance anyone's safety.
You really shouldn't swing a Louisville Slugger in an enclosed space like an airplane, since you might hit somebody other than your target or the plane itself. Instead, grasp the handle with one hand, use your other hand to grasp the middle of the bat, and then thrust the business end of the bat into the terrorist's face.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Press Release – FAA Announces Decision on Child Safety Seats
Where are the pictures where we see Michelle, Malia An and Natasha being fondled by these people.
This all happening sickens me and yet I am not surprised. The staff just do as they are ordered. People do if their nose bleeds and just nicely follow whatever the leader says.
Stop talking about the second amendment, start using it. The wackos are not that wrong in their fear of a new world order. They just could never imagine that it would be their own people and that in a few years the UN will need to come and rescue them. Not the other way around.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Billionaire Leona Helmsely: "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."
Only the "little people" are inconvenienced by the law.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I'm one of the people who have opted to drive instead of flying several times this year precisely because of the issues with airports, and the security theater is definitely a main part of that. Though just getting rid of the new scanners and intrusive pat-downs isn't nearly enough to fix security theater.
How about making sure that the images cannot be stored and published online later? I think that's where the problem lies.
Bow before me, for I am root.
Strike on Iraq by CmdrTaco
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Saddam Hussein Arrested by CmdrTaco
Gotta give this guy credit - arrested Saddam, ruled on textbook stickers and struck Iraq
Six Bomb Blasts Around Central London by Zonk
Might want to keep an eye on this one though
Your American odds of dying in an airplane bombing are 1 in 500,000
Whenever anyone quotes a number like this in relation to reducing security, it really bothers me.
Because you are giving a CURRENT number, with all of the current security measures in place - and you are using that number to claim security should be reduced!!!
I'm not saying the measures have had much of an effect. What I am saying is that it is absurd to claim the current risk of incident is affected not at all by removing even a single security control.
So please stop giving statistics indicating how we can eliminate security that could just as easily be used to claim the security is having an effect.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My first thought was making it look like a Homonculus
In the Denver airport for a while, they had a really nice security screening machine - the Puffer. All it did was puff air on you, briefly, then analyze the air for chemicals used in explosives.
It worked really well, and no-one complained about it, because who cares about a brief gust?
The problem was that it broke down often, and so they stopped using it. But recently I read some article with an idea that would make it work - make the detector a replaceable cartridge, that could easily be sent back for cleaning - apparently random dust clogged the sensors after a while.
No XRays, no controversial mages, just common sense detection that would probably catch more problems than the current scanners could. What's not to love?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"The fix would distort the images captured on full-body scanners so they look like reflections in a fun-house mirror..."
We could also put clown shoes, red noses and makeup on serial rapists, but I doubt that would make the victims feel any better.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
And the only reason he failed to put a hole in that plane was his own incompetence. Maybe not the best model for how we should do things.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199---israelification-high-security-little-bother
The ONLY part of this article that seems difficult is getting the public to be angry instead of frightened and to place trust in the people protecting us. Oh and getting the people who protect us the training and skills instead of spending a bazillion on equipment that Govt. officials have a vested interest in seeing sold.
I guess we're screwed? I mean really who's a bigger target the Israeli people or us? I realize that the margin is shrinking but still they've been FAR more secure than us for a good long time. Their reaction to a possible bomb in luggage is pretty telling - here's we paralyze an airport and evac everyone into a nice tight target group. Over there they're prepared and drop the luggage into a container to contain the blast while calling for help - they evac like a dozen people to our thousands. What a concept!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
"one of the researchers who helped develop the software for the scanners"
Yep, that's the guy we all want to listen to, after all, he knows best. No Rights/Privacy/Modesty/Health issue here, just move along because umm, your picture is now distorted.
Begone villian! The said 'researcher' should be replaced with a tiny shell script and then unlinked.
Now that the threat to the general public is diminished the only thing a terrorist can do to a plane now is blow it up, and to that I say: so what? It's a waste of a terrorist organization's resources, they can accomplish much better kill and terror rates on other vectors.
You're making theoretical argument about whether terrorists would try to blow up a plane. But we have numerous, recent examples of actual terrorists trying to blow up planes--the underwear bomber less than a year ago, and the printer bombs more recently.
You're right that terrorists could choose to target airport security checkpoints, but do you understand that terrorism is not a zero-sum game? Just because terrorists could target other gatherings of people, that has no logical connection to the need to secure planes--especially since we have solid empirical evidence that planes are targets.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In the past 10 years, there was eactly 4 succesfull terrorist attacks that crashed a plane (all on 9/11). But three of those attacks did manage to kill some extra people (mostly firemen trying to put out the fires).
Lets be generous and assume that the terrorists manage the equivelent of 1 plane crash a year.
