TSA's mm-Wave Body Scanner Breaks Diabetic Teen's $10K Insulin Pump 811
OverTheGeicoE writes "Savannah Barry, a Colorado teenager, was returning home from a conference in Salt Lake City. She is a diabetic and wears an insulin pump to control her insulin levels 24/7. She carries documentation of her condition to assist screeners, who usually give her a pat-down search. This time the screeners listened to her story, read her doctor's letter, and forced her to go through a millimeter-wave body scanner anyway. The insulin pump stopped working correctly, and of course, she was subjected to an invasive manual search. 'My life is pretty much in their hands when I go through a body scan with my insulin pump on,' she says. She wants TSA screeners to have more training. Was this a predictable outcome, considering that no one outside TSA has access to millimeter-wave scanners for testing? Would oversight from the FDA or FCC prevent similar incidents from happening in the future?"
new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
The war on terror is over (Score:5, Insightful)
The White House just said the war on terror is over.
We don't need the TSA screeners any more, send them home and stop the unnecessary abuse of U.S. citizens.
Re:forced? (Score:5, Insightful)
She is a teenager. I bet they bullied her into "voluntarily" going through the scanner.
Re:forced? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:5, Insightful)
You're forgetting that whenever you give up a right you rarely (if ever) get that right back (re: government).
Re:forced? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything to get a mm wave look at some underage breasts.
Everytime.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time there's a story about the TSA making life unpleasant for Americans, a terrorist gets his wings..
Congratulations, the terrorists have won.
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't need the TSA screeners any more, send them home and stop the unnecessary abuse of U.S. citizens.
Not only U.S. citizens - they abuse permanent residents and visitors too.
They didn't force her. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read the article the TSA agents advised her that the insulin pump would not be damaged by the scanners, despite a doctors note to the contrary. She took their advice, assuming they knew what they were doing, and chose to go through the scanner rather than requesting a pat-down.
While her actions are understandable, if she had simply requested a pat-down like the doctor instructed her to do rather than asking for a second opinion, this would have been avoided. Likewise if agents weren't so stupid as to disagree with a doctor's order on a matter they knew nothing about, this would have been avoided. Given their position of authority they should be liable for the cost of the pump since their negligence caused it to be destroyed.
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:2, Insightful)
Al Quaeda outsourced all right, they just outsourced to the US government.
Now its the US government wageing terror attacks on its citizens.
Whe it comes to surrender, maybe we should update the motto with US instead of France ? ^_^
Nobody surrenders to terrorism as fast as the US.
Re:avoid them thar rays! (Score:4, Insightful)
Electrical devices like that are full of amplifiers and things like field-effect transistors - things that take small changes in, and output much (relatively) larger ones.
It doesn't take much interference at all to cause problems, and this is made even worse that circuit traces etc can be resonant (where you most certainly will not) with the incoming interference, making things worse.
Re:forced? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why lie?
"I want to opt out."
"Why?"
"Because."
"Why?"
"......"
"Why?"
"......"
You have the right to remain silent and are not required to give ANY answers to a government employee except your name and ID (varies from state-to-state).
Re:forced? (Score:3, Insightful)
And they have the power to detain you until you miss your flight.
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is she stupid as well? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because she's 16 and away from home, and probably just wants to get back. Quit expecting everyone to have a vigilate chip on their shoulder.
You know, as adults, we should have already fixed this god damned problem with our government - not expect our children to have to rise up against the man for something as simple and common place as a plane flight.
Re:forced? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why you should give them the same courtesy you should be giving any other person, even if you hate them.
It's amazing what a little courtesy can do. If money makes the world go 'round, then courtesy is the grease on the axle.
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair enough, fair enough. If getting back the old ones are so difficult, let's get some new ones, that are just like the old ones, but worded slightly different.
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that this sort of radiation is not typically encountered in everyday activity, why would anyone think to defend against it? Casual use of millimeter-wave scanners is quite a recent phenomenon. Hard to fault the pump's engineers for not foreseeing that one.
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They didn't force her. (Score:5, Insightful)
She is likely to get the same response as another customer who asked, "How did my luggage get damaged? Why did the TSA cut the lock off?"
"GO TO HELL" scrawled on the complaint form.
Or maybe the handicapped soldier who asked, "Where did my 300 dollars disappear too? I put it right here in the tub."
"You causing trouble?"
"No sir."
"Then shut up or we'll bar you from flying."
The handicapped soldier boarded the plane & lost his 300.
Or maybe the woman with the breast pump who was told, "You can't take that onboard." She was then forced to demonstrate it to the TSA woman to prove it was a breast pump, else it would have been confiscated & junked.
Or the mother who was carrying milk for her newborn infant, and the TSA told her to dump it or else. She showed them printouts of TSA procedures and they tossed them in the trash. They then placed her in a glass jail for an hour, made her miss her flight, and refused to refund the ticket for the plane.
THE SA DOESN'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT BROKEN DIABETIC PUMPS OR ANY OF THE FUCKING PASSENGERS. They are goons with power trips. They need to be fired and replaced with what we had pre-911 (xrays of baggage/metal detectors for passengers).
