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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."
the enemy by pointing out stupidity!
-- George Carlin
Go back to the old scanners. Try again in a few years with better tech if you actually create some. Actually test the tech out next time, preferably with open field testing. Geeks can break most anything and it's best to see how they can BEFORE you implement the "important terrorist stopping scanner".
The only surprising thing here is that it took so long for such an easy work-around to come to light. It's not that there are very few people working with those scanners on a daily basis, and I bet plenty of TSA front-line personnel will discuss those scanners and how they work with their friends.
Images purporting to show what TSA scanners actually get have been demonstrated to be fakes:
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=154635.0
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
The workaround for this is to have people turn at 45 intervals in the scanner so that you can catch them at every angle. Of course this will increase the time it takes to scan each individual which means you will need to buy more backscatter x-ray machines and hire more TSA employees to keep people moving through at the same rate.
Since obviously a metal detector will detect that sort of thing, the tsa will now buy new millimeter wave/backscatter x-ray scanners with a traditional metal detector integrated into the system. The only reason they're going to give up their toys is because they can get better ones.
Fuck Beta
They invade citizens' privacy, and because of that, I think they should be gone.
"For the children," "to stop the terrorists," "ban technology X because of the actions of a few," they're all the same thing. All that's needed is increased cockpit security and citizen awareness. No privacy violations are necessary or even wanted.
How many guns were smuggled onto planes as part of 9/11 again? You could easily conceal a weapon in a tin that size.
His point is that a metal detector would've actually detected that tin, and allowed them to inspect the contents to see if contained something that might be used as a weapon, with much less impact on his privacy.
This should have been titled "The Effectiveness of Political Donations and Revolving Door Practices".
It should simply read, "The Ineffectiveness of the TSA"
Silence is a state of mime.
I heard you can hide a gun in a Fleshlight and it'll get through.
Yeah. Duh. Who wants to actually inspect the inside of one of those? Do you want the job?
I was part of a team bringing forward a competing technology to those scanners (standoff biometrics, no weird imaging, ~5 different measurements, easy to beat one, hard to beat them all). We thought we had won the tests. At least, we found all the people sneaking stuff in during our test and we knew they couldn't have detected certain things - like explosives, which they still can't see.
Due to the nature of my sensor work, much of my clothing is covered in explosives residue. A good scanner should really pick me out every time, but I only ever get "caught" when I'm selected for random screening.
We were pretty surprised when we found out they were selected. I guess we should have worked harder on our lobbying and less on our engineering.
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.
The inquisition (yes, that one) was an expense account scam. Since the accused was required to pay for their own inquisition, the system simply padded the expenses to the limit of the available money.
The TSA is the same thing. People wail and moan about how stupid/intrusive/incompetent/useless they are, and miss the larger picture.
The TSA sends money to corporations, and the corporations grease the political wheels.
There's no rocket science, no ulterior motive, nothing else to consider. Like the inquisition, the TSA doesn't need to justify expenditures with usefulness or effectiveness. The more they spend, the more they get to spend. Cause and effect.
Why do you think they spend billions on technology, but pay only slightly above the minimum wage and spend so little on training?
People keep grousing about the TSA as if that will make a difference. It won't. They have been generally incompetent from the start, and there's nothing that people can do to unseat them from their position.
Voting hasn't helped. Contacting representatives hasn't helped. Complaining to the TSA or their employees hasn't helped. Legal action hasn't helped.
There's one obvious remaining course of action we can take to rein in all the government waste and corruption. Can anyone think of things to try before we take that last drastic step? I'm out of ideas...
I'm not sure flying solo counts.
Blank until
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want it back after it's spent 8 hours soaking up your brother in law's flap-sweat.
Nobody is surprised when a homeless man dies of pneumonia, or when thousands of teenagers commit suicide because of a toxic culture. These things aren't "scary", even though objectively they are much more horrible than the statistically insignificant deaths from terrorist attacks [in the US]. It's all about what is and isn't part of "the plan", to quote The Joker from the greatest part of that movie.
weinersmith
It seems obvious to me that the TSA knew the machines didn't work effectively, but that this didn't matter to them. Airport security isn't about making the skies safer, it's about scaring (some would even say terrorising) the public in order to give the government more power and control. In his video he even says that there was no threat with the old metal detectors...
