Slashdot Mirror
Next Step For US Body Scanners Could Be Trains, Metro Systems
Hugh Pickens writes "The Hill reports that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for US vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary. '[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through,' Napolitano said in an interview with Charlie Rose. 'I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime.' Napolitano added she hoped the US could get to a place in the future where Americans would not have to be as guarded against terrorist attacks as they are and that she was actively promoting research into the psychology of how a terrorist becomes radicalized. 'The long-term [question] is, how do we get out of this having to have an ever-increasing security apparatus because of terrorists and a terrorist attack?' says Napolitano. 'I think having a better understanding of what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful.'"
The obvious next logical step would be body scanners to get into your car, and should you refuse, your car will grope you inappropriately.
Although I'm sure the car fetishists are salivating at that prospect already.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
No offense, but this is completely speculative, and seems to ignore the fact that these body scanners can cost up to and exceeding $100,000 [epic.org], and that's not even including the costs of hiring and maintaining staff to manage the machines. I personally find it hysterical that anybody would think we'd see these in the _many_ train stations out there in even the distant future. Toss in buses as well, and you're quickly approaching $1M just to "secure" one bus/train route.
As it stands, the cost of these technologies is far too great to be presently implemented at this level. Although, if the TSA is indicative of the average IQ required to operate these machines, even the morons who work for our fabulous local CTA here in Chicago might be able to run these things.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
seen most of the movies and tv shows and reading some of the books now. everyone is always getting scanned
geeks should rejoice
Fuck you.
Hi John Pistole.
Fuck you too.
And Obama. God it pains me to say it.
Fuck you. What the fuck, man?
And to the 82% of people who think this is good,
Fuck all of you.
You don't have the right to fly. Or take the train. Or the bus. Or drive. If you don't want to be molested by the government, you can walk.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
you have never been to NYC
population 8 million and 20 million during the workday. most of the 12 million come in via mass transit
In your car maybe, More likely in your house
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I knew she was this stupid when it comes to security. She was good at education and better at the budget than some, but her border security policy was awful and never did jack shit towards actually keeping anyone safe. Why she was selected for this, of all jobs, is beyond me. As I said, she could have been good at something else like Secretary of Education, but Homeland Security is possibly the worst possible position for her. She just has no grasp of what makes things secure (hint: it's not a fence/scanning machines).
'I think having a better understanding of what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful.'
Really? It took you ten years to realize this?
Hint: being sold by your neighbor to the CIA, blindfolding, extraditing, torture, more flying, Guantanamo Bay, ten years of lock-down will turn ANYBODY and his brother into a so-called "terrorist".
Full body scanners, on the other hand, don't do shit, terrorism-wise.
As for a fear-free future: stop being afraid.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I would love it if we had a president who said something like this:
"Yeah, about the TSA. We're ending it. Same with Homeland Security. Folks, the simple truth of the matter is there's no possible way to secure ourselves against all risk. I think we can all agree that the Soviet Union operated as a police state none of us would want to live in and even with all that security, they still had serial killers. China routinely uses the death penalty for drug smugglers and yet they still have a drug problem.
"The trappings of the police state represented by the TSA does not deter terrorists, it represents the illusion that government is doing something. It also is making a great deal of money for people who provide goods and services for the paranoia industry.
"The fact of the matter is that we will get hit again. We don't know by who, we don't know where, we don't know when, but it'll happen. You know what, though? We're strong. We can take whatever they dish out. They could fly ten more planes into ten more buildings, they could set off a nuclear device in downtown New York. No, we won't like it. But we'll crawl out from under the rubble and rebuild. Living as we have before, uncowed, unbowed, not conceding a goddamn thing to terrorists, that's middle finger resolutely extended right back at them. It says 'If that's all you've got, we've got nothing to worry about.'
"What we're no longer going to do is live our lives looking over our shoulder, jumping at shadows, giving up the way we live our lives because someone has rattled us, because we've lost our nerve, because we've been beaten.
"Oh, and while we're on the topic, Middle Eastern nuts wouldn't have so much money to finance terror attacks if we weren't giving it to them for the goddamn oil. They wouldn't even have a reason to attack us if we weren't involved in their politics in the first place. Our post-oil energy policy is also our anti-terror policy."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
That's what they tell you get in radiation. There is a very big lack of 3rd party oversight and data to support the claim. This is really the first use of x-rays without some kind of medical benefit. And across the whole population.