So with the TSA scanners in place we get about 1.06 plane loads of people with cancer each year. Without the scanners in place, assuming the terrorists more than double their rate of attempted attacks AND succeed, we get 1.00 plane load of dead passengers.
Any idiot that can highschool math can easily see that the scanners give more people cancer than they save from terrorist attack.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They're already skirting State laws on operation of a medical imaging device without training - they would simply skirt this too.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
The chances of dying in a car accident are also quite low--you're much more likely to die of heart disease than a car accident.
And yet, safety is a major selling point for cars, and the government puts a lot of effort into designing safe roads and regulating safe cars. Why don't we all just call it "good enough" and focus our resources on nutrition, exercise, and Lipitor??
Maybe because if it's my family that is killed, I doubt the statistics of relative safety will comfort me. I'm guessing you would probably feel the same way.
Your question can be framed to question any effort of human improvement at all. "Linux is already more secure than Windows--why do we need to keep patching it?" See how silly that sounds?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Actually publish them all online and crowdsource the weapon detection. It'd be the new chatroulette.
Radiation exposure risk is cumulative over your life.
But not over multiple lives, which is why the "kill more people than terrorists" conclusion is a laughable abuse of statistics. The deaths are not the same. If a terrorist blows up a plane, the bomb is the direct causal (and therefore preventable) cause of death. Aggregated epidemiological statistics are not causal. The number one killer of Americans is heart disease; does that imply that serving someone a steak is as bad as shooting them in the heart?
Disappointing to see such innumeracy on Slashdot.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
But really, all of these proactive and invasive "security" measures tell me that the terrorists have won. They have irrevocably changed the way of life for many Americans by forcing security measures that infringe on our personal liberties; if that isn't one of their goals, I don't know what is.
Both bombs failed because of incompetence. By the time the passengers were aware of them (from the fire, smoke, and smell), the bombs had already failed.
It's one thing to dislike the scanners, it's another to lie about events that actually happened.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The few leadership positions with security details (because of the line of presidential succession) skip all security checkpoints. Other members of Congress flying commercial are subject to the same screening as anyone else. Last year I was behind Ron Paul and his wife in line at National Airport in DC; both got pulled aside for pat-downs. I did not.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Those Rent-A-Cops will be washing their hands and sniffing their fingers for a long time after they frisk some kids and get a load of the load the kid did in his diapers. It ain't Semtex but its toxic.
Think of it.
That has GOT to be the worst job in America.
Who else but some bad-cholesterol gulping, high-blood pressure, porn collecting pervert or masochist would take it?
You are being paid like crap money to frisk people down while getting universal opprobrium (shit from everybody,) spending your day out at the fuckin' airport, getting to try to get by on "poor people food" (greasy, over-processed, salty cardboard and watery beer,) until you look like a stuffed sausage in a uniform.
Man it must be eating at them, (yuck,) that they are responsible for the safety of people, half of whom the airport will never see again, going off to visit who knows who while they don't earn enough to go anywhere themselves.
Meanwhile rich people don't go through the same security. I guarantee you that people in that bracket don't get groped by some angry troglodyte.
No, they charter jets at smaller airports and snicker and laugh at anybody who doesn't rate.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
anyone who'd be into saving images of children's genitalia certainly wouldn't care for images of enlarged children's genitalia.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Imagine you get to update your wall with ALL the pictures, your AND the TSA, with your, uh, face in 'em, starting from before the vacation/holiday/honeymoon/business trip even started.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Some people can be titilated by some really grotesque images. There's porn of old women, fat women, etc.
Which makes me wonder why anyone would go through the trouble of getting hired by TSA, hoping that they will be one of the few people assigned to these machines. I mean, it's not like it's hard to find naked (and hardcore pornographic) pictures of pretty much any body type, doing pretty much anything, on the Internet.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Think of how many PCs, mainframe terminals and dot matrix printers there are at an airport, choking with dust and dead insects while their performance degrades, that never get seen to even once ... before they utterly fail.
Now do you want to trust your life to the maintenance crew at the airport?
The equipment may have been delivered un-jostled and may have even been installed properly, (by people from two or three different unions,) but who knows how long the default settings are going to remain set?
How are you going to discover a faulty scanner before there are hundreds of people scattered to the four corners of the country or even the planet quietly dying of radiation poisoning?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I had an idea, actually this morning, about taking the 'naked' out of the body scanner. Using edge detection on the image would show the outline of the body, as well as the outline of any detected objects. A red line figure on a black background shouldn't be objectionable. That way the image isn't distorted, and could actually be more useful than interpreting gray blobs.
