TSA

[bluelion]

You know, back in 2003 when the TSA was looking at ways to rapidly scan folks through the thing that showed the most promise was a sniffer. You know a machine that would collect the volatile compounds coming off your body (since your body radiates heat quite nicely) and test them against a known list of explosives. The hand scanner sucks up a bit of air about your body, plugs it into a reader/spectrometer and viola. No radiation, no frisking, no bullshit.

I wonder where those devices went.

-BL.

[Eagle]

You know, back in 2003 when the TSA was looking at ways to rapidly scan folks through the thing that showed the most promise was a sniffer. You know a machine that would collect the volatile compounds coming off your body (since your body radiates heat quite nicely) and test them against a known list of explosives. The hand scanner sucks up a bit of air about your body, plugs it into a reader/spectrometer and viola. No radiation, no frisking, no bullshit.

I wonder where those devices went.

-BL.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washi ... promotion/

Since the attempted bombing of a US airliner on Christmas Day, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has given dozens of media interviews touting the need for the federal government to buy more full-body scanners for airports.

What he has made little mention of is that the Chertoff Group, his security consulting agency, includes a client that manufactures the machines. Chertoff disclosed the relationship on a CNN program Wednesday, in response to a question.

[Jim Charalampidis]

skip to about the 1:05 mark.



All I got to say is how the $%#% did that get past them?

[bluelion]

http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/new ... argo-bombs

[Eagle]

http://myhelicaltryst.blogspot.com/2010 ... anner.html

Which brings me to how the scanner works. Essentially, it appears that an X-ray beam is rastered across the body, which highlights the importance of one of the specific concerns raised by the UCSF scientists... what happens if the machine fails, or gets stuck, during a raster. How much radiation would a person's eye, hand, testicle, stomach, etc be exposed to during such a failure. What is the failure rate of these machines? What is the failure rate in an operational environment? Who services the machine? What is the decay rate of the filter? What is the decay rate of the shielding material? What is the variability in the power of the X-ray source during the manufacturing process? This last question may seem trivial; however, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory noted significant differences in their test models, which were supposed to be precisely up to spec. Its also interesting to note that the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory criticized other reports from NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and a group called Medical and Health Physics Consulting for testing the machine while one of the two X-ray sources was disabled (citations at the bottom of the page).

These questions have not been answered to any satisfaction and the UCSF scientists, all esteemed in their fields and members of the National Academy of Sciences have been dismissed based on a couple of reports seemingly hastily put together by mid-level government lab technicians. The documents that I have reviewed thus far either have NO AUTHOR CREDITS or are NOT authored by anyone with either a Ph.D. or a M.D., raising serious concerns of the extent of the expertise of the individuals and organizations evaluating these machines. Yet, the FDA and TSA continue to dismiss some of the most talented scientists in the country...

Furthermore, when making this comparison, the TSA and FDA are calculating that the dose is absorbed throughout the body. According the simulations performed by NIST, the relative absorption of the radiation is ~20-35-fold higher in the skin, breast, testes and thymus than the brain, or 7-12-fold higher than bone marrow. So a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. Of particular concern is radiation exposure to the testes, which could result in infertility or birth defects, and breasts for women who might carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant's testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!

[splicer]

Clearly no one is happy about this, you can either be; subjected to radiation, or an intense pat down with the possibility of a strip search that might involve a cavity search? What happened to land of the free? Despite everyone being outraged about this, will anything get done about it? Like seriously, can anything be done about this?

If someone wants to FUCK SHIT UP, like they say terrorists do, then they don't have to hijack a plane and crash it into something, there's an infinite amount of other ways to FUCK SHIT UP...so this whole thing looks like a massive breach of peoples rights to health and privacy, and not a step to making anything safer. Nothing has happened since 9/11, so as a result, they put in more measures to keep us 'safe'.

[Bill Farmer]

Someone told me we have to vote for the people who will vote the way you would want them to. That could work until someone pays them enough to vote the other way. I don't think anything can really be done other than choosing to travel by other means. I am surprised they don't start tugging on peoples cheeks now since most of the security measures are a reaction to security failures.

[Eagle]

This is a great idea:

http://lifehacker.com/5448014/pack-a-gu ... ft-or-loss

If you don't like your bags being out of your sight and it makes you uncomfortable to think that airline workers are rifling through your stuff, you can take advantage of the TSA's own security rules by packing a gun.

A "weapons" is defined as a rifle, shotgun, pistol, airgun, and STARTER PISTOL. Yes, starter pistols - those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets - are considered weapons...and do NOT have to be registered in any state in the United States.

I have a starter pistol for all my cases. All I have to do upon check-in is tell the airline ticket agent that I have a weapon to declare...I'm given a little card to sign, the card is put in the case, the case is given to a TSA official who takes my key and locks the case, and gives my key back to me.

That's the procedure. The case is extra-tracked...TSA does not want to lose a weapons case. This reduces the chance of the case being lost to virtually zero.
It's a great way to travel with camera gear...I've been doing this since Dec 2001 and have had no problems whatsoever.

One of the commenters suggested just getting a cheap plastic toy cap gun since there's no regulation that defines a "starter pistol." Say it's a "starter pistol" and they have to treat it as one.

[splicer]

Or you could just pack a real gun.

[Eagle]

You know, last night as I was drifting off to sleep, it occurred to me I hadn't heard much about these clowns recently, so look what cropped up today. They can fucking grope you wherever the fuck they want in the airport.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/quee ... ADfZNBjI4J

“If I had been physically attacked, this would have been a very, very similar experience,” said Nancy Campbell, 33, an urban planner who said she was traumatized by a touchy-feely female TSA agent before her flight to Washington Tuesday.

Campbell had already cleared security and was approaching the gate when the young agent stopped her, told her to drop her stuff and demanded she stand spread-eagled.

As passers-by gawked, the TSA agent patted Campbell down, touching her breasts, inner thighs and crotch, the freaked-out flier told The Post.

When she protested, the agent said, “You can either continue on flailing about, or you can let me do my job. If you don’t, you can’t fly.”

The petite Brooklynite was in tears when she boarded her plane after the three-minute ordeal.

Y'all saw the one about where they were searching and patting down people getting off a train at their destination too, right?

[Eagle]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41959553/ns ... om/toolbar

A witch got fired from the TSA for casting a curse on her supervisor's car heater.

She accused Smith of following her on the highway one snowy evening after work and casting a spell on the heater of her car, causing it not to work. Well, actually, Bagnoli said she hadn't seen Smith's car, but she had seen Smith. “I thought to myself,” Smith recalls, “what, did she see me flying on my broom?”

[monkeybutter]

a TSA job is on par with working at Wendys, Starbucks, Walmart or any other minimum-wage, know-nothing, go-nowhere job. it's not surprising that you get retards and/or lunatics working there.

[Zombie Dave McCaig]

Almost. What the TSA's minimum wage fails to reward, their unbridled power makes up for. Working for the TSA is almost as good as being a mall cop. (I'm pretty sure you can't get away with beating up vagrants as a TSA agent.)

It's not often you get a job that's 100% power, 0% responsibility on minimum wage - for good reason.

[Eagle]

TSA has reviewed the incident and the security officer in the video followed the current standard operating procedures.

Why is this still being allowed?

[Sixter]

On April 6th Wil Wheaton wrote about his recent TSA experience.
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbacku ... angry.html

When I left the security screening yesterday, I didn't feel safe. I felt violated, humiliated, assaulted, and angry. I felt like I never wanted to fly again. I was so furious and upset, my hands shook for quite some time after the ordeal was over. I felt sick to my stomach for hours.