My Helical Tryst: Review of the TSA X-ray backscatter body scanner safety report: hide your kids, hi

[autographedcat]

I've been reluctant to weigh in on the TSA scanners because there simply wasn't enough data, pro or con, to really make a decision about their safety. Jason Bell goes a long way towards giving us more hard data to consider, and it's somewhat alarming.

I still maintain that the real problem with this sort of thing is that it doesn't actually improve the safety of air travel to any meaningful degree, unless the object is to make flying so onerous that no one bothers to do it anymore.

My Helical Tryst: Review of the TSA X-ray backscatter body scanner safety report: hide your kids, hide your wife

Last spring, a group of scientists at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) including John Sedat Ph.D., David Agard Ph.D., Robert Stroud, Ph.D. and Marc Shuman, M.D. sent a letter of concern to the TSA regarding the implementation of their 'Advanced Imaging Technology', or body scanners as a routine method of security screening in US airports. Of specific concern is the scanner that uses X-ray back-scattering. In the letter they raise some interesting points, which I've quoted below:

"Our overriding concern is the extent to which the safety of this scanning device has been adequately demonstrated. This can only be determined by a meeting of an impartial panel of experts that would include medical physicists and radiation biologists at which all of the available relevant data is reviewed."

"The X-ray dose from these devices has often been compared in the media to the cosmic ray exposure inherent to airplane travel or that of a chest X-ray. However, this comparison is very misleading: both the air travel cosmic ray exposure and chest X-rays have much higher X-ray energies and the health consequences are appropriately understood in terms of the whole body volume dose. In contrast, these new airport scanners are largely depositing their energy into the skin and immediately adjacent tissue, and since this is such a small fraction of body weight/vol, possibly by one to two orders of magnitude, the real dose to the skin is now high."

"In addition, it appears that real independent safety data do not exist."

"There is good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations. We are unanimous in believing that the potential health consequences need to be rigorously studied before these scanners are adopted."

Comments

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

What the Israelis do that we don't is actually both more fundamental and more effective than any of our security theatre:

Every passenger is interviewed.
Every passenger is interviewed by a trained professional.
Every passenger is interviewed by a trained professional who maintains constant eye contact with the passenger.

Racial profiling is wrong and ineffective. Behavioural profiling, on the other hand, is highly effective. But it requires more than a 40 hour training program and a $13/hour wage.

The biggest problem with an Israeli style security approach in the USA is the sheer volume of air travel. Israel has 28 airports, of which only three are international. The United states has nearly 15,000 (!) airports, and more than 50 of those server international traffic.

That doesn't mean the Israeli methods aren't ones we should adopt. But I do think we need to appreciate that it's not as simple as some people seem to suggest it is.

I think I'm basically agreeing with you ...

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Ii think the Israeli approach would work here, if the scaling were done intelligently (e.g. treat each airport as a separate system of manageable size instead of trying to act as though the US is one big airport that needs securing as a whole), ... and if we get serious enough about security and impatient enough with security theatre to find the will to spend the money it'd take. The big obstacle (bigger than funding) is the training -- the ramp-up time for such a system would be long because of both the number of interviewers who'd need to be trained and how much training each requires. Assuming sane-ish turnover rates once the system is running, training won't be a problem then (and by then, we'd have plenty of qualified trainers); starting out from essentially zero trained interviewers, it'd take a while to get the system staffed.

I think it might be worth it. At least worth investigating what the actual annual costs would be (taking into account any savings from scrapping the theatre-only aspects of what we've got), and asking ourselves what it'd be worth to us to have an effective and safe system that involved fewer delays and less intrusion on dignity/liberties.