Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Bollocks. That's one thing the millimeter scan will pick up just fine.

No. Millimetre wave (and backscatter x-ray) imagery won't penetrate skin and certainly won't reveal the presence of contraband inside a human.

There's commercially available penetrating X-ray human body security scanners, but afaict those just have been used in prisons, not in airports (yet!).

They are also used in diamond mines. In fact, that's what the LODOX (low dosage x-ray) system was first invented for.

To find diamonds or to scan workers for smuggled diamonds?

Scanning the workers. A full body scan is low enough dosage that it is safe to be scanned every ~3 days (IIRC), so 30% of workers would be randomly selected for a whole body scan each day when they leave the mines.

Since then it has been repurposed for extreme cases like unconscious car crash victims in order to determine the extent of injuries. Or so I learned in a medical imaging elective.

The technology behind it is really cool! By using temporal separation for the different parts of the image they reduce scattering blur, allowing them to use a much lower dose to get the same image quality.

Millimeter scans only happen in US airports -- they're banned in ~Europe~ the EU and not really used anywhere else.

Also you're very wrong. You can defeat a millimeter scan just by placing the contraband between your palms while your hands are clasped above your head.

> Millimeter scans only happen in US airports -- they're banned in Europe and not really used anywhere else.

were.

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2014/04/19/bodyscanners-zo-gaat-he...

You're right, it's just the EU. I fixed my comment.

The point is their technology is terrible and they are easy to defeat, as has been proven many many times.

They are security theater and they were only put in place because the guy in charge of what scanners were allowed at US airports happened to have a financial interest in the company that made the millimeter wave scanner.

> They are security theater and they were only put in place because the guy in charge of what scanners were allowed at US airports happened to have a financial interest in the company that made the millimeter wave scanner.

Yup. I have been to many airports in Africa and SE Asia that have