Maine Senator Wants Independent Study of TSA's Body Scanners 335
OverTheGeicoE writes "U.S. Senator Susan Collins, the top Republican on the homeland security committee, plans to introduce a bill that would require a new health study of the X-ray body scanners used to screen airline passengers nationwide. If the bill becomes law, TSA would be required to choose an 'independent laboratory' to measure the radiation emitted by a scanner currently in use at an airport checkpoint and use the data to produce a peer-reviewed study, to be submitted to Congress, based on its findings. The study would also evaluate the safety mechanisms on the machine and determine 'whether there are any biological signs of cellular damage caused by the scans.' Many Slashdotters are or have been involved in science. Is this a credible experimental protocol? Is it reasonable to expect an organization accused of jeopardizing the health and safety of hundreds of millions of air travelers to pick a truly unbiased lab? Would any lab chosen deliver a critical report and risk future funding? Should the public trust a study of radiology and human health designed by a US Senator whose highest degree is a bachelor's degree in government?"
Should of done that (Score:5, Insightful)
I missed the part... (Score:5, Insightful)
...where whathername insisted on "designing the study".
As opposed, of course, for calling for a study to be done - not the same at all.
Re:Should of done that (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't this something our fabulous leaders should of demanded before spending a crap load of money and deploying them all around the nation?
Isn't this something that's better late than never, considering that it's too late to say it should be done beforehand?
How independent? (Score:5, Insightful)
How independent if the TSA has to choose it?
immense foresight was used (Score:4, Insightful)
What does her degree have to do with it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't we judge the experiment on its merits (good or bad)? What does the educational background of the person proposing it have to do with anything? The scientific method doesn't break just because someone without a PHD proposes the experiment.
Re:Should of done that (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
TSA must have gotten their marching orders recently. They have been pretty strict about pushing as many people through those radiation machines as possible for that last couple of months. Prior, you could pony up to the metal detectors without much hassle. Now, you are told to stand in the long imaging line. And this is the case at several airports I travel through.
You know, you can still decline to go though the scanners. In recent months I have traveled through many busy airports. I watched as TSA agents push people (including myself) x-ray 'branding' line. No matter how busy (or how light) the travel loads have been, I have and always will opted out. Until they pass federal rules suggesting we no long have the right to opt out, I will be standing safely outside of the range of any body scanner for the foreseeable future.
In this country it's still legal not to do something if you feel uncomfortable. Get a pat down and move on with your travel day...
Re:Should of done that (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you of any idea how annoying "should of" is?
Re:immense foresight was used (Score:3, Insightful)
The immense foresight was they made money upon initial sale and now they'll make more money going back and making them more safe. If people continue to complain, they can rinse and repeat. The best part is if the minimize the changes, they can have minimal impact and minimal cost, so its highly profitable and more likely they'll need to circle back around for more safety measures at an even higher cost. Who wouldn't love this deal?
Education (Score:4, Insightful)
Are we missing the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep seeing these things that seem to be attempting to show that these naked scanners are unhealthy. But is that really a distraction from what we should be considering?
1. Doesn't human dignity require that we treat travellers as people and not the same way that we treat convicts?
2. Don't these security measures do more harm than good by forcing people to accept a microcosm of "police state" for no discernable benefit?
Politicians (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this something our fabulous leaders should of demanded before spending a crap load of money and deploying them all around the nation?
Isn't this something that's better late than never, considering that it's too late to say it should be done beforehand?
This. Politicians are not engineers. And even if they were, when they do something right, it makes more sense to praise them for it than it does to point out how foolish they may have been not to have done it earlier. Attacking them only makes sense if you are trying to defeat them in the next election--which is probably not the right thing to do when they do something right. =)
Use the GAO!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Letting the TSA pick an organization to do this is ridiculous, the GAO should be the one in charge of figuring out if this is harmful. You need a completely unbiased third party, not the guys who fouled up the "evaluation" in the first place.
Re:Too late... (Score:4, Insightful)
In this country it's still legal not to do something if you feel uncomfortable. Get a pat down and move on with your travel day...
What if the pat down makes you feel uncomfortable? This is like saying you don't have to get punched in the face, you could get kicked in the balls instead. Your choice...
Re:Too late... (Score:4, Insightful)
I too always opt out of the body scanner - I'd rather have the temporary psychological stress of another guy putting his gloved hands on my thighs than permanent damage to my physical body from a machine that some "security company" lobbied to have placed in every airport in the U.S. under the guise that it miraculously makes us safer.
