
The 99% Rule (nsfw) - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/08/the-99-rule-nsf.php
======
DanielBMarkham
Hey guys,

I apologize that I got punked with the image. It is a known fake.

Having said that, the technology really does take naked pictures of folks. The
only question is how much image manipulation the software performs (and how
easily it can be hacked)

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray> \- " it performs a
virtual strip search, easily penetrating clothing to reveal concealed weapons;
however, it raises privacy concerns in that it appears to screeners
essentially as a nude picture of the subject, and may allow screeners to gain
access to otherwise confidential medical information, such as the fact a
passenger uses a colostomy bag, has a missing limb or wears a prosthesis, or
is transsexual."

From <http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/backscatter.htm> \- "And
yes, it's possible for backscatter X-raying to produce photo-quality images of
what's going on beneath our clothes. But because of privacy concerns, for the
time being, the peep show has been distorted: "

I would also direct you to [http://www.prisonplanet.com/exposed-naked-body-
scanner-image...](http://www.prisonplanet.com/exposed-naked-body-scanner-
images-of-film-star-printed-circulated.html) and
[http://oklahoma.watchdog.org/1053/naked-machines-do-store-
an...](http://oklahoma.watchdog.org/1053/naked-machines-do-store-and-transmit-
images-feds-admit/)

Very sorry about the slip-up. I'm also sorry that this was taken as a
political rant. This same thing happens in large organizations when dealing
with other things that cause political risk, and for the same reason. And it's
just as upsetting. I simply used the security business as a theme. It's what
upsets the most folks, and it seemed to be easily understandable by the
largest audience.

I've updated the blog to remove the naked picture and make the correction.

~~~
zacharypinter
Is the source image a fake? You can see it inverted back by hitting
"command+option+control+8" on your mac.

~~~
rarestblog
Yes. First image is fake too.

------
ataggart
In a functioning constitutional republic we would not first be asking what
Amendments prohibit government power, but rather by what constitutionally-
delegated power does the government assert its authority to act. Alas we've
spent the better part of two centuries carving out an ever-widening reading of
Federal power.

There are those who are perfectly willing to read into the Interstate Commerce
Clause the power to mandate individuals purchase health insurance. There are
those who are perfectly willing to read into the Interstate Commerce Clause
the power to forbid purely _intra_ state sale of otherwise legal drugs. How
sadly humorous that these two groups, likely opposed in most political issues,
can agree on near-limitless Federal power, and in so doing they have left us
with only "penumbras and emanations" as defense.

------
sofuture
I don't mean to detract from the article but it's worth pointing out that
those are absolutely fake/photoshopped images and not at all actual scans.

~~~
spatulon
Here's a link showing that the images are almost certainly fake:
[http://trueslant.com/KashmirHill/2010/01/27/tsa-scanner-
porn...](http://trueslant.com/KashmirHill/2010/01/27/tsa-scanner-porn-hoax-
fools-gizmodo-drudge-report/)

------
rarestblog
The image used in article is a known hoax (it's a stock image, not a real
scanner result). <http://www.tatumba.com/blog/archives/1369>

Compare with: [http://www.kelowna.com/2010/04/08/kelowna-airport-using-
full...](http://www.kelowna.com/2010/04/08/kelowna-airport-using-full-body-
scanner/)

~~~
jessriedel
Your "compare with" link is a millimeter wave image, not a back-scatter x-ray
image. The later really is much more detailed...

<http://www.naturalnews.com/gallery/articles/WaveScanners.jpg>

...though not quite as detailed-looking as the hoax.

~~~
rarestblog
Thanks for the correction! I thought those two were the same.

------
notahacker
A "99% accurate" paedophilia test would quite possibly falsely accuse as many
innocents as catch positive people (given that only a tiny fraction of people
are paedophiles) and being wrongly accused of being a paedophile has a pretty
substantial negative impact on your welfare.

I'm not sure the airport scanner argument is really connected: it causes mild
embarrassment to 100% of people asked to use it. The real question is whether
having the mild embarrassment of being subject to certain security procedures
(voluntarily; you bought the ticket) is worth a reduced chance of a fiery
death in mid-air. Personally I'd say yes even though the chances of the latter
occurring are vanishingly small. If anything the "99% rule" is the defending
the opposite argument: >99% of the time it reveals nothing or throws up false
positives, same with passport control and with the delay-inducing regular
maintenance checks on the aircraft and the costly OEM approvals required for
each and every component fitted on the aircraft and the extra hours spent by
the pilot getting type-rated on the newer variant and the slight adjustments
to the flight path to take into account the remote possibility of bad weather
and extra airspace assigned to that particular aircraft because of mildly
reduced visibility and the minute corrections of altitude shortly before and
the possibility of deploying the autopilot.... and actually, I quite like the
way having all these seemingly easily-dispensed-with checks ensures that an
aluminium tube travelling at several hundred mph thousands of feet above the
ground is the safest mode of transport.

