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.'"

Comments

Hi Janet Napolitano

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:In every train station? LOL

[The MAZZTer]

Not to mention that they will be unable to ensure the entire route between stations is secure. Why risk being caught boarding a train with a bomb when you can plant a bomb next to the track?

We need to man up

[jollyreaper]

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."

Re:In every train station? LOL

[dgatwood]

It's completely absurd. Anyone with half a brain can think of at least half a dozen reasons why they can't secure trains this way.

• The average Amtrak station is a double wide about 100 feet of the tracks. They would have to build real thousands of real train stations at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.
• Unlike planes, which leave the airport up in the air, trains leave the station on the ground. So all someone has to do to get around security is to walk along the tracks.
• There has never been even one single case of a terrorist boarding any train in the United States with the intent to cause it harm. There has never even been intelligence suggesting that this is a credible threat.
• The easiest, safest, and most effective way to target a train is not to target the trains themselves, but rather the approximately 233,000 miles of unsecured railroad tracks. If we want to make it at least as secure as the U.S. Mexico border fence (with fences along both sides of every track), it would cost approximately 1.8 Trillion dollars, or about 14% of the total U.S. national debt.
• That's not counting the tens of trillions of dollars you would have to spend on adding bridges at every railroad crossing in the nation to allow cars to go over the fences.

In short, Ms. Napolitano clearly has not thought this through. Either that or she has thought it through and she's just the biggest idiot on the face of the planet. With political appointees, it's often hard to say. Either way, it's time to defund the TSA and Homeland Security. They're the biggest laughingstock of the security world since Windows XP.

Tag article witchhunt

[TrisexualPuppy]

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

Re:Tag article witchhunt

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

The TSA doesn't use behavior identification methods because they'd discover that THEY are the one's who act like Taliban.

Re:Tag article witchhunt

[nbauman]

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'm old enough to have met people who fought in the resistance against the Nazis in WWII.

One of their favorite targets was troop trains. The Germans had a great railroad system.

All they had to do was remove the spikes, and the train would be derailed. On a winding mountain road, it might go tumbling off the cliff.

One guy said that they would remove the spikes, fill the hole with gasoline, and replace the spikes, so that it would explode when the train rolled over it. I couldn't figure out how that would work, but he killed 600 Nazis.

I'm glad the war is over, and the Germans have returned to sensible things, like solar power and molecular biology.

I hope we (and the Arabs) can join them soon.

Re:Tag article witchhunt

[paeanblack]

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.

The problem with trains being soft targets is that they take specific paths at predetermined times. Because it's too expensive to guard the millions of miles of railway track from terrorists, I propose, for security's sake, we randomize the train departure times and destinations and implement random delays and schedule changes en route.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Boston and New England Amtrak have had these security measures for years and, as one can infer from the lack of terrorist incidents, they have clearly presented a most difficult target. Note that when the 9/11 attackers left Boston, they chose to fly rather than take the train.

Re:Step after that

[Migraineman]

I would suggest that, since they're heading toward "universal" security measures, we take a cue from the Old West and require that everyone carry a sidearm. That'll take security down to the individual person, regardless of mode of transportation.

Yes, there will be some irresponsible behavior at first (consider it an initial boundary condition,) but things will sort themselves out once the yahoos have removed each other from the equation.

It's worse than 3 minutes at 30,000 (A lot worse).

[ebuck]

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.

home of the brave, my ass

[corbettw]

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?

Re:Thanks Janet!

[MRe_nl]

Anonymous@DHS:
"The terminology contained within the reported memo is indeed troubling. It labels any person who “interferes” with TSA airport security screening procedure protocol and operations by actively objecting to the established screening process, “including but not limited to the anticipated national opt-out day” as a “domestic extremist.” The label is then broadened to include “any person, group or alternative media source” that actively objects to, causes others to object to, supports and/or elicits support for anyone who engages in such travel disruptions at U.S. airports in response to the enhanced security procedures."

Is everyone there an idiot?

[khasim]

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.

Re:In every train station? LOL

[DavidTC]

So, in your universe, propping up the Saudi government doesn't count as imperialism?

Every single step in imperialism always looks entirely sane and just. (Usually because the unjust steps are classified.)

And we can't seem to understand how people have come to the conclusion that we have conquered them. Sure, we're running around with guns killing the rebels at the request of the government we installed in the first place, but they have FREEDOM(TM)!

We could pull out of the Middle East tomorrow and return to a 1930s era isolationism

Could we? Why the FUCK don't we, then?

and there would still be some extremist nutjob that would find a reason to hate us.

The problem isn't who hates us, the problem is how many people and what sort of recruitment they can do.

On 9/11, 19 people killed about three thousand...so each person killed 150, although that was partially absurd luck on their part.

But let's assume that it's still possible to blow up airplanes, and only takes two people to do that plot, so each person can still kill 150 people.

But the problem isn't the 150 people. There is functionally no way to stop that if the person is willing to die. You could fricking mix ammonia and bleach at a high school talent show and kill 150 many people which chlorine gas

It's the 19 people willing to kill and give their life to do so that many that's the problem.

And it's not really being an 'extremist nutjob' to hate the US because they blew up your house and killed your family. That's just perfectly normal hatred.

Re:Step after that

[JesseMcDonald]

That is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of other options, including simply learning to accept reasonable levels of risk while traveling rather than allow a nebulous group of criminals to cheaply provoke us into destroying our own society for them in the name of "security".