I wouldn't be surprised if the stress of dealing with the TSA and other privacy violations in a post-9/11 world has killed more people than terrorism ever did.
Here's a thought (Score:2, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment [wikipedia.org]
Thanks, Newt. You want to go to the frigging moon but won't spend 21 million to make sure Congress isn't farting into the scientific wind.
Re:Too late... (Score:4, Insightful)
What about the people that operate the machines? Do they get to opt out too?
Nuclear physics grad student response (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh dear flying spaghetti monster, quit trying to be sensational. It takes away from the genuine problem.
(1) Experiment design. The senator won't "design" the study. I don't know how you got such a stupid idea. The senator is requesting (demanding, commissioning) the study. The bill is her effort to pin down what questions the study should answer. It's a darn sight better than just handing the scanner over to some folks and saying, "Take a look at this here doohickey and tell me what you think." She isn't going to come up with any actual science processes.
Think of it in programming terms - the senator is the boss, and she tells the programmer (scientist) what the program (science study) is supposed to output (what question the study is supposed to answer). She doesn't tell the programmer how to write the program, step-by-step. If, against all odds, she does stand there and try to tell you how to code each detail, you politely get her requirements again and shoo her off to do her actual job instead of yours (or you turn down the project). Nothing fancy to get so upset about, and a darn sight better than doing nothing and hoping for the best.
(2) Picking an unbiased lab. Of course the TSA will try to pick someone who will give them the results they want. The question is, how many labs (or scientists) do you think the TSA can influence? The TSA is not in the science business or the nuclear business or the detector business. They are in the business of training people with the IQs of dogs to bark when they see something gun-shaped and to sniff your crotch for dangerous materials.
In this I can at least claim some level of insider knowledge. I am a grad student at a nuclear physics lab. Nobody here has any special regard for the TSA - not the director, not the scientists, not the grad students. Now, we certainly aren't immune from political pressures, but in the end, no one is. However, most of the scientists here would rather be at odds with the TSA than have their professional reputation ruined by certifying a device as safe that can be demonstrated to be dangerous. Professional reputation is everything in science. If the TSA gets pissy at a scientist, then that scientist can go work in Germany, or France, or Great Britain, or India, or the various Arab countries with an interest in nuclear physics. If the scientific community gets angry at a scientist for endorsing something that kills folks, then there is nowhere in the world that the scientist can hide his damaged reputation.
(3) Lab funding. Labs are funded on fairly long cycles. Ours is funded on a five year cycle. So, any lab like ours would be fairly immune to a temporary temper tantrum by some government official. We're not completely immune, but our funding is mostly determined by the President's office, the DOE, and the NSF. Note how there is no mention of the TSA in there. The TSA doesn't fund a darned thing in science, and so we couldn't care less about offending the TSA. As I said, we aren't completely immune from political pressures - if a senator got really angry at us over such a thing, the study might be squelched and our funding might get reduced or cut. That's very uncommon, though. Usually, senators don't want their name next to a study that erroneously says something is safe if it actually kills people. It's bad for the senator's re-election efforts. It's especially bad if the word "nuclear" is involved anywhere - nothing scares the public (and thus, the politicians) like the word "nuclear."
(4) My professional opinion: You've completely got the wrong take on this. You probably didn't read the article at all. If anything, Collins is trying to use politics to squelch the scanners, not to cover up defects in the scanner's design. If there is any political pressure on the scientists involved in this study, it will be pressure to declare the devices unsafe and unsuitable for use. And, while I don't agree with playing politics with science, I do agree with squelching these scanners.
By the way, as a nuclear physi
Re:Should of done that (Score:5, Insightful)
You understood it, but it took longer to parse in your brain.
It's not "douchey" to want to converse using correct spelling and grammar. For one thing, it immediately tells you something about the person you are talking to. If they really can't be bothered to learn to write properly, what makes you think they have anything worth saying?
Everyone makes the odd grammar and spelling mistake, and more frequently the odd typo, but consistently poor spelling and grammar is just laziness. I correct my friends' spelling and grammar (politely), and I get the same in return when I make errors.
re: Why deploy now ... think about outcomes later? (Score:5, Insightful)
The obvious answer to the question is, as usual; "Follow the money!"
