Study: TSA Whole Body Scanners Ineffective at Detecting Explosives

[avaistheone1]

Evidence mounts that TSA’s whole-body scanners are not designed to detect powdered explosives or other low-density materials that pose a threat to airline safety. Leon Kaufman and Joseph W. Carlson’s new study finds that “Even if exposure were to be increased significantly, normal anatomy would make a dangerous amount of plastic explosives with tapered edges difficult, if not impossible to detect.

http://epic.org/2010/12/study-tsa-whole-body-scanners.html

http://springerlink.com/content/g6620thk08679160/




:kick:

[Loge23]

1. Bullet caps in Miami last week.

They got through OK.
Look, there's no defense of this BS. If we're lucky as a nation, someday this whole TSA nonsense will be looked at as we now (well, some of us) view McCarthy, the Klan, and the John Birch Society - painful lessons in freedom. It's a shame that this process takes so long.

[AnneD]

2. Well colour me srprised......

not!

Someone found a way NOT ONLY to pick our pockets, but to groom us into being more obedient slave.

Enough of this ridiculous security theater and start using those scanner to scan cargo going into the hold area of the plane. I fear the TSA far more than I ever would terrorists.

[Gin]

3. plus...the searches and scan were randomly selected......if one in ten

get screened or searched...what about the other 9? It is a money making scam for the machines...and the pat downs are smoke and mirrors.

[PDJane]

4. The pat downs are less smoke and mirrors

than they are intimidation. And yes, they are meant to be intrusive and humiliating and intimidating.

They chose my son....a white, middle-class 38-year-old with glasses, blue eyes, curly hair and a goatee...for security scans and luggage search both ways. He travels on business, to and from the US, about 7 weeks in this quarter alone; something that he finds totally unappealing.

It's ridiculous, and it's all theatre; you can get items as varied as explosives and detonators and as seriously dangerous as twelve-inch razor blades in a tube (that was one of the guys from mythbusters) through the scanner. It's all money and myth.

[hlthe2b]

5. I would love to see cost benefit analysis...

of these damned scanners... versus other technology or even a nationwide intense program to train countless more bomb-sniffing dogs for the airports.