Your Tax Dollars At Waste: TSA Finally Junks Rapiscan Scanners
Lisa Simeone blogs at TSANewsBlog:
As we reported here on September 3, 2012, the TSA last year started quietly removing the radiation-emitting backscatter (x-ray) scanners from airports and replacing them with millimeter wave scanners.This news was kept quiet, of course, only until the press found out about it. Even then, media reports often got the story wrong, implying, or stating outright as this Bloomberg story does, that all "naked-image scanners" are being removed, which is not true. Scanners will still be used at airports, only they will be millimeter wave scanners (also untested), with a generic outline of the body, not backscatter scanners.
While the TSA at first tried to palm off the backscatter scanners onto smaller airports (don't you know that big-city slickers are more important than small-town peons?), it later became known that the agency was collecting the clunkers in a warehouse. Hey, your tax dollars at work.
And still the story continued. One of the TSA's favorite contractors, Rapiscan, was accused of falsifying its scanner data. Now it appears that the TSA can no longer pretend that Rapiscan's machines are viable and will junk all of them. The claim is that the removal of the backscatter scanners has everything to do with their lack of "privacy-enhancing software" and nothing to do with the possibly falsified safety data.
Yet even while the agency is getting rid of one set of machines, it's busy buying others.
If you're still not familiar with the two different types of scanners, you might think that a millimeter wave (MMW) scanner is a machine that magically "protects your privacy." And that's the story the TSA is pushing.
In fact, as we've reported umpteen times, the MMW scanners have a 54% false positive rate. They alarm on seams. On pleats. On sweat. That means that even though you go through a scanner, you can still be hauled aside for a grope.
And the upshot -- on the scanners and the compliant American sheep, who are all too-polite as their rights are yanked from them:
Regardless, scanners aren't leaving U.S. airports. Compliant passengers are still stepping into them and raising their arms in a pose of surrender.
Baaaaaaaaaaa.
Michael Wilds at January 18, 2013 8:06 AM
I have a skirt I wear a lot on travel. It's cotton, as are the tights I wear underneath it. And yet, somehow, the machine always triggers on my right leg and I have to get patted down. The aliens must have installed an artificial hip during the abduction.
Astra at January 18, 2013 8:37 AM
I have it on good authority that many people only travel for the grope.
Michael Wilds at January 18, 2013 8:40 AM
Thanks, Amy. FYI, everyone, since we moved servers a few weeks ago, TSA News Blog has been having problems. You might get an error message saying "can't establish database connection."
Yes, it's annoying.
All I can say is keep trying. All the links to supporting evidence are there in the original post.
Lisa Simeone at January 18, 2013 10:25 AM
Safety depends on the scanner's technology. If they are using passive (most likely given the 54% false-positive rate) then it is using the radiation our body and immediate area emits (yes we emit radiation). If it is active, unlikely, it is at a lower level than a cellphone and don't cause DNA damage but it is debatable for people who already have cancer whether it increases growth or not.
Still a waste of our money for a crappy machine that can't even catch a weapon according to some tests... like this one http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/TSA-Agent-Slips-Through-DFW-Body-Scanner-With-a-Gun-116497568.html
NakkiNyan at January 18, 2013 11:56 AM
Re-read your link.
Jeff Guinn at January 18, 2013 1:34 PM
Hi, Jeff!
Would you like to explain just how, if the Rapiscan was effective, the professionals at DHS are now removing them?
Every TSA move is one of failure.
Celebrate another year of being groped for wanting to be a passenger on an airplane!
Radwaste at January 18, 2013 6:59 PM
Do you mean this statement:
So then that means that the TSA agents are ignorant, lazy and inattentive about doing the job they are paid to do; or that the scanners don't work?
A 100% failure rate means I'm probably going to blame the technology.
If it isn't the technology failing -- then why are we subjected to the indignity of the TSA?
Jim P. at January 18, 2013 9:00 PM
@Jeff Guinn,
I want you to pick apart the following paragraphs and tell me where I am wrong.
I beg you to do it.
=================================================
The TSA was not needed one hour and one minute after Tower II was hit!
The paradigm, the norm, the expected, what everyone was taught to do was to sit down, shut up and wait for the plane to land and the negotiations happen. That was the model from Entebbe onward.
The passengers on board did not really know what was about to happen on September 11, 2001 at 8:46:30 when Flight 11 struck Tower I.
Even the passengers on Flight 175 probably didn't realize what was about to happen when they struck Tower II at 9:03:02.
The Pentagon crash of Flight 77 at 9:37:46 may have been still a matter of ignorance.
At 10:03:11 on September 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed after the brave souls counter-attacked and caused the hijackers to crash the plane.
The time difference is 60 minutes and 9 seconds from Tower II being struck to the crash of Flight 93. The shoe bomber and panty bomber were taken down by fellow passengers as well. Recently, JetBlue's Flight 191 pilot was taken down by the passengers once he was out of the cockpit. Additionally how many times have you heard of passengers' concerns and diverted flights?
The TSA is and has always been a joke, no make that a total stupidity, that has wasted our country's fortune going down a rabbit hole.
If you don't believe me look at the 9/11 timeline.
There will never be another 9/11 style attack unless the attackers can arrange planes full of geriatrics, and even then it would be doubtful.
Oh, and someone brought bombs being an issue. If bombs were effective and simple then the Lockerbie bombing would have been repeated multiple times between 21 December 1988 and 11 September 2001. That's 4647 days or 13 years. Where was the TSA in that time? There was one successful bombing that was done in Colombia and two unsuccessful attempts in that time. The bombing in Colombia was a drug dealer assassination and not a terrorist attack.
=================================================
Jim P. at January 18, 2013 9:03 PM
A 54% false positive rate is pretty good. That means one in two hits was for something genuine (by their dopey rules, mind you, which in my case included a 3" jeweler's screwdriver, wow, dangerous). How many equivalent hits from a metal detector turn out to be something real, as opposed to a belt buckle or similar? I'd be surprised if the answer was over 1%, if that.
I'm not defending the TSA, and I think the whole thing is stupid. But if you go by what they're aiming to pick up, I'd call that a successful result.
On the other hand, getting a gun through is a bit of an indictment.
Ltw at January 18, 2013 10:15 PM
I have a medical implant in my chest, just below the skin, with about two feet of metal wires inside of me running from my neck to my ambomen.
I travel a lot.
I trigger the alarm only one-out-of-ten times I go through security (if that.)
Safety!
AB at January 19, 2013 9:57 AM
Why is that Jeff Guinn will never respond to my post?
Jim P. at January 19, 2013 5:32 PM
AB, that's a good sign. Shows the machines are working properly, and don't false alarm on some very thin bits of copper embedded in your body. Wow, metal wires... calcium is a metal for that matter, so your bones are more likely to set off the alarm than your medical implant if you think metal is what sets it off.
Would you feel better if they triggered every time? Low false positive and high detection rates are mutually exclusive. You can't have it both ways.
Ltw at January 19, 2013 6:37 PM
Ltw:
If the government is promoting a massively intrusive piece of technology that is specifically designed to thwart things like implanted bombs then, yes, I would prefer it to work.
If not, then get rid of the charade.
AB at January 20, 2013 12:27 PM
"Wow, metal wires... calcium is a metal for that matter, so your bones are more likely to set off the alarm than your medical implant if you think metal is what sets it off."
Annnd we have someone who has no idea what bone is made of. Hey. Look it up.
(Not a metal.)
Radwaste at January 21, 2013 7:38 PM
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