Of course, there is still the radiation exposure to deal with, but at least removing some of the problem wouldn't hurt.
high-speed train. (Oh sorry, That's only in Europe, Japan and China ... We need it here in America. We just don't have it. :-)
But I figure you have a one or two year window of travel before those radiation ejaculating machines spread to all forms of common transportation.
If you share a ride, how do you know who you're sharing it with?
First it starts with paranoiac whispers, they something goes Boom!
Then you're doing a risk assessment before going to the toilet.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It wouldn't take much to hack into the ethernet cable and intercept the packets between the scanner(machine) and the scanner(human).
For all we know, the scanner(human) doesn't know who he's looking at either, so it would be possible to smuggle drugs, guns and other contraband by substituting one image, (a clean image from a few days ago,) for another, (the guy who's got a kilo of cocaine sown around a ceramic blade, hidden down his pants.)
If I could think of it, anybody could.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Doesn't matter, you can just go to a restaurant after the security check point and grab a knife.
Those knives are plastic.
As long as the TSA is allowed to flaut the 4th amendment like that, our standing as a "free society" has been greatly reduced. There is no way that "fixing" the actual images or safeguarding the privacy of them makes up for making you stand there submissively with your arms up inside a scanner which risks your health. You as a citizen should be considered innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around; and that's all there is to it.
It's like asking slashdoters to RTFA. Umpossible!
If you enter a cublcle and the machine tell the security guy what is wrong...
What is it that needs human to look over a picture that cannot be automated ?
Under a conformal mapping, the local features (such as small objects, like what the scanners are looking for) could be seen without distortion, other than possibly changes in scale and rotation.
The actual image could be severely distorted on the global scale. (E.g. think, Escher's ``Gallery'' and beyond).
Unfortunately, the distorted image is not immune to the opposite transformation being applied. However, the distortion could be randomized. To undistort an image, you would have to know certain coefficients which could be varied for each image. Without knowing the parameters, the reverse mapping becomes a search problem over the distorted image.
The difficulty of this is probably well in excess of being proportional to the actual threat.
Go get a bottle of beer after the screening in one of the bars that most airports have. Nothing stopping you from getting that on the plane, and broken glass is just as good a weapon as a knife.
The problem with that kind of operation is it is obvious or it is botched.
Lone gunman doesn't scale well. It has to be coordinated otherwise its lost in the "noise" and the authorities deny it.
Its in their interest to make people fearful but it is not in their interest to make them fear.
Right now they have a bugbear that is not so awful that it interferes with their daily lives.
Their liberties are being whittled away one by one but it does not interfere with their lives, so they don't bitch...
(Okay, if *I* tried to do what the TSA does every single day to every single passenger, I'd be put away. But if I really wanted to do it, I could even apply to the TSA and get PAID to do this "feeling up you, your wife/girlfriend and your little girl" shit. [THAT'S AMERICA BUDDY!!! We used to castigate and chastise perverts, now we give them jobs and government protection...])
Now imagine if someone WAS actively blowing themselves up in American airports or on American soil...
This "destroying the economy" statement shows you know nothing about the entrepreneurial spirit, or its venality.
Look for scanners coming to a train station and bus depot near you. And Chertoff's company, friends and associates are going to just rake in the bucks until some traveler's can be a) proved to have been caused by the scanner and b) wont accept the hush money, c) the judges won't accept the hush money either. (How likely is that? ... He said drawing in a lungful of carcinogens along with the smoke from his Winston.)
The United States created the FDA to protect the consumer from unfounded claims. ("Drink Schwartz's Elixir and you'll cure your beri-beri".)
Once the purveyors of "patent medicine" (Note the operative word in there is "patent" not "medicine") were disposed of, the FDA (way back in the middle 19th century,) now had to find a way of justifying its funding and the aim switched from "protecting the public" to "protecting the industry" which kept it around.
A classic case of "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes!"
There was no one watching the watchers. Just like now.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
On a flight?
It's possible to walk through the scanner, and *still* be pulled aside for TSA assault.
Troll FAIL. (And so do I, for responding to one.)
in health and security.
Officers understand tighten controls make secure feeling. So they just do that for lower public preasure.
http://olegvolk.net/gallery/d/15128-8/tsa2691.jpg
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
These searches are a flagrant vilation of our Fourth Amendment rights. Furthermore, TSA does not have up to date information on which airports have these porno scanners. So if you go to an airport not listed as having porno scanners, decide you don't want to be blasted with radiation, have naked pictures taken, or groped, you cannot leave without being jailed and slapped with an $11,000+ fine.
Want to know why 9/11 happened? Why those planes were able to be flown into those buildings? It happened because your government disarmed every honest person on those planes.
Simple solution, leave airline security to the airlines. I'll fly the airline that treats me with the msot respect as a customer and allows me to carry what I'd like onboard. until then, I do not fly anymore.