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TSA To Retest Full Body Scanners For Radiation
cultiv8 writes with this excerpt from USA Today:
"The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that it would retest every full-body X-ray scanner that emits ionizing radiation — 247 machines at 38 airports — after maintenance records on some of the devices showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected. The TSA says that the records reflect math mistakes and that all the machines are safe. Indeed, even the highest readings listed on some of the records — the numbers that the TSA says were mistakes — appear to be many times less than what the agency says a person absorbs through one day of natural background radiation.
Even so, the TSA has ordered the new tests out of 'an abundance of caution to reassure the public,' spokesman Nicholas Kimball says. The tests will be finished by the end of the month, and the results will be released 'as they are completed,' the agency said on its website."
Shouldn't they be testing the radiation output from these machines at regular intervals to make sure they're safe?
(as opposed to just checking them when the public needs "reassuring")
In the past, the TSA has failed to properly monitor and ensure the safety of X-ray devices used on luggage. A 2008 report by the worker safety arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the TSA and its maintenance contractors had failed to detect when baggage X-ray machines emitted radiation beyond what regulations allowed. They also failed to take action when some machines had missing or disabled safety features, the report shows.
Oh, wait, that's right. For the most part, they're incompetent, or just don't care.
The least they could do while subjecting people to discomfort and harm is ensure that they're keeping damage to a minimum. Assholes.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
While all you geeky LOSERS patter on about being exposed to LESS radiation than your fucking CELL PHONE (and really, do ANY of you masturbation freaks actually ever get out of your mom's basement?), the WINNERS are dealing with actual real issues involving warlocks and tiger blood. I get zapped at the airport maybe 8 times a year. The amount of alcohol and cocaine I take will kill me first, and I plan on NEVER DIEING.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Where you have to get your balls groped to be able to travel. You would be hard pressed to make a public servant grope your balls even in 3rd world countries. But, its free in america.
..
That, or a good dose of healthy radiation
"Hello sir ! What would you like to have today ? Ball-grope, or radiation ?"
now come to think of it, even that 'hello sir' part may be extra in that sentence.
Read radical news here
So glad that the people who use these machines on people and make mathematical mistakes in their logs are the ones that are going to be testing it for safety. That should settle the matter.
This sets a new bar for incompetence. Its almost comical that they are admitting that someone didn't divide by 10 to get an average, but instead *added* the numbers together. This smells like its too dumb to be true, and they are hiding something.
Their example of "appear to be many times less than what the agency says a person absorbs through one day of natural background radiation." is a bad one.
The force of a bullet hitting a person is the same as that of the stock hitting the shoulder of the shooter. I'd rather be on the shooter's end.
Just because the amount of radiation is the same (or less) it doesn't mean its the same type. The scanners concentrate that radiation at one frequency, not over a broad spectrum. That frequency is absorbed not by the whole body, but by the first few millimeters of flest. That means that bit of flesh is getting thousands of times higher levels of exposure then that of the whole body mass exposure of back ground radiation.
There's a keychain-sized radiation detector available for $160. It's a sealed unit, always on, and has a 10-year battery life. It sounds a burst of "chirps" if it detects radiation, with the number of chirps indicating logarithmically the level of hazard. One chirp, the level of radiation is safe for 40 days of exposure. 10 chirps, lethal within hours. Putting one in front of a dental X-ray machine produces about five chirps.
Carry one of those through a body scanner and see what happens.
Indeed, even the highest readings listed on some of the records — the numbers that the TSA says were mistakes — appear to be many times less than what the agency says a person absorbs through one day of natural background radiation.
That is irrelevant, and in my recommendation whoever came up with that formulation should be fired, or at least reassigned to duties far from any actual responsibilities.
I have been unable to find any actual numbers for dosage recorded in this case, so let's look at the National Council on Radiation Protection Commentary No. 16 - Screening of Humans for Security Purposes Using Ionizing Radiation Scanning Systems, which I believe governs this.
The Commentary states that general-use systems should adhere to an effective dose of 0.1 microsievert (Sv) (0.01 millirem) or less per scan, and can be used mostly without regard to the number of individuals scanned or the number of scans per individual in a year. An effective dose of 0.1 Sv (0.01 mrem) per scan would allow 2,500 scans of an individual annually [i.e., if each scan required 0.1 Sv (0.01 mrem)] without exceeding the administrative control of 0.25 mSv (25 mrem) to a member of the general public for a single source or set of sources under one control. Assuming 250 workdays per year, this would correspond to an average of 10 scans each day, a frequency that is unlikely to be encountered.
So, if the actual dose is 10 times that, or 1 micro Sv / scan, then the "administrative control" of 250 microSv / year would require only 250 scans, or one per workday, a frequency which would not be "unlikely to be encountered." In fact, both really frequent flyers and airline crew would be likely to match or exceed this. To be blunt about it, the TSA chose words intended to obscure the likelihood that their radiation guidelines are being violated, at least for some members of the public. This does not inspire confidence.
Remember, too, that this technology was pushed heavily by Michael Chertoff when he was in office, and now he is profiting from its deployment. That also does not inspire confidence.
I think that there should be an independent audit of the TSA's use of X-Ray backscatter and that until that is done members of the flying public should refuse to take those scans. It is better to get groped than to get cancer.
The training that the TSA agents took does require this "groping." (I have talked to off-duty TSA agents about this.) However, I also travel a lot, I always refuse the scanning, and I have yet to be groped. I think that they are just not (by and large) following their training in this matter.
And to speed things up they've already started writing up the results.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Given the rash of medical radiation devices that have been gorking people because they were working incorrectly, I do worry about this.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/health/06radiation.html?src=mv
How about we have an agency OTHER than the TSA provide data on how much radiation in being emitted. Not hard to do -- OSHA rep visits the airport, run the test on each machine, and out. TSA never has to do math again; the radiation output is not a security question anyway.