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:5, Insightful)
But if your predecessor started to beat me with a lead pipe, and then you stopped the beating, I would vote for you.
Re:EMC compliance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the Patriot Act was already drafted prior to 9/11, and that they went to far as to keep it secret and only allow lawmakers to read it under a declaration of secrecy shows that the Abuse of Citizens is the plan.
The war on Drugs, Terror et al are just code names for the War on the Constitution.
Constitutional Rights are an inconvenient obstruction to increased Power of the State and must be removed.
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
How exactly can it be the manufacturer's fault that their product doesn't withstand energy bombardment from a technology that was unknown to them for the entire duration of the product's development?
That's like trying to blame medieval armorsmiths for not making chainmail protect against tasers.
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:5, Insightful)
So, someone can beat you for 8 minutes with a lead pipe, I step in and beat you for 3 then stop. You'd still vote for me?
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:2, Insightful)
Murder in the interest of public safety... (Score:5, Insightful)
Being an insulin dependant diabetic, they could have easily killd her. It could have failed the other way and dumped several days of insulin into her at once. I guess once she passes out, they would have done a body cavity search before calling the paramedics.
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you were trying to imply it is senseless to avoid these scanners. However this just goes to point out how stupid the effort to prevent terrorism is. The risk is so low even with 9/11 happening that it make no sense to subject people to ANY kind of screening. People should be able to hop on a plane as easily as they hop in the car and drive to work or hop on the subway, a bus, or any other form of public transport ion which has no screening and lots of people.
Can jets be used as bombs? Yes. So what! There are lots of other more dangerous problems that we should be investing time and money in solving that should be taking precedent. Like cancer, global warming, and education.
Re:They didn't force her. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, because I do not wish to exchange freedom for apparent security. I want it to be like it was up through the mid-90s: loved ones and friends being able to meet you or see you off right at the gate, children being able to be escorted directly to the gate by their parents, etc.
You know, LIBERTY.
I know, only the radical fringe lunatics believe in actual freedom nowadays.
TSA is not ALLOWED to exercise common sense (Score:1, Insightful)
It's not that they don't have common sense (I'm not saying they do), but they're not ALLOWED to exercise common sense. There is so much hubbub about patdowns of 90 year old grandmothers and 3 year old toddlers, but they're instructed to treat everyone equally. Otherwise, it would be profiling.
We need to learn from the Israelis that have the best security, but they do lots of common sense profiling.
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
The TSA wants it to be equally easy as well, which is why they are trying to work their way into harassing citizens ("Papiere bitte") on every mode of transportation.
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
More like the needs of earmarked pork-barrel spending benefiting pockets of the few outweigh inalienable rights of the many.
Re:new slogan (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Losing business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:5, Insightful)
Blowing up a plane was never the problem with 9/11; it was the fact that the terrorists got access to the cockpit and turned the planes into flying bombs that were then used to blow up two massive office buildings. That can't happen anymore, now that pilots close the door to the cockpit and the average passenger knows to swarm any idiot who tries to hijack a plane; all this other stuff is just theater perpetuated by security theater companies to keep getting money from easily frightened people.
Re:Is it possible to just leave? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. By the police.
TSA agents are not police no matter how much they try to act like them. The real problem is people *need* to fly in many cases. This is a 16 year old girl on her way home - she didn't have the option to cancel a trip because of a bad tsa policy. She's also (in many states at least) too young to drive and definitely too young to rent a car from almost any company. That leaves busses and trains - without advance planning by a minor far from home. She had effectively no choice but to submit to screenings - and THIS is why the fact you cannot refuse TSA/FAA rules on the basis that flying is not a 'need' is utter bullshit.
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
How exactly do you calculate the risk of terrorism -- in this case hijacking or bombing? It's not as simple as taking the current number of hijackings and bombings, dividing by the current number of flights, ignoring the fact that screening is currently in place (and has been since the 1970's), and thus "proving" that we don't need screening of any kind.
And how are you accounting for the "success effect"? At one point in the early 70's there were over 60 hijackings in a single year, because they were fairly easy to do and they fairly easily achieved their goals (and hence were "successful")? If it were as easy to kill thousands or tens of thousands of infidels as walking on to a plane, do you doubt that there would be many more than there are currently? (In 9/11: we were incredibly lucky. Fully-fueled planes crashed into high-density areas and only killed, on average, about 1,000 people each. That's amazingly low, and it of course doesn't count the economic cost, rendering multiple city blocks uninhabitable for years, etc.)
Not saying that any kind of screening or abrogation of our rights and privileges can be justified. Just not feeling the honor system for flights would work out all that well.
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that what's been done? The US can now be modeled in function as a series of concentric rings of incarceration, with Guantanamo as the extreme axial center, and TSA operating the guarded outer perimeter...
Re:Murder in the interest of public safety... (Score:5, Insightful)
She should sue the fuck out of them for starters.
Passing her machine through the scanner EVEN AFTER a doctor's note said otherwise is grossly negligent or reckless or worse.