Even worse are the van scanners. They are designed to see inside a steel shipping container, so no so soft x-rays, and quite a lot higher dosage. And they just need to drive past your house.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Oh, Janet! Sure we can take over boats and wreck them using mere boxcutters and explosives. I'm sure you've seen the movie Speed.
But let me give you a hint. Trains? Didn't you watch old cartoons as a kid? When we want to derail them, we don't need to be on them, and if we are, we have wasted some kamikaze brothers who could have better employed elsewhere.
I also think understanding what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful.
Yours,
The Terrorists
is that those who get cancer from radiation exposure if these body scanners are more widely used, will be a number orders of magnitude greater than those killed by terrorists, if we had no security at all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The USA interfering in other countries' business has a lot to do with the fact that every powerful country interferes in other countries' business.
There's plenty of controversy about the new full body scanners that the TSA is installing at airports, and plenty more about the way some TSA agents are handling those that choose to opt out.
The heart of the matter comes from the fact that the TSA often doesn't understand that it is in show business, not security business. A rational look at the threats facing travelers would indicate that intense scrutiny of a four ounce jar of mouthwash or aggressive frisking of a child is a misplaced use of resources. If the goal is to find dangerous items in cargo or track down Stinger missiles, this isn't going to help.
Instead, the mission appears to be twofold:
1. Reassure the public that the government is really trying and
2. Keep random bad actors off guard by frequently raising the bar on getting caught
The challenge with #1 is that if people believe they're going to get groped, or get cancer, or have to wait in line even longer on Thanksgiving, they cease to be on your side. Particularly once they realize how irrational it is to try to stop a threat after it's already been perpetrated. (Imagine the havoc if someone had a brassiere-based weapon...)
And the challenge of #2 is that the cost of raising the bar gets higher and higher.
Smart marketers know how to pivot. I think it's time to do that. Start marketing the idea that flying is safe, like driving, but it's not perfect, like driving. If someone is crazy enough to hurt themselves or spend their life in jail, we're not going to stop them, and even if we did, they'd just cause havoc somewhere else. So instead of spending billions of dollars a year in time and money pretending, let's just get back to work.
The current model doesn't scale.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/11/groping-for-a-marketing-solution-tsa-and-security-theater.html
This is very much like what Schneier has been saying for years, but nobody else really cared till things got sexual. Isn't that like our species ;-)
Schneier, from 2005:
Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcement of cockpit doors, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back. Everything else -- Secure Flight and Trusted Traveler included -- is security theater. We would all be a lot safer if, instead, we implemented enhanced baggage security -- both ensuring that a passenger's bags don't fly unless he does, and explosives screening for all baggage -- as well as background checks and increased screening for airport employees.
Then we could take all the money we save and apply it to intelligence, investigation and emergency response. These are security measures that pay dividends regardless of what the terrorists are planning next, whether it's the movie plot threat of the moment, or something entirely different.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
"Oh, and while we're on the topic, Middle Eastern nuts wouldn't have so much money to finance terror attacks if we weren't giving it to them for the goddamn oil. They wouldn't even have a reason to attack us if we weren't involved in their politics in the first place. Our post-oil energy policy is also our anti-terror policy."
While we're on the topic, most of our oil comes from Canada, South America, and yes, our very own US of A. It's a common misconception that we rely on the middle east for "most" or all of our oil, and you see it perpetuated every time Obama and other politicians talk about "our foreign dependence".
Our foreign policy was/is heavily influenced by communism, by the way...that's at least half the reason we got ourselves into such a mess. It wasn't just "oil", it was "commies getting oil."
Please help metamoderate.
That sound you hear is American exceptionalism being flushed down the crapper.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
But unlike the 3 minutes at 30,000 feet, the radiation is lower power, designed to scatter off your skin.
That means that 3 minutes a 30,000 feet your entire body (insides included) is hit with the same amount of power: in a scanner only your surface area (skin) is hit with 3 minutes of radiation exposure at 30,000 feet in just under two seconds.
Assuming that the radiation needs to penetrate 1 mm or less to scatter, an average male's body surface area is 1.9 m^2 (165 lbs 5'9") making an exposure area of 0.0019 m^3
Likewise an average male weights about 75 kg (165 pounds) with an average conversion factor of 1.015 kg/l coming with a rough value of 70 l for an average male's volume.
