How X-Ray Scanners Became Mandatory In US Airports 264
OverTheGeicoE writes "ProPublica has a story on how x-ray scanners became the controversial yet mandatory security fixtures we in the US must now endure. The story title, 'U.S. Government Glossed Over Cancer Concerns As It Rolled Out Airport X-Ray Scanners,' summarizes a substantial part of the article, but not all of it. The story also describes how government attitudes about the scanners went from overwhelmingly negative in the early 1990s to the naive optimism we see today. How did this change occur? The government weakened its regulatory structure for radiation safety in electronic devices, and left defining safety standards to an ANSI committee dominated by scanner producers and users (prison and customs officials). Even after 9/11 there was still great mistrust of x-ray scanners, but nine years of lobbying from scanner manufacturers, panic over failed terrorist attacks, and pressure from legislators advancing businesses in their own districts eventually forced the devices into the airports. The article estimates that 6 to 100 cancers per year will be caused by the x-ray scanners."
I for one... (Score:5, Interesting)
do not welcome our new x-ray overlords.
Re:Airport security is a farce (Score:5, Interesting)
Even better:
I was once in an airport queue with an American friend who had, somehow, managed to bring a can of CS spray into a country where any sort of offensive weapon is illegal. CS spray is illegal for anything but police use over here. You will be arrested just for having it on you, whether you use it or not, whether it's for "self-defence" or not. It's just an instantaneous "arrest me".
They'd managed to bring it from the US, through all the "heightened" airport security post-9-11, onto a plane, into my country, through my airport security, carry it around London for several weeks in her handbag (including through museum entry security checks, public transport etc), and only because her friends spotted it when she opened her bag IN A LONDON AIRPORT as she headed home - specifically, the queue to security scanning - that anyone knew she'd had it.
In London, carrying CS spray is an instant arrest that would pretty much provoke an immediate armed response anyway, especially in an airport which is about the only place the average Brit would ever see live weapons in real-life (carried by the policemen).
We quietly and hastily had her dispose of it into the wheelie-bins used for over-size deodorants etc. (as you say, they're just a large, unchecked "trash can" full of material that you're NOT allowed to take on a plane because of it's contents or size, sitting in the middle of an airport foyer) and passed through the airport unhindered onto our destination.
God knows what happens in that bin. The incineration must be fabulous when they do it, because it could literally contain anything at all. And, as you point out, prime target to drop a couple of things in, along with a dozen or a thousand "innocent" items that your accomplices can put in there earlier in the day and be pretty much untraceable which one caused the explosion. Right by the entrance to a security queue which can take hours to pass through and contain thousands of passengers sounds pretty much perfect - and the risk is just that of dropping someone off at an airport and them dropping something in a bin designed for things to be dropped into anonymously, because those bins are not "airside".
Re:I wish they would do the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Try taking a classified military radio (in a properly marked courier bag with all the paperwork) through security. Between what the xray of the bag showed, his truthful answer to "did you pack this bag yourself" and his response to requests to open the bag (he correctly said that he couldn't do that nor allow it to happen) he spent the night with airport security and only got out when someone from the base personally came to get him and told the TSA that he had done everything correctly.