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Not saying that any kind of screening or abrogation of our rights and privileges can be justified. Just not feeling the honor system for flights would work out all that well
There is a vast middle ground between the invasive grope-and-scan system the TSA uses and the pre-DB Cooper honor system. The ease with which hijackings happened in the 70s-90s was largely due to the explicit policy of complying with hijackers demands. This policy was reversed about the same time the second plane hit the tower and, in combination with locked cockpit doors, pretty well assures that hijacked aircraft will not be effective guided missiles again.
Instead of making an attempt to balance the cost, inconvenience and, yes, risks of ever more invasive screening procedures, TSA throws up the terrorist bogeyman and tells us that if all this expense saves even one life, then it's all worth it. Events like this one serve to remind us that screening procedures, even those involving minuscule risks, when applied to hundreds of millions of people, cause morbidity. Morbidity that is much more predictable (and therefore more preventable) than terrorists. So, the question is: would you prefer safe magentometer-only screening and a 0.0000001% chance of hijacking, or body scanning, with a 0.0000001% chance of cancer and a 0.00000001% chance of hijacking?
Re:The war on terror is over (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone still blaming "those evil (Republicans|Democrats)" has clearly NOT been paying attention.
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Spock: That is wise. Were I to invoke logic, however, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Kirk: Or the one.
Killing an individual would be better for society than letting an individual kill bunches of individuals. You make a joke, but that is the way the TSA works. We are not people, we are statistics. There is no way to treat us as individuals.
Anyone who works with familiar co-workers every day, herding strangers through life, will never see us as individuals. Police, TSA, fast food - there is a bond with the people you know, the "us", and everyone else is "them".
It is psychologically impossible for the TSA as a whole to be sympathetic to individual situations, including mental illness and prosthetics or implants. It will never happen because of our innate need to group people socially, without drastic changes.
If it will not work, abolish it, that is the only other option.
Good God man, honor system? No need. (Score:3, Insightful)
After 9-11, do you really think the passengers of any plane is going to allow any idiot to hijack a plane ever again? You'll have grandmothers on oxygen rushing them before they ever get near the door to the cockpit.
As for bombs, bombs [that actually work in a manner that would provide a large enough explosion] would be easily visible on ordinary x-ray machines like those we sent our shit through all the time before 9-11.
Patting down children, harassing insulin dependent teenagers and scaring the shit out of old ladies is just theater. Terrible terrible theater.
Re:Homegrown terrorism ... (Score:5, Insightful)
.
One question lays to rest all this apologist nonsense. Was TSA formed in response to 1995 bombing? or 2009 plot? If you were concerned so much about "homegrown terrorism", why were all these measures taken in response to 911, an event that was NOT homegrown terrorism? That fact alone signifies that so-called homegrown terrorism was not really much of an issue.
As far as so-called homegrown terrorism is concerned, none the specific cases you cite, involve any flights apparently. I find that significant and interesting.
I mean the bombing of buildings... the shootings... it is pretty easy to get a gun(and by that extension explosives) in USA isn't it? What measures are there today to stop someone get a gun legally, and start shooting up people in crowded market street or in some mall? ... or in a bus? How exactly are your protected from occurances of such bombings or attacks at traffic stops, just by having scanners and pat-downs at some airport which is say, 40 kilometers away from the said spot? McVeigh carried out the attacks without any need of any conspiracy being discussed on internet or phone with anyone. So what exactly can all the internet/phone surveillance can do against such nutcases acting alone?
But I guess folks like you would rather not think logically and rationally and just drink the cool-aid, so that someone can take away your rights and tax money to give you a false sense of security.
There was a recent article on slashdot, where FBI itself cooked up a terrorist plot, went out of its way to motivate some criminal types by offering cash to plant bombs, and then arrested him and declared it to be a terrorist plot foiled by its diligence. And occasional murders by fringe lunatics/murderers happen in every nation, and have happened for centuries in fact. But it had to be you who had to come up and declared these murderers to be "terrorists" instead.
Key question : How do these security measures help, considering that a) a terrorist can easily plant a bomb just before the security check point and still blow up hundreds of folks in the waiting area. b) These machines are pretty much useless and have been repeatedly demonstrated to be so, with severe known flaws in them. c) Terrorists do NOT need to rely on a single method of attack. They can just plant a bomb at some political rally next time.
And to repeat, what are you hoping to achieve with all this futile circus? Save lives? Far, far more people die on road accidents. Where are the billions being poured into preventing that? Or is it that most of the 5000 at WTC were rich folks, whose lives are worth more than just random road-kills? You decide. It is all about proportions.
Only thing the government needed to do was put all foreigners entering the country under full surveillance. It should be easier than monitoring every single communication happening across the globe. But instead, they decide to declare war on its own citizens and you think this is fine.
Re:new slogan (Score:5, Insightful)
Killing an individual would be better for society than letting an individual kill bunches of individuals.
No, it devalues all human life. It would be better to prevent that individual from killing others and then bring them to justice, hopefully leading to their eventual reform.