~~~
doki_pen
Let the market decided! Those who want the "added protection" of naked
pictures, can fly the naked picture airlines!

~~~
notahacker
Not everyone affected by lax airline security/safety chooses to buy tickets...
[http://www.kinomaniak.pl/film/world_trade_center/world_trade...](http://www.kinomaniak.pl/film/world_trade_center/world_trade_center6b.jpg)
<http://www.twf.org/News/Y2003/0815-Lockerbie.jpg>

------
seven
I missed absolute numbers.

Talk for example about false positives in airport security. An error rate of
'only 0.01%' looks pretty good at first. But if you put in the actual numbers,
you see a very different image.

Airport Frankfurt had about 50 million passengers in 2009. An false positive
rate of 0.01% would cause trouble for 5000 people. Each day about 13 people
would be falsely accused.

~~~
confuzatron
To be honest, I don't think that's a big deal - 'false positives', whatever
those might be in the case of backscatter machines, can be easily caught at
the second stage - a pat-down. The bigger issue is blindly forcing everyone to
effectively strip naked for the authorities before they are allowed to board a
plane.

~~~
seven
Agree, but actually I was not thinking about backscatter machines. I had
biometric passports in mind while writing... and people missing flights as a
consequence.

------
forgottenpaswrd
"Look. I don't like running naked pictures of people on my blog. This is a
family deal and the kids read it."

Hmmmm, what's wrong with kids seeing people naked? I'm sorry but I can't
understand, I'm not American.

Satellites are only available for short periods of time, and are so expensive,
SUAVs are going to be way more used than satellites.

------
jedwhite
Ben Franklin put it well:

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety."

~~~
hbt
Each time I read this quote, I can only think of the Patriot Act.

~~~
Tamerlin
When I think of the Pariot Act I think of what V said in V for Vendetta: The
government should fear its people, never the other way around.

~~~
pivo
Or Thomas Jefferson: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny;
when the government fears the people, there is liberty."

~~~
Tamerlin
Also an excellent quote, and entirely appropriate.

------
jedwhite
Of course the arguments for governments doing full backscatter body image
scans are fundamentally the same as the arguments for getting access to
encrypted mail and voice calls.

As India is doing in this other currently popular story here on HN:
[http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100831/blackberry-r...](http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100831/blackberry-
research-in-motion-ban)

If we're happy to have government agents inspect our private parts to board a
plane, why shouldn't we be happy for them to inspect our emails and phone
calls to be able to communicate with each other?

Email and phone calls aren't any more of a right than freedom of movement are
they?

Technology should be increasing not decreasing the effectiveness of our
freedoms. And us folks who make it should have liberty on our brains as we
hack away.

------
points
Can someone with a scientific knowledge tell me if we'll one day have
technology to package the full body scanner into glasses? That will open a
massive can of worms for humanity :/ What happens when everyone can see
everyone else naked...

~~~
83457
Of course. Your body radiates waves of various types through your clothes, or
waves can be bounced off your body, that are not visible to the human eye. The
waves can be recorded through various methods and converted to an image that
we can see on a video screen. Once we have augmented reality glasses which is
inevitable, this will certainly be on the market somewhere. Google for "night
vision see through clothes" and "infra red see through clothes".

~~~
dmoney
I think the grandparent was asking if the X-ray machines themselves could be
miniaturized enough to fit in the glasses. In case you wanted to use them when
a giant machine wasn't around.

~~~
Retric
You can generate X-ray's from a device the size of a flashlight.