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-11-22-scanner-lobby_N.htm [usatoday.com]
http://www.infowars.com/chertoff-linked-to-body-scanner-manufacturer/ [infowars.com]
IMO, the *real* question we should be asking is why we believed this costly new technology, coupled with a whole new govt. agency to operate it, was going to accomplish anything substantial in the first place? The argument over the cost is tough to make without somebody insisting that either A) it created so many new jobs for American citizens that it added a lot of value, and/or B) if it saves even ONE human life, how can you put a price on that? So IMO, we can probably just ignore the "cost" angle, and simply ask if the TSA screening procedure we've implemented is a net positive, or a net negative for everyone?
Personally, I think you've got to be drinking some serious govt. kool-aid if you REALLY believe this nonsense of putting anyone on a secret "watch list" (based on the discretion of agents hired from the general public at hourly pay starting at around $11/hr.), and making everyone walk through body scanners before boarding commercial planes is going to save you from terrorist acts. As one of my friends pointed out, you can go to most airports in the U.S. and find that the only thing keeping you from wandering out to the hangars and runways is a chain-link fence around their perimeter. If someone REALLY wanted to sabotage a plane, they could throw on a mechanics' outfit or something, run out onto the tarmac, and do whatever they wanted to do with a parked jet, or even quickly insert something into some luggage on one of the transports, waiting to be loaded onto a flight. Trying to secure the plane from the terminal's boarding gate so heavily ignores all the other possibilities. Meanwhile, we've created a situation where EVERYONE is inconvenienced and put at risk of being falsely labeled a "potential terrorist" for transgressions as simple as wearing a t-shirt with a counter-culture political message printed on it, or making the wrong comment while standing in line.
Freedom = 0, Terrorists = 1 by my score-card
Re:It was done (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree with you on the lack of benefits of the scanners. As far as the safety. As someone who works in radiation safety, can you elaborate some more. Conventional wisdom on radiation safety is that the dangers are cumulative, but that's clearly not really the case. Maybe for long term risks like cancer, but clearly in the short term, higher intensity is more dangerous. For an extreme example, consider em radiation in the 560 to 490 nm wavelengths. Exposure is, as far as anyone has ever studied, virtually harmless. An entire lifetime's exposure adds 0% to cancer risk as far as I know. However, take a person's average exposure over the course of a month and give it to them in a tenth of a second. The cancer risk is still 0%, but that's only because the person has just been utterly vaporized. Maybe try instead taking a person's exposure to those frequencies in full sunlight over their whole body and concentrate it for 30 seconds on just one square centimeter of their body. No instant death this time, but that square centimeter will be completely and permanently destroyed. Also, cancer risk from that is now no longer 0% because of all of the byproducts from the burn.
So, yes you get more radiation from the flight than you do from the body scanner. People forget that visible light is radiation too, of course. So, technically, you get far more radiation from the lights in the plane than you do from either of them. Radiation safety obviously has to take these things into account, and it gets technical. Maybe many of us here won't understand the deeper issues involved in a full technical explanation of the relative safety of the body scanners versus the flight. We're a pretty technical crowd, however, I'm pretty sure just about all of us can withstand a lot more detail than you gave. So, if it's your field, by all means educate us on _why_ the scanners are so safe.
Re:Too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two problems with the deterrent claim:
1) The TSA keeps claiming we need these new and more intrusive security programs to catch terrorists. Yet, they haven't caught any.
2) There really isn't any way to test the deterrent claim. Yes, you could have some random airports reduce security on the line to pre-911 levels. (Don't announce it and rotate daily which airports have these security reductions.) Then, you could test which flights had more instances of terrorist attacks. However, if the deterrent of the enhanced security is true, it would apply to the dropped security lines as well since the terrorists wouldn't know ahead of time which airports to target. In short, it's untestable unless you announce the reduced security airports ahead of time and nobody would authorize that.
BTW, they might not have let terrorists get on board with a weapon, but there are plenty of instances of the TSA missing weapons. A quick Google search found an instance a couple of weeks ago of them missing a weapon in a carry-on bag. ( http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/Plane-Left-Gate-With-Gun-on-Board-DFW-Airport-Says-011812#ixzz1jr0xQJdZ ) By the time they realized the issue, the woman was gone. She was apprehended 90 minutes later. What if this was a terrorist instead of a little old lady, though? I just don't see the reasoning behind removing shoes and ditching all liquid above X ounces (in the trash can, no less.... if it was an explosion risk, I wouldn't toss it there!!!) when they have trouble with simple things like guns.
