The Ineffectiveness of TSA Body Scanners

TheNextCorner points out a video that lays bare a glaring flaw in the TSA body scanners used in airports to detect weapons and explosives. In such scans, citizens are depicted in light colors, while metallic objects show as very dark. The problem comes when you consider that the images are taken with a dark background. From the transcript: "Yes that’s right, if you have a metallic object on your side, it will be the same color as the background and therefore completely invisible to both visual and automated inspection. It can’t possibly be that easy to beat the TSA’s billion dollar fleet of nude body scanners, right? The TSA can’t be that stupid, can they? Unfortunately, they can, and they are. To put it to the test, I bought a sewing kit from the dollar store, broke out my 8th grade home ec skills, and sewed a pocket directly on the side of a shirt. Then I took a random metallic object, in this case a heavy metal carrying case that would easily alarm any of the “old” metal detectors, and walked through a backscatter x-ray at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. On video, of course. While I’m not about to win any videography awards for my hidden camera footage, you can watch as I walk through the security line with the metal object in my new side pocket."

Comments

Re:Day in court for pointing out the obvious

[Riceballsan]

Indeed all of the actual holes that were exploited on 9/11 were pretty much patched very early. The main holes being 1. Policies saying let hijackers do whatever they want, wait till they land to have them arrested. 2. the cockpit doors being weak. Even if the underware and shoebomber both succeeded (both of which succesfully being thwarted without the super overintrusive new TSA rules), air travel as a whole still has less total risks than driving to the airport. In the end soceity has to realize that to some extent we have to ballance control of horrible deaths. I would imagine there are far more ways that people die that could be prevented if we applied anywhere near the money we put into TSA post 9/11 than we saved in reality. There are no shortage of underfunded disaster control, rescue, fire departments, starving homeless etc... We also could improve the quality of life by putting things into schools, or encorage more science by funding NASA etc... Decisions inspired by sudden knee jerk fear are rarely good ones and often we forget the scale of what we are fighting against is actually very small.

Re:SSDD

[dgatwood]

At the time of the 9/11/2001 attacks, it was legal to bring a box cutter aboard an airplane.

Untrue. Pocket knives were legal. Box cutters and straight razors have never been allowed as best I can determine. (Source: planesafe.org)

Besides, there's reason to suspect that they were never taken through security in the first place, making the entire question moot.

By the way, it might be happening again.