------
tmsh
I'm surprised image filtering technology doesn't have a way to just view a
silhouette of the skin. I.e., establish the skin color gradients and then
remove them...

~~~
ajj
I work in image processing / computer vision (albeit in completely different
applications), and the technology is not very good at doing that, at least
yet.

On the other hand, whenever you mention 'skin color' in a research proposal,
that does not have an easy route either, even when it has nothing to do with
racism.

------
frank304
A few years ago I was on a school trip, and we were flying back to the US from
London. The security at the airport asked me if I minded going through a new
type of scanner with a shorter line. The airport was doing a test run of the
same kind of backscatter machine. Everyone likes short lines, so I agreed.
After the scan was over, the security showed me the scan of my backside. It
was literally an inverted naked picture of my ass. They looked at the scan of
the frontside, but didn't show it to me. I wasn't expecting anything like
this, because the technology was so new and it hadn't been widely publicized.
It was really embarrassing to think that I had just been practically strip
searched.

That image is a fake, but it's not very far from the truth.

------
radioflyer
Is anyone else more worried about radiation exposure from these things than
their privacy?

------
powrtoch
I'm at work. Can someone at least tell me why I shouldn't click?

~~~
torial
Basically it includes some screenshots of the supposed effectiveness of the
Airport scanner... e.g. a nude woman, then has the images inverted. I didn't
read the article too closely, I'm not sure that the author understands those
images are from an image catalog that has nothing to do with the airport
scanner, but have been misrepresented as being so. Can't provide citation, but
saw that on an earlier article from HN about a month ago.

~~~
sp332
Reminds me of Hearst: "You furnish the images, I'll furnish the war!" He got
images like this one of a woman being strip-searched NSFW
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spaniards_search_women_189...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spaniards_search_women_1898.jpg)
which (he knew) was totally fabricated, and published them to rally pro-war
sentiment.

------
d4ft
Quick nitpick: The Court that issued the judgment on the GPS case was the 9th
circuit (not district). Otherwise, I do agree. The right to privacy is
something that is not explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution. It only
exists because it was read in by Justice Douglas as a side product of
"penumbras and emanations" of the Bill of Rights. The balance between freedom
and government protection has always been tenuous. After 9/11 we have
certainly seen a tipping toward the latter. Only time will tell if this trend
continues, but in a world in which technology can reveal even our naked
bodies, I certainly hope not.

~~~
jemfinch
> The balance between freedom and government protection has always been
> tenuous. After 9/11 we have certainly seen a tipping toward the latter.

Have we? All I've seen is a reduction in freedom.

~~~
d4ft
Thats exactly what I meant. Sorry if it wasn't clear. I was trying to say that
we are leaning toward government protection over personal freedoms. So, yes I
agree.

------
sk_0919
Interesting how a nsfw link makes it to the top of HN between 9:30 and 10:30
AM :-)

~~~
steveklabnik
When you work for yourself, you decide what's safe for work.

------
sliverstorm
> There is no doubt in my mind that if every person in the United States were
> relieved of their guns, we would have no gun violence

Uh... there's a whole lot of doubt in MY mind.

------
nchapman
That picture is a fake. That's how the scans actually look.

------
napierzaza
There are airport scanner photos of a naked woman.

This isn't really a 99% case is it? He's saying that someone making fun of a
scanned persons genitalia is part of the 1% where it doesn't work. I would
argue that 100% of the time this practice is demeaning. I think that using spy
satellites on American Citizens (I'm Canadian) is a bad idea 99% of the time.
It's the other way around. You're catching the bad guys maybe 1% of the time
or less, not the other way around.

Where is even the 1% of crimes prevented by taking naked pictures of women and
children? What is the benefit if the bomb won't be in underwear anymore, but
an orifice.

"Sometimes the people in charge of tracking you have ulterior motives -- which
are very easy to have when there's no warrant involved. That pesky 1%"

Yeah, _my tracker_ is always calling me out when I'm off my diet.

~~~
Confusion
The argument is not about whether the method is 99% effective. The argument is
about whether the method works as intended 99% of the time, which means that
99% of the time, nobody is bothered by it and it _may_ have the positive
effect of catching a terrorist if one happens to pass by.

Incidentally, lets suppose the method was 99% effective and that one in a
million passengers is a terrorist. That would mean that 10K innocent
passengers would be suspected of being a terrorist for every real terrorist.
There would be a 99% chance of catching the terrorist and a 100% certainty of
harassing ~10K innocent folks, which gets them stripsearched, put on no-fly
lists and demeaned in other ways. All under the guise of making air travel
safer, which is complete BS, because the examples of journalists still making
it through security with unchecked devices are numerous.

~~~
anamax
> a 100% certainty of harassing ~10K innocent folks, which gets them
> stripsearched, put on no-fly lists and demeaned in other ways.

Actually you don't have to do anything demeaning or persistent to someone who
trips the filter.

