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In German Trials, Airport Body Scanners Easily Confused
OverTheGeicoE writes "The German government just finished a 10-month test of millimeter-wave body scanners made by L3 Communications. It appears they are not happy with the results. The devices raise false alarms 7 times out of 10, and are confused by layered clothing, boots, zippers, pleats, and even incorrect posture. Australia recently started a trial, and the second person in at the Sydney airport set off the alarm repeatedly due to sweaty armpits."
sweaty armpits
Now you will never be able to deport Ballmer. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The only thing to do when faced with one of these is to strip naked on the spot. Fuck 'em.
Thy deodorant shall not abandon thee.
I was going to point out the repeated paragraph as an example of unintended "backscatter".
I can't seem to find exact details about what the TSA uses. Either my google-fu is failing or it's considered too strategically important information. :/
Anyway, I'd like to see a comparison and see why the Germans can't seem to make scanners viable but the US can. 'Cause something smells here (not that the whole TSA affair neeeds any more stink already.)
As far as I understand, the primary (and probably only) purpose of those scanners is to make their manufacturers a buttload of money. I think they're doing that perfectly fine, so it's definitely a success!
I was stopped because they thought I was trying to smuggle a baby elephant in my pants.
Brings a whole new meaning to the term "sweating bullets", I guess.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"The devices raise false alarms 7 times out of 10, and are confused by layered clothing, boots, zippers, pleats, and even incorrect posture. Australia recently started a trial, and the second person in at the Sydney airport set off the alarm repeatedly due to sweaty armpits."
Layered clothing (body fat?), incorrect posture and sweaty armpits? Bad news for CmdrTaco. No wonder he takes the bus.
if so, i would find it interesting to see how the united states addressed the false positive issue.
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If he had nothing to hide, why was he so nervous? The system works!
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
As if these scanners needed to be more fun to play with.
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
I don't have a position on whether these scanners are better or worse than the alternatives, but a 70% false positive rate is not necessarily a bad thing. What people forget is that false positive/false negative rates are dependent on the underlying rate of occurrence of the phenomenon you're looking for. Say you create a test for a disease that has a false positive rate of 0.1% for people who don't have the disease (which is excellent!). If the disease is extremely rare, say 0.1% occurrence rate in the population tested, about half the people who test positive will in fact not have disease. Whereas if 10% of the population has the disease, only about 1% of the positive tests will be false positive. Not because the test is any different, but because the underlying rate is so much higher. So without knowing what the underlying rate of people bringing inappropriate items through security is, the 70% number is hard to interpret.
.sig withheld by request
He should have poured his sweat into a transparent plastic bag just like everyone else.
The next time I have to fly I am just going to wear a thong, flip flops, and a long jacket. When I refuse to be scanned and they start to search me, the jacket is hitting the ground and I am going to stand there in my 100% legally allowed glory. Since I will have my genitals fully, yet thinly covered, there is nothing they can actually do to me legally.
Really, if you have nothing to hide, why are you wearing all those clothes?
I've only taken one trip since the new bodyscanners, but the first time through, I got hit with a false positive. The source of the problem: I was wearing cargo pants, with the pockets on the sides, and the bodyscanner couldn't see past the pocket. So I was taken aside, and given a manual pat-down in addition to the bodyscanner.
Glad I showed up early to the airport that day. These things just contribute to the delay of taking a flight.
n/t
Obviously most contemporary terrorists have a hard-on for Allah and his little goblins, but they also seem addicted to doing bad shit to plans and airports. Each time a TSA agent cups your balls, they're bringing airports a step closer to being totally safe. What do we do when terrorists realize that there are targets that aren't airplanes? We need the TSA to apply their strategy to everything. I for one will have a far safer dining experience at fast food joints if I've have my cock checked. Picture the smiles on the faces of parents as they play their part in the safety of McDonalds by waiting calmly while some guy in a side-office appraises naked images of their pre-pubescent daughter. Everything I say should be taken literally and blown out of proportion. A guy jokingly mentioning having a bomb would be seen by TSA enforcers as being little different to some militia nut issuing demands through a bullhorn while keeping a shaky thumb over the detonator button. Of course a simpler option for security could be to dismantle the orwellian bullshit assembled by Bush, and allowed to continue under Obama, and try to return to some level of civility and acceptance that the increased security has diminishing returns but an incredible cost, both financial and in terms of civil liberties.
I didn't know there was such a huge market for machines that don't work. Someone in purchasing should be fired.
WTF? That's fsckin' worse than random. Invert the output and the false alarm rate drops to 3 out of 10.
Germany gets the nude-scanning cancer machines?
And I thought they were done with the Nazi era... Guess not.
"The function of any security checkpoint is to show who's boss." - Richard Ben Cramer
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He wouldn't be sweaty if he wasn't hiding something!
Only guilty people sweat!
sweaty armpits in the close confines of an airplane *is* terrorism. :)
he should not be allowed to board
The THz (terahertz) scanners are dangerous because THz radiation causes DNA to de-hybridize spontaneously in the chromosomes.
The X-ray back-scatter scanners are dangerous because they are ionizing and increasing your risks for skin cancer as your skin is given a dangerously concentrated dose.
I used to do radiation effects for DOD. The folks making the claims about risks got the math and radiation physics very, very wrong.