Re:Too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue is whether the deterrent value of the additional screening justifies the billions of dollars spent on additional equipment, the noticeable reduction in personal privacy (Gee, I can subject myself to questionable radiation doses *AND* have some screener in the side room verify whether I was circumsized, OR I can have them manually check the size of my privates), etc etc.
Many in the field argue that the best improvements in air security have come from the deadbolts on the cockpit door and the attitude change of the passengers from sit-back-and-wait-to-be-ransomed (from the old Havana-hijacking days) to the take-them-down-before-they-get-us seen now.
The current checkpoint system is reactive: Richard Reid had explosives in his shoes, now we take off ours. One group had chemicals they *hoped* to combine on-board to create a bomb, so we have the War on Moisture (despite the evidence it would never have worked). The underwear bomber packed PETN in his BVDs, so now we have virtual strip-searching and groping of grandmothers, toddlers, and ostomy patients.
THEY'RE NOT GOING TO TRY THE SAME THING AGAIN, BECAUSE IT DIDN'T WORK THEN.
Profiling is the best solution (ref: El Al), but the government is too concerned with potential discrimination lawsuits to follow through.
The Ben Franklin quote is over-used but still all too applicable: Those who would trade temporary safety for essential liberty deserve neither.
Re:It was done (Score:5, Insightful)
You post ignores these facts:
1. The TSA is solely accountable for testing, calibrating, and maintaining these machines.
2. An audit of the tests found that machines were mis-calibrated by up to a factor of 10 (misplaced decimal point), that the testing and calibration procedures were unclear, and that the technicians had inadequate training.
3. TSOa are standing near these machines 8 hours per shift without wearing any protective clothing and they are prohibited from wearing dosimeters.
4. That the studies that were performed have been contested because the methodology has not been shown to adequately account for the tact that 100% of the radiation dose of the back-scatter machines is deposited within 3mm of the skin.
5. The type of radiation received while flying is different than the type of received from the scanners, so a direct comparison of levels is meaningless.
Re:How independent? (Score:4, Insightful)
The TSA should not get to choose the agency, machines to be tested, nor the time for the tests. An independent lab should show up at an airport and test any machines they wish to test (one or few at a time to have little or no impact on passenger screening), including making the TSA stop using an in use machine (and switch to another) so it can be tested. They should test at least 100 machines at no less than 25 different airports, all randomly selected by the testing agency. All with no more than 1 hour notice to the TSA (preferably with less than 30 minutes notice or no notice). One viable way to do it "without notice" would be to show up, identify yourselves and immediately identify machines for testing. The TSA can spend 15-30 minutes verifying that they are indeed from the testing agency. In the mean-time, no one touches the machines to be tested. Any any use machines to be tested shall stop being used as soon as another machine can be made ready and passengers redirected to the other machine.
Re:Should of done that (Score:4, Insightful)
Precision is important. If exchanging ideas is all that is important then why not simply grunt and point at what you want, for example.
It's not "small minded" to place importance on communication skills where going too far in the other direction is equally bad, and leads to atrocious constructions like "If you have any questions direct then ask myself" or non-words like "irregardless" in an attempt to sound important.
Obviously there are going to be people who use their ability to write correct English as a way to feel superior to someone else (that's human nature and happens in every situation where some people are better at a thing than other people (games, sports, literacy, art, music....), but that in itself is not a reason to say "screw the whole thing, you understood me!". (There are whole communities on the web who could argue about the punctuation at the end of that last sentence).
Like I said before; people make small slips here and there, but correcting them is not rude or anal or small minded (depending on the attitude of the corrector, or course). However, when an entire post is littered with repeated, basic errors then there are really very few excuses if someone says "I'm sorry, you need to work on that if you want me to take you seriously" - if that's the level of care and attention they put into communicating with other people, then what sort of care and attention do they pay to other things?
Re:Should of done that (Score:4, Insightful)
You're on the right track. The "should of" abuse is largely a side effect of the way we learn English as a primary language. Native English speakers learn English first by speech (from their parents, from TV, whatever) before they learn to read.
The problem comes because so many speakers use the contracted form of "should have". The words "should've" and "should of" sound nearly identical unless you are deliberately exaggerating the latter. Therefore, by the time kids learn the correct spelling, "should have", they have been hearing "should've" and interpreting it as "should of" for many years. It is already ingrained in their vocabulary, and is thus hard to unlearn.