

TSA Admits Bungling of Airport Body-Scanner Radiation Tests - jvilalta
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/tsa-radiation-test-bungling/

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asr
This article is confusingly written to obscure the fact that there's no story.

Some field tests showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected, but
the TSA has determined it's because some field testers, who were conducting 10
tests at a time, reported the sum of the individual radiation levels instead
of the average.

Apparently this is due to a confusing field test form. So the TSA has fixed
the form.

I mean, I hate the TSA too, but come on...

~~~
lutorm
That doesn't even make sense. If they forgot to divide by 10, the results are
actually 10 times _too large_ , meaning the actual radiation is 1/10 of the
previously reported result.

~~~
asr
Correct. These new tests produced abnormally large results. If these results
were true, then this would be front-page news. But the results are faulty. So
the actual radiation is ... the same as what we thought before these new tests
were conducted.

It's confusing because, once you understand it, you ask _why they wrote a
story about it_.

~~~
lutorm
Oh now I see. I thought they forgot to divide by 10 in the _old_ results. But
the story is that they did _new_ measurements which were too large because
they screwed up. So the story is that nothing's changed. Yeah, I agree with
you...

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OstiaAntica
The real issue is that these scanners violate the 4th Amendment and impose
health risk for no gain in security.

~~~
charlesju
I am not a legal expert, but I do not believe you are forced to use the
airport and thus the 4th amendment does not apply.

~~~
alexqgb
If your job requires a lot of travel, then short of a radical career change
(itself, a pretty unreasonable demand)airplanes are your only viable choice.

But are you "forced" at gunpoint? Obviously not, but this is a ridiculously
high standard to use when establishing whether someone is being compelled to
do something.

If your boss says "you need to be in Dallas on Monday morning", you need to be
in Dallas on Monday morning.

~~~
InclinedPlane
This is not a good argument. You have no legal right to drive an automobile or
to fly a plane, both are heavily regulated. The "if you have a job that
requires X" argument is fundamentally weak, there is no intrinsically superior
right to any activity due to it being job related or not (this is a good
thing, I believe).

The problem of course is the extent of intrusion on daily lives.

The better legal approach is the 10th amendment route, or coming up with new
legislation.

~~~
wil2k
"You have no legal right to drive an automobile "

Actually, under Common Law you have a legal right to _travel_ (I'm not saying
driving) in a car if you're a Sovereign.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jUxupkD57g>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWRO_jQxDjY>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfbfpz4iYDU>

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ck2
This is so last year's question for the TSA.

The new question is why the mainstream press isn't repeatedly asking the TSA
why they are suddenly appearing in train and bus stations as well as randomly
shutting down bridges for car searches? It's happened often yet few know about
it.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Because the only thing separating the vast majority of the mainstream media
from tabloid journalism is mere perception and production value?

~~~
ck2
I would only add the qualifier "currently" to your question.

Because a decade ago NY Times and CNN were actually paying for real reporters
to go into the field and research things.

Now they've become popculture pushers, anything just to get eyeballs on their
websites, though the NY Times still has some good pieces. CNN is long past
gone however.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Even a decade ago, or 4 decades ago, I think there was a lot wrong with
mainstream media. The disruption the internet is causing is revealing a lot of
these problems more than actually causing them.

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_delirium
It's strange that these aren't required to undergo some sort of more standard
and professional safety testing. I get that they don't need quite the same
level of reliability as medical scanners, but the level of radiation safety
should be similar, or perhaps actually higher, since many more people are
routinely exposed to them. Could you get a device with the amount of ad-hoc
testing that's been done here even into your local doctor's office? My guess
is no.

I'm not particularly confident in what I've found of the failure analysis and
testing, either. For example, the devices appear to work by scanning a beam
rapidly across one's body. If the beam got stuck in one place, it would have
to shut off extremely rapidly to avoid an unhealthy dose of radiation being
concentrated in one place. Is it possible for the beam to get stuck? Are there
fail-safes that would cut off the beam, and how fast do they operate, and how
reliable are they? As far as I can tell, miscellaneous doctors and medical-
device folks have been asking these sorts of questions, but there aren't very
professional looking tests and analyses available to answer them.

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Joakal
"The Therac-25 was a radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of
Canada Limited .. It was involved in at least six accidents between 1985 and
1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation,
approximately 100 times the intended dose"

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Therac-25>

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etherael
Clarification, not bungling the actual scans, but bungling tests _of_ the
scanners, and by bungling tests of the scanners; not testing incorrectly, but
omitting a single critical step.

Standard procedure is to take ten consecutive measures and then average the
results (sum and divide). Their test staff have simply missed the final step
on that list.

Raises competence questions, yes, but nothing to get bent out of shape about
in terms of real world effects in isolation.

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jtagen
I'm not worried. According to the scanned test log, the radiation level was
0.0. Everyone knows that 10 times that is still zero, so we're safe.

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georgieporgie
I bet you get more radiation during your flight. Still, if this fuels
irrational public fear of scanners such that it outweighs irrational public
fear of terrorism, I'll consider it a good thing.

~~~
swaits
We will let you test that theory out. Certainly you don't have a problem with
someone else, perhaps more cancer prone and risk averse than you, opting out.
Right?

~~~
georgieporgie
Opting out is absolutely fine. I am in no way supporting these stupid
backscatter machines. The only thing that will get rid of them is public
outrage, and that is never, in my experience, rational.

