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TSA 'Warning' Media About Reporting On Body Scanner Failures?
OverTheGeicoE writes "When anti-TSA activist Jonathan Corbett exposed a severe weakness in TSA's body scanners, one would expect the story to attract a lot of media attention. Apparently TSA is attempting to stop reporters from covering the story. According to Corbett, at least one reporter has been 'strongly cautioned' by TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz not to cover the story. If TSA is worried that this is new information they need to suppress to keep it away from terrorists, that horse may have left the barn years ago. Corbett's demonstration may just be confirmation of a 2010 paper in the Journal of Transportation Security that concluded that 'an object such as a wire or a boxcutter blade, taped to the side of the body, or even a small gun in the same location, will be invisible' to X-ray scanners."
That's what metal detectors do. I fly a lot. these go thusly:
wait, get in, put your feet on the prints (rotated 90 degrees from normal walking direction), hold up your arms
wait for the scanner to swipe through it's arc.
get out
wait on another set of footprints
total time 20-45 seconds per scan.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
They can send you to jail for not cooperating (or even citing the constitution at them), prevent you from traveling freely and deny you the right to exit the country. They can put you on watch lists that make the "more traditional" TLA's pay attention to you. And their influence is spreading.
So, yes, they are.
Check your premises.
FoxNews is covering the story:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/03/08/blogger-shows-world-how-to-sneak-anything-past-tsas-nude-body-scanners/
I'm impressed.
Someone who has actually used one of these could probably confirm or deny this...
As someone who has actually used one of these (many times), my answer is a solid "deny". You don't just walk through these scanners the way you do with the metal detectors. You walk in, turn to the side, spread your legs, put your hands in the air, and hold that position for about five seconds. They slow down the lines immensely. If you then had to turn another 90 degrees and hold for another five seconds, it would make things even worse.
Considering that the scanners don't even detect the sort of threat they were rolled out in response to (the underwear bomber), they should just be scrapped entirely, and the government should do everything in its power to find a loophole in the contract to get some of our money back.
The flaw was exposed in February 2011 by an undercover TSA agent. He tested a known, unpatched, exploit.
Here's more links to stories.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Sigh. Have you ever held a glock? What material do you suppose the slide (you know, that thingy on the top that goes back and forth each time it goes bang) is made of? That's right... Steel. Which is a metal. How about the barrel? Oh yeah, that's steel too. Recoil spring? I'll give you a hint... steel. Should I go on?
But you're half right... the frame is made of... polymer. A fancy name for plastic. So if you separated the slide from the frame, and took all the little movable metal parts out of the frame, then the frame probably wouldn't set off the metal detector (the little metal inserts molded into the frame are probably too small to set off the walk-thru metal detector).
Summary: Glocks (and all other mainstream guns) have major parts made of metal. More metal than a belt buckle. If a beltbuckle sets of the metal detector, so will a gun. Even a glock.
http://xkcd.com/386/
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