Good article. Thanks Stuart. You can imagine how seriously annoyed I am at our system by my above examples. When the metal detector goes off because of a belt I am wearing (for some reason this always happens), I have been pulled aside and full body frisked by a woman. It is not offensive as it is done professionally, and puts everyone's mind at ease. I am surprised that some only do partial body frisks...

Also, although Reid the shoe bomber did not fit a standard racial profile for terrorism (as per the above article), if I recall correctly he also did not have a two way ticket. That in and of itself should have raised bells.

Seriously, this is very frightening and the ridiculous 'security' the U.S. is supposedly providing is totally *unacceptable* for a country that is at war, has been attacked in airplanes, and has had two failed airplane attacks with jihadists.

So, I, a blonde American middle aged woman continues to get frisked whether or not the metal detector goes off, my white haired American 75 year old mother gets detained in a cubicle, my young daughter continues to have her bags 'specially' checked and foreign young men with no return ticket or luggage breeze through security here and everywhere...Ofcourse these would be attackers started in Europe and not here, so the problem needs to also be worked on in every country, or at the very least for every international boarding flight that will land in the United States.

As for our airports and security, I just can't help but wonder, are we so hideously bound by our desire to be politically correct that it blinds our need to protect our citizens who are flying?!? I am speechless at the stupidity and very angry that a child has more intelligence than those who get paid to think out security do...

Alice

My question is how much cellular damage does this machine to the body as it scans? Un-necessary radiation!

Reminds me of the article the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko wrote after the Oklahoma City bombing. When Moslems were outraged at being the initial suspects, Royko wrote "Whenever I hear of a terrorist bombing, plane hijacking or hostages being taken anywhere in the world, I always suspect Norwegians"

Dear Rose,

I don't know if you are talking about the standard metal detector or the full body scanner which is being considered for airport security. I don't know for either one. Maybe someone else here does.

I think that one of the problems with implementing full body scanners is that many people are upset about the invasion of bodily privacy with the images it allows. I understand their point, but in a way, that too is surprising in a culture which is anything but Victorian, and certainly no stranger to nudity!!!

Dear Lawrence,



LOL!!!

Wishing everyone a happy new year,
Alice

Pani Rose,

THANK YOU! Not only is it unnecessary radiation, but damaging. This is a very important and overlooked point.

In October 2009, Technology Review reported a new mechanism of DNA damage from terahertz radiation:

"The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. "Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none," say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.

"Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they've found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication."

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24331/

So these scanners are reported by some to damage the very stuff that make us up as humans.

The scanners are explained with pictures here: http://epic.org/privacy/airtravel/backscatter/

Ray

Hmmm...I hadn't realized these were actually being used and they do seem more graphic than necessary. Atleast in full body pat downs, you don't feel violated because it is done by a member of your own gender.

Again, judging from the posts below the article, all the wrong people are still getting singled out. This is totally ridiculous, just as not bringing liquids on board is ridiculous and taking off your shoes. Those attempts already happened. Future terrorists (such as the recent Nigerian boy) are not going to attempt the same exact method as the previous one!! How stupid and what lack of foresight and proactive thinking. What has happened to the great minds of this country?!?

Why don't we just concede to learn from the pros--the Israelis-- and folllow their method?!? Dogs are still a much better bet than those dreadful machines and they are cheaper too.

Kyrie Eleison...that is all I can say (after saying more than enough!!! LOL).

Total radiation exposure of the new full body scanners is under 1/2 that of a typical film-based x-ray image. Note that, if your doc does digital X-ray imaging, he's using less than 1/4 the film based ones; recent x-ray imagers are sensitive to 1/10th the source intensity....

Sex, Alice. Plants have gender. Nouns have gender. Mammals, including human beings, have sex. Every time you use the word "gender", the feminists win.

hehehe...okay, good point, but don't we see and hear the word 'sex' just a tad too much these days!! LOL!

Having just returned from Russia, I saw profiling used very effectively. Returning to Moscow from Krasnodar, all passengers ethnically not Slavic were segregated and fully searched prior to boarding, including passing through a contingent of explosive-sniffing dogs, and several being taken aside for further processing. No one objected. The risk from Babushki traveling to deliver baked goods to their grandsons in the military is non existent. The risk lies in the Central Asiatics. Political correctness be darned, we should use the same system here.

Alexandr

Unless, of course, you wind up with an ethnic Slav who's converted to Islam, or who belongs to what he perceives as an oppressed minority, in which case, congratulations, you've just let your bomber on board.

That aside, one could make a good case that the FSB is perhaps the greatest threat faced by ordinary Russians.

I really don't like the idea of an explosive sniffer dog! reminds me about the dog with no nose who smelled terribly.

Ach! The Nazi version of the famed "Killer Joke"!

Was there any single case of a terrorist attack by Slavs? Except for the FSB, of course.

I remember that after the London underground bombings of 2004 (or so) talking heads on the TV were surprised that the terrorists were "English". That they were Pakis born in England was not visible through PC glasses.

Yet we are beginning to see the emergence of home-grown, non-Arab Islamic terrorists, of whom Richard Reid was but the first. Just because we cannot identify an Islamic terrorist (or other sort) who was an ethnic Slav today does not mean there would not be one tomorrow. Russia's own repressive policies in fact make this more likely rather than less, so profiling strictly on ethnicity in the long run can be counterproductive. As the article I posted indicated, Israel does not automatically pull over all Arabs or Muslims passing through Ben Gurion Airport--it looks for certain types of behavior and other indicators (in the case of the author Richard Totten, an American Protestant, it was his extensive travel to Lebanon, Syria and other terrorist hot spots). That's the way to go, not throwing a blanket of suspicion over one ethnic group and giving another group a free pass. That's just as foolish as treating everybody the same, as TSA does in the U.S.