You're playing the role of skeptic, but you're not going far enough. How would I actually answer that question? You could have said the same thing about the Therac; of course it can't blast that much radiation, there's no good reason for it. Yet, here we are.
What evidence do you have that it is actually not possible for the machines to dangerously malfunction, and how much confidence can actually be placed in it? Those telling us it is safe don't have entirely clean hands on the topic, they've lied about other things like picture retention policies and capabilities before.
You're making an appeal to incredulity. I would not actually be that incredulous to discover that the machines do indeed have some sort of flaw that would permit them to blast out more radiation than intended. After all, it's happened before. That said, I don't necessarily consider it likely, either, what I find far more problematic is that this is merely one consistent piece in a larger puzzle of unconcern about the real safety of the public.
For the same reasons we ought to be able to examine our voting machines, we ought to be able to examine these machines.
The Therac was designed to blast dangerous amounts of radiation. It had two modes of operation - "deadly radiation" and "VERY deadly radiation". A software bug caused it to go into "VERY deadly radiation" mode when it should have been only in "deadly radiation" mode.
A smaller radiation source, like that of an x-ray backscattering scanner, does not need to have a "deadly radiation" mode. And it's highly unlikely that a hardware failure can accidentally turn "10x weaker than chest x-ray" mode into "deadly radiation mode". The more likely failure mode will be something along the lines of "6x weaker than chest x-ray mode".
It's just highly unlikely that any device will accidentally emit millions to billions of times more energy than it was designed to.
What evidence do you have that it is actually not possible for the machines to dangerously malfunction, and how much confidence can actually be placed in it? Those telling us it is safe don't have entirely clean hands on the topic, they've lied about other things like picture retention policies and capabilities before.
You're making an appeal to incredulity. I would not actually be that incredulous to discover that the machines do indeed have some sort of flaw that would permit them to blast out more radiation than intended. After all, it's happened before. That said, I don't necessarily consider it likely, either, what I find far more problematic is that this is merely one consistent piece in a larger puzzle of unconcern about the real safety of the public.
For the same reasons we ought to be able to examine our voting machines, we ought to be able to examine these machines.