There are so many ways one could commit an act of terrorism at an airport without getting on a plane if one were so inclined (I'm not, by the way!) and every time I fly I see more. The full body scanners do nothing to increase a person's safety.
Let's face it - the terrorists have won. The public are terrified. Sadly it's their own governments which have done the terrorising.
I've snuck everything from pepper spray (accidentally), to a live deadly scorpion (on purpose) onto a plane, even with all this new security. All the scanners just make it inconvenient to conceal stuff, not impossible, or even that difficult really. Now what is effective are the interviews by personnel trained to detect unusual behavior, I'd feel much safer if we had more of those and fewer see you naked machines.
I'm glad the EU has declared backscatter X-ray scanners to be illegal to use in European airports. I work in a radiation industry and know a considerable amount about X-ray physics and medical imaging, and these scanners should never have been taken into use for public screening.
I love going through the US airports and requesting a manual search when they try to put me through the backscatter machines. They always make a big drama over it, but I explain that I work in a radiation industry and I will not subject myself to additional radiation given a choice. Backscatter machines fall into this category, and so far I have not been through a single one. If they try to force me to go through one or not pass the security checkpoint, I will take it all the way to the top if needed. I will not tolerate being scanned by a backscatter machine, nor should anyone else. It's not been proven safe for human use or effective at increasing security.
And let's not even get started about the fact that the TSA have been caught multiple times storing images from the backscatter and millimeter wave machines, when they say publicly that the images are not saved. There is a reason why they earned the nickname, pr0n scanner. There is no valid reason to save the images after you pass screening, unless they are simply playing the CYA game. This should not be allowed.
Note, the backscatter machines are far different than the millimeter wave scanners used in some airports. Millimeter wave is known to be safe. Backscatter is NOT and should never be used on the public.
Mod parent up! Terrorism is all about... Creating terror! And disrupting societies by leading them to change significantly due to that terror. If societies refuse to change, terrorism will fail and the funding will stop coming. Look at IRA and ETA, they were not defeated by expensive equipment or civil rights limitations, they were defeated by societies refusal to become terrified.
just look at /. discussions about self-driving cars, if you don't believe me
Funny you should bring that up, it's actually been bugging me for a while. Most of the comments on those posts seem to either claim that it's an impossible engineering problem to solve, or that it creates legal/social problems that are impossible to solve (e.g. "just wait until one of these crashes, the resulting lawsuit will bring down all technology-related companies in the world and thrust us back to the bronze age and give everyone AIDS." I'm exaggerating only slightly...). What's up with that? I thought people on /. were supposed to like technology and all that... How long has it been cool for "geeks" to be Luddites?
weinersmith
If I needed a firearm on an airplane, I would probably use the 33 gram CO2 cartridges from the life vest conveniently located under my seat. Put it in a fitting pipe, and all you need is a crude firing device to pierce the seal - blunt force will do.
The TSA lines are there for your illusion of safety. Your real safety lies in the fact that it is rather unusual for people to conspire to kill a plane full of people, themselves included.
Well, I guess it's not completely irrational. Automated systems don't deal with highly unlikely exceptions as well as humans sometimes do. Though they also tend to make much fewer mistakes under normal circumstances (or under types of exceptions that were taken into account by the engineers) than humans do... If money wasn't an issue, I'd say that the autopilot + usually passive human operator solution is the best of both worlds. Which is exactly what Google and others have in mind while designing autonomous cars -- it would be silly of them to build/market the technology as completely driverless. And I imagine that the transition will really be very gradual. I don't think the first "self-driving" consumer cars will drive themselves completely from point A to point B. More likely we will first see for example highway-only self-driving cars, which sounds like both a much easier engineering problem as well as having higher potential for saving lives (no falling asleep and drifting, no lane changing into a car in the blind spot, etc). There would have to be a system for smoothly transferring control upon entering an leaving the highway, but again that seems like an easier problem that urban driving with all of its messiness and variety of environment types... As usual, I think the anxiety of people predicting the implications of the technology is highly exaggerated compared to the actual disruption it will cause.
weinersmith
Maybe the government could stop aiding the enemy by being stupid.
