United States DHS' X-ray scanners could be cancer risk to border crossers

I find it hard to believe they would not remove the people first from their cars. This is crazy.

I guess we all knew Janet Napolitano and the rest of the DHS kooks were criminally insane. It begs the question: how low will they go?

I've heard this as a goal before. They think of it as a feature - "you don't even have to get out of your car." Yay. Well, except for the cancer part.

What's cancer risk, damaged tissue or readjusted chromosomes for the price of "s.a.f.e.t.y?"

But I totally agree. Just like everything else associated with these organizations, it starts with a few border checkpoints, and than a month later it's 1984.

"For its part, Homeland Security says the dose is safe and based on commonly accepted government standards (

PDF

) established by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement, "

And this part also bothers me because the "accepted government standard" is a best guess at the moment, 'standards' can change and be adjusted as we learn and research. Through history, how many times have we had to go back and realize the 'accepted standard' was wrong?

I'm going to tweet this at EPIC. I'm sure they've seen it, but just in case....

and done

Huh? I'm thoroughly confused.

These are devices like those at http://www.millivision.com/. They render objects under your clothes that are not your body. so, if you don't have breast implants or intimate medical devices, you're probably fine.
but it is still looking under your clothing, still against the requirements of the 4th. They can use this device anywhere they want to...

oh joy

First of all, how much do they pay a DHS/TSA employee to come up with acronyms?

I wonder how many explosives this test program found. None? Of course, the test will be declared a success and passive scanning will be expanded.

Of course there are privacy issues involved if the thing can see under your clothes. How many ostomy bags did it pick up?

Can one put something under one's arm and hold that arm tight to one's side, thereby hiding whatever it is under the arm?

Does the scanner do a 360 degree scan or does it "see" only one side of the body?

Were passengers being advised that they were being scanned?

Do millimeter waves impact implanted defibrillators or pacemakers? (Calling RadioGirl.)

I thought I answered this two days ago but my post seems to have failed. Sorry, I've been saving the universe elsewhere this week.

Scanners are like cameras, except that instead of visible light, the illumination is radio waves. TSA airport checkpoint MMW ("active") scanners are like taking a photo with flash in a dark (or dim) room - the scanner illuminates the body with radio wave (=flash) and records the reflection (=taking picture). The passive scanners described by Lisa are like taking a non-flash photo in broad daylight. The ambient radio energy (from the sun, mainly) illuminates the body and the scanner just looks at the reflection. "Passive" by definition means it's not transmitting anything.

One implication is that the passive scanners CANNOT impact medical devices like pacemakers. (I would be surprised if ACTIVE scanners would have an effect, as the energy level is very low and as energy at this frequency doesn't penetrate far enough into the body (~ fractions of an inch) to reach implanted electronics, but I am not a bio-medical engineer and cannot give an authoritative statement on what might affect such devices.)

A second implication of the passive scanners is that the resolution is quite poor; this is largely intrinsic to the way they work, not a matter of insufficient technology. I believe that the raw output of these scanners would be like the processed ATR - an outline of the body with a block where there might be something unexpected. It will likely alarm on people wearing insulin pumps or have breast prostheses (which is unnecessarily intrusive), but it's not a body imager in the way that the airport MMW scanner is.

And a new fashion line is born -- dusters lined with tin foil (or something much like it).