A little math and you find out that (0.0019/70) the entire in machine dose is hitting only 1/36842 of your body, or about 0.0027% of your body.
Normalizing for exposure per second E = Rate(at 30000)*180(seconds), and E = Rate2(in machine)*2(seconds). Leads to Rate(at 30000)*180(seconds) = Rate2(in machine)*2(seconds). A little more math, an you realize that the rate of exposure is 90 times faster in the machine.
90 times faster exposure of only 0.0027% of your body means that the "only three minutes" argument is true, but misleading. Such things can only happen in a culture where most people are mathematically illiterate.
To make a mathematical analogy. Assume the exposure in the air is like having a match light each second. You feel the heat of one match for 180 seconds. Then standing in such a machine is like being exposed to 36841 matches being lit 90 time a second for 2 seconds. That's 3315690 matches per second for 2 seconds. It's a 3 million plus fold increase in exposure rate.
By the way, 1 million matches lit creates a fire column 3 to 5 meters in size over 10 meters tall. For the Americans, that's 10 to 16 feet wide and over 40 feet tall. I don't want to know how how big the fire column would be for a 3.3 million match lighting experiment.
I used to tear up with pride when I heard the national anthem, or Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA". The final line of the anthem, "the land of the free and the home of the brave", and Greenwood's line that "the flag still stands for freedom, and they can't take that away", are both now lies. We are not the land of the free, the flag doesn't stand for freedom, they did take it away, but most of all we are no longer the home of the brave. We are a nation of cowards, so afraid of the boogeyman of terrorism we are willing to sacrifice not just our rights but our very dignity, all in the forlorn hope of being safe.
The TSA has not stopped a single terrorist in the 9 years of its operation. The full-body scanners would not have detected any of the bomb plots of the last few years, including last year's Captain Underpants. It is a complete and total waste of time and money, and serves no purpose beyond enriching a handful of politically connected individuals.
Enough is enough. It's time we all refuse to subject ourselves to any security measures until sanity is restored. Don't show your ID at the airport, don't go through the metal detectors, don't even submit your carry ons for X-Ray inspection. The pendulum has swung too far in one direction, it is time we push it back where it belongs.
If everyone were to refuse to submit to these intrusions, they would be gone in a matter of days. The "powerful" who think themselves our masters are neither, and in their hearts they know it. The people still have the power in this country to stand up for what's right.
Who's with me?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Hmm, let's see....
Invade their country. (Check)
Bomb their country. (Check)
Kill thousands of their innocent civilians, men women and children. (Check)
Show no remorse for these acts. Indeed, be proud of them, and say the victims had it coming. (Check)
Tell the survivors that they are going to get the same. (Check)
How much research do you need? I thought America had drawn up this five-point-plan years ago.
Seriously, is everyone who works for "Homeland Security" an idiot? Is there some maximum IQ you can have before you're unqualified?
Attacking a bus is completely different than attacking a plane.
Even if these measure were useful in defending a plane (which they are not) they wouldn't apply to a bus because any terrorist WOULD NOT GO THROUGH THEM and would, instead, drive next to the bus and blow up his car.
MAYBE they'd be useful in a subway. As long as the train never left the tunnels and all the access routes were sealed shut.
Which still leave the malls and the after Thanksgiving crowds there.
And that doesn't even cover things like a couple of snipers just shooting people in DC.
Fastest way to defeat a terrorist is to give him a real job or business to support loved ones with out interference from corruption.
Ah, that would explain why those doctors and engineers who worked and lived in Great Britain blew up the trains a couple years back. If you do a little research on actual terrorists, you will discover that many of them are well-educated people from middle class backgrounds who have excellent job prospects.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
This is really the first use of x-rays without some kind of medical benefit. And across the whole population.
That's not exactly accurate:
In the late 1940's and early 1950's, the shoe-fitting x-ray unit was a common shoe store sales promotion device and nearly all stores had one.
http://www.museumofquackery.com/devices/shoexray.htm
The TSA seems to believe that they can protect us from every little threat, but they're responding to the last threat from our enemies, not the next one. They are the hysterical ones, jumping through every little hoop that our enemies set up. Their behavior is increasingly bizarre and insane. None of the people whose privacy they invade beyond reason will be a threat! If an actual threat emerges it will no doubt come down to us, the very people that the TSA holds in such contempt, the very people they fear, to stop it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Tons of people have worked out that this stupid policy is not a solution - why hasn't the government?