It's more understandable if you read it like it's a broken up radio transmission from Metro 2033. With a Russian accent of course.
the "enemy" is much smarter than 10000 bureaucrats [GARBLED] being sold by a used car salesman ... [UNINTELLIGIBLE] ... after all this decades enemy has sustained life for thousands of years in an environment most of our citizens would die in, in a matter of hours...[CRACKLE] they do have some tricks "up their sleeve"
Great, now we'll get a bigger dose of "safe" radiation as they take side pictures as well.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I read somewhere that he shared me own diagnosis of Schizoaffective Disorder. That's a bad diagnosis if You Are The NRA.
I have an Idaho state gun safety card and my father was a Naval officer so I know how to handle a gun with complete safety. but I don't go near the things not because I would fail the background check but because I know very well that the day would be bound to come when I start shooting at my own hallucinations.
I have a close friend who is licensed for concealed carry because her clients are suchnwarm fuzzy people. She takes all the same medicines I do yet is completely unaware that she is severely in the grip of paranoid schizophrenia.
I hallucinate on a regular basis but for reason I have been struggling to figure out for decades I always can readily distinguish between what I really see and what my mind makes me experience as seeing. note that that does not make the hallucinations go away, it just enables me to sanitize my input.
But rather frightening to me is that a whole bunch of times my friend gas pointed out her hallucinations to me then either gone chasing after them or fled from them.
The federal gun background check is completely cool with batshit crazy people purchasing all manner of powerful firearms. bur perfectly sane people check into psychiatric inpatient units for reasons that are completely resolved upon their discharge. At that point they are not permitted to possess firearms for the next five years. Not only may they not purchase any they must surrender any guns already in their possession.
I've been struggling desperately to clue my friend into the fact that she is paranoid and that she hallucinates. Even more frustrating than the drug addict's denial is that she readily agrees and in fact can discuss her madness quite insightfully, yet she remains unaware if what her medicines are prescribed for. Once we stop actively discussing her paranoia she becomes completely enmeshed in it again.
1) If self driving cars are proven to improve safety, all else being equal it's irresponsible to resist using them purely for the sake of personal enjoyment.
The thing is, all else will not be equal. Whatever makes the car a "self-driving car" will increase the cost of production. THis is actually an overall problem we have in this country (and probably in all developed nations). There is to much, "but this makes it safer" without enough analysis of the costs involved. For example, I do not think we have done enough analysis as to whether or not airbags are worth the total cost. While people have considered the cost of initially installing airbags as part of manufacture, I do not believe that people have really considered the cost of airbags over the lifetime of a car. The fact of the matter is that airbags reduce the overall useful lifetime of a car. For most cars the factor that renders them no longer worth maintaining is when the airbags need to be replaced (whether through age or deployment). This may not happen the first time the airbags need to be replaced, if they deploy in an accident in a new enough car, but even there they drive up the cost of repair, and thus drive up the cost of everyone's insurance.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Korea? The only reason action was taken in Korea was that the Soviets boycotted the session in question, avoiding a Security Council veto. The UNC structure and DMZ are still there, 60 years on. All of the allied nations have fled except the US. There's a rousing success story.
South Korea has about 49 million people living in it. Depending on how you count it, they have the 12th or 15th highest GDP in the world . I think 49 million people would argue that it is a rousing success story. Moron. However, I do agree with your general point that the UN is mostly a legacy of failure, but your cited example of South Korea is a big time fail.
In Amsterdam, where they use the L3 scanner, and have the image shown to the security guy right on the back side of the scanner (where I could see it as well), the metal I had on me (coins I forgot in my pocket), and the papers I had in my shirt pocket showed up as bright yellow, over a white image of the person being scanned, and a black background.
I opt out everywhere I'm selected for the scanner in the US. This was not possible in Amsterdam. In fact, they weren't even familiar with the concept of opting out. The security woman there said to me, when I asked to opt out, "whataya got a big d*** or something?" (Yes, she seriously said that).
Last time I opted out in San Francisco (2 weeks ago), I whistled "My Country 'Tis of Thee" during the pat down. No reaction from the patter-downer. My brother did the same in Tennessee and heard one of the TSA guys say to another, "this is turning into a religion...."
In Salt Lake City, they had one line for the scanner (the others went to metal detectors, and a second body scanner was not in use at all), and I heard the guy say "if you don't want to go through the scanner, go into one of the other lines." I don't think that's how it's supposed to work. Maybe someone can confirm or correct me.