And you avoid situations like this one, where testing gets somehow... skipped.
Source: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/02/umdnj_didnt_test_medical_x-ray.html
Mr. Pistole:
According to federal sources cited around the web, the amount of radiation is less than 1/1000 times the dosage from 3 minutes of air travel.
If these systems are as safe as you say, being scanned 100,000 times is about the amount of radiation one would get from a 4 hour flight.
It would go a long way towards convincing everyone if, as a publicity stunt, you allowed yourself to be scanned 100,000 times over a four hour period.
The equivalent dosage would be a little less than from a four hour flight, which is a risk that you regularly take as part of your official duties.
If you do this and emerge unharmed, I'm willing to concede the point. Until then, I claim that there is no evidence to warrant any claims as to the safety of airport scanners.
Rajstennaj Barrabas
Nashua, NH
And, of course, the errors only ever overestimate the actual dose. There's no chance whatsoever of a machine being checked off as 'within normal limits' when it's producing plane-loads of glow in the dark passengers.
Just because that female TSA agent thinks you're fugly doesn't mean she didn't grope MY balls!
If I get sick and need a scan, my government pleads poverty and leaves me on my own. If I try to fly somewhere, suddenly they're so overstuffed with money that they demand that I take a scan.
Best of both worlds, have certified radiologists operate the airport scanners and pat-downs. They can not only get you where you're going but give you a free scan and manual breast or testicular cancer screening.
One thing people rarely consider is the amount of cosmic rays you get with the high altitude during a flight. A visiting physics professor coming to our university wore a geiger counter watch during the flight. After he explained to nearby passengers why it was sounding alarms, he was detained when they landed. :( The talk he was coming for was cancelled because he was held for several hours at an airport for detecting cosmic rays in this age of paranoia.
Anyway, here's an article about the dosage you get during flight compared to the scanners:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politifact-radiation-of-airport-scans-less-than-the-dose-in-flight/1135857
No, the possibilities are not endless. They had a training film, produced by a contractor. (I don't remember which one, and I can't find a link, but it was one of the usual suspects.) That is the way the Government generally does training. I don't know how explicit the film was, but the discussion was very explicit (I remember the phrase "lift and separate," among others).
I was also told that there was general unhappiness about this new procedure, under the assumption that agents would catch even more hell from the public.
Homeland Security is a massive operation that is out of control and puts a vast amount of money into a vast number of pockets - which means more influence than any government body apart from the entire combined defence forces. Any attempt to assert decent control would result in accusations all the way up to treason and result at minimum in a hell of a lot of people losing jobs that they never should have been doing in the first place. That means whoever attempts to tackle it gets to lose their party enough votes that they can forget about getting another President in for a decade or more.
Now if only there had been a Central Intelligence Agency with a brief of coordinating all intelligence there would never have been a need for Homeland Security in the first place. There was? OK, if only there was an agency like that that was run by somebody with a clue that could actually take the job seriously and not another horse judge buddy.
This has been known for decades. The more time at altitude the LESS you should be exposed to other forms of radiation. That's why they ask you questions about flying before any medical procedure involving radiation.
I'll bet the pilots are incredibly pissed about all these scans because for one thing it can reduce their legal flight time.
To make things worse these things are not just your normal transmission x-ray where you just want to see what photons make it to the sensor and the dark spots tell you where the dense stuff is. What these scanners are doing is providing far more radiation with the aim of getting atoms to absorb and re-emit photons - effectively making you radioactive while the scanner is on. The idea behind that is the wavelengths of the re-emitted photons can be used to determine what elements are present, find metal and perhaps find explosives. Because that really adds up to a shitload of radiation if it's going to scan all the way through you the dose is cut back and you just end up with the skin being exposed to quite a lot and no ability to sense internally hidden explosives.
Apart from having a chance of finding some specific kinds of explosives (which are just as easily detected by gas sensors or dogs) it's not going to find any more metal than a conventional and much lower radiation x-ray.
It's security homeopathy - take something that might work at very dangerous levels of radiation and water it down in an attempt to improve the safety but give up on any chance of it being effective. The compromise is still slightly dangerous but does nothing to get a useful result. That makes them a useless and dangerous waste of time and money that is coming out of your pocket.
However, the thing that really should have alarm bells ringing very loudly is that there is no disinterested third party making sure that people are telling the truth. It's a corrupt third world type situation where one group can completely ignore the radiation safety rules that every other industry has to comply with. I'm not going to trust these people and wait another ten years to hear about it being another shoe fluoroscopy sort of scandal - I think they should be under adult supervision now.
While "groped" would certainly be an exaggeration, I have absolutely had my balls touched by a TSA officer after refusing the scanner here in San Francisco. This has happened more than once.
Back in Nov I wrote my rep about the TSA's scanners. Here is a copy of his letter to the TSA. http://markey.house.gov/docs/homeland_security/markey_letter_to_fda_11.23.10.pdf
I make radiology stations for a living. The 3 companies that make the "backscatter" x-ray machines aren't people like "GE' or "Siemens", they're defense contractors. There's many radiologiests who won't fly commercial because of these things. All it takes is ONE screw up in configuration and maintenance and you get Therac-25... except these things are everywhere now...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
The problem is that most TSA agents feel bad about groping another man's junk. The only ones that don't are either gay or psychopaths - TSA agents that do willfully these type of patdowns are the ones we should be scared off, they might be the Boston Strangler on their time off. And it's not like the agents can/will be fired for not willing to do their job, they just have to say: it's against my religion/sexuality (or whatever protected right) or "I would like to have a union representative present".
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