Because they believe their purpose is to *do something*. That's why they were elected/appointed. Not doing anything means their position is pointless, and you can't sustain a bureaucracy that way.
Simply put, nobody is going to tell the people responsible for their job that they can't find anything to do. It either makes you look incompetent, or it makes it look your position is redundant and should be eliminated.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
In China, they already have pre-nudie-scanner airport-like security at the train stations - at least for the longer distance trains like Hong Kong to Guangzhou or to Shenzhen. They don't have these in the Guangzhou Metro yet, though. I've seen these at long distance bus stations too (HK to GZ again, for example). They even have them at the entrances to certain museums, the Guangzhou Science Center (which is an amazing science museum), and other similar attractions. No taking off your shoes, though. You just pass your bags through the x-ray machine and walk through the metal detector just like at an airport, but no metal-detector wand and pat-down like at the airports.
The greedy airlines do not want the traveling public switching to Amtrak or the bus. The reason to grope/scan train passengers is purely in the comercial interest of the airlines.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
The reason might be, as others pointed out, that they would be completely useless. But then again, the US government has to support the failing car industry. And what better way of doing that, than to molest people, who want to use "unnatural" (public) forms of transportation.
the difference with planes is that you can slam them into any target you wish. they're essentially piloted cruise missiles. trains and buses and metro stations are different. while you can blow them up, kill people on them or whatever you can't slam them into an arbitrary target. in that respect a train and the metro are no different than your local mall or walmart, downtown or whatever. and i can't imagine we're going to body scan people going into walmart or any other location where there are lots of people in one place. or maybe we are? hope not.
david reuteler
They weren't terrorists. All of them had specific targets - people or Government buildings - in order to take those targets out: they were murderers. They were NOT targeting groups of Americans for the sake of creating terror.
They were targeting the government for the sake of creating terror in those working for the government. Both the 90s right wing terrorists and the 60s left wing terrorists.
What that means is that they had become so jaded that they thought that terrorizing the people to change the government wouldn't work, so they terrorized government officials instead.
You're right in that this isn't really 'traditional' terrorism, but traditional terrorism is incredibly stupid and only causes a backlash. If Terrorist group X starts killing civilians randomly, civilians will run to the government for help. If, OTOH, X kills government workers, government workers will quickly find other jobs, crippling the government.
But that really is 'terrorism', just aimed at government civilians instead of other civilians.
However, while that point is valid, the 9/11 attackers did the same thing. The 9/11 attacks were against the White House, the Pentagon, and...the World Trade Center. And what that means is that they appear to think...um...the military and big business run US foreign policy.
Instead of thinking of 'the US government' as a discrete entity, they saw it linked inextricably with big business, and decided they'd terrorize bis business also, who they also think are attacking them.
This is, incidentally, probably more accurate a world-view than the left- and right-wing terrorists in the US, which seem to think that domestic policy is set at Federal buildings.
Of course, the US population doesn't see it that way.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Well I can't speak for the US, but over here (UK) the thing is, most people aren't contorting themselves in fear. The media does a fine job of convincing us we are, but seriously most people just get on with it. After the 7/7 bombings, there were rumours in the press that people would stay away from work, afraid to use the train or buses. In reality everyone just carried on as close to normal as possible. Hell, we were dealing with this crap before it was popular. I think a lot of people convince themselves security theatre is a good idea because the media and politicians are so busy telling us that's what everyone else believes, but in reality most people wouldn't care if security theatre disappeared tomorrow (they wouldn't be paralysed with terror but I'll bet their commute to work would be a little easier).
Considering that a large part of the NRA's activities are education initiatives oriented around familiarizing people with not only proper firearm use but also the Constitution and the Founding Principles as they related to firearm ownership, I'm thinking that this is a GREAT idea.
Also, It'd REALLY cut down on inner-city crime. Can you imagine a gang trying to terrorize a street full of armed, trained and educated free citizens? It'd end badly. For the gang.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
they did their job so well, that the very same Taliban the CIA created is driving the US out of Afghanistan.
And the US protected Saudi's exported ( and still export ) their fundamentalists buying peace for their own air-conditioned dustheap.
I should note that I think the NRA going in and doing this voluntarily is a good thing, as is removing most gun restriction laws in the inner cities.
I do disagree with the subsidizing bit though. Once we get Government involved it'll get hosed up.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Let's see. They live under an oppressive government / invading force. They find themselves ecnomically fucked with no hope of advancing themselves or their family. They find their way of life and/or religion maligned as evil. Then one day they decide, "Fuck it. My life can't be any worse. Maybe I can make things better for the next generation by fighting what has fucked up my generation."
Trucks and cars are even easier to load with explosives and pilot into a target, as they have been. Remember Lebanon? The first World Trade Center Bombing? Oklahoma City?
Also, pilots figured out how to thwart hijackers right after 9/11: use the lock that was already on the cabin door. A 9/11 style attack will never happen again, the passengers won't allow it and the pilot won't open the door.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
A friend of mine (retired sheriff deputy and Air Force reservist) explained it to me, and I've also heard this from my neighbor, who is a city police officer.
Most police who are on the beat, actually out there in contact with the public heavily favor private gun ownership and "must-issue" CCW laws. Most police chiefs (politicians) are against private ownership of firearms. When you hear talk about proposed ordinances, etc., listen to exactly who is doing the endorsing. If it's a police CHIEFS organization, they want you under their heel. If it's a police OFFICERS association, they want you guarding their backs. In my friend's words, "an armed citizen is a police officer's guardian angel".
Police chiefs absolutely DO NOT speak for the positions of the rank-and-file, and are usually dead opposite on civil rights issues. They claim otherwise, but they lie (and if a cop says "Hey, he doesn't speak for me", guess who's not getting a promotion that year). It's not Officer Friendly who wants a GPS transceiver in your ass and handcuffs on you any time you step out of your house. It's Chief Political Ambition, the one who thinks he's going to be Governor someday, and his hand-picked SWAT elite (who have as bad an attitude about ordinary cops as they have about ordinary citizens).
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Makes sense to me.
An observation about SWAT: the more SWAT equipment the cops have, the more paranoid and jackbooted the cops get, even when the citizenry is pretty much disarmed.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Sure, "most" of our oil is sourced within North America. But some very significant fraction comes from elsewhere. Around 40% of our consumption is from domestic sources, another 15-20% is from elsewhere in North America. The rest comes from elsewhere in the world - some from stable, friendly places (Norway, the UK), some from relatively friendly but not so stable places (e.g. Nigeria), and some from not-so-friendly but relatively stable places (e.g. Venezuela), and some from places that are both unstable and less than completely friendly (e.g. various middle east locations). So, yeah, "most" of our oil is domestically sourced. But we're still sending money by the supertanker load to a bunch of places we'd probably rather not be sending it. And we most certainly are dependent on it, as our economy would rapidly go into a tailspin if the overseas spigots were shut off.
I'm not all that sure I buy this armed-society-polite-society thing.
Armed societies aren't necessarily polite. But there is an immediacy of consequence when the impolite turn violent. When ordinary citizens are armed, there is a built-in limit as to how far a violent criminal act can go unchecked.
The problem, in a dense area, is that sometimes you miss, and then there's something behind whatever you missed
Which also is an argument against police carrying guns; cops miss too.
We've decided as a society that the possibility of a missed shot against a deadly criminal act is acceptable risk, thus urban police are armed. The thing is, the threat that cops face is identical to the threat that ordinary citizens face. The response to that threat against ordinary citizens should come with the same acceptance of risk whether the defense comes from a cop's gun or a citizen's.
(And don't get me started on "cops are trained marksmen"; they're not. They suck. The pistol range I frequent is right next to the police headquarters of the city it is in, and I can say with certainty I can outshoot every cop I have ever seen in there shooting. I'm also not an expert shot, and it dismays me that someone whose job depends upon marksmanship is not better than me, for whom it is primarily a hobby.)
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
But there is an immediacy of consequence when the impolite turn violent. When ordinary citizens are armed, there is a built-in limit as to how far a violent criminal act can go unchecked.
Or not. My brother lives in Brazil - it is amazing just how much blue-on-blue gun crime there is between police officers, as coffee-fueled arguments escalate into gunfights - let alone the heavy weaponry like rocket launchers that the drug gangs, who are so pervasive as to practically be the lower-class government, have.
tl;dr: guns don't make an impolite society polite. They make a walk down the street to the shopping mall into an exciting bullet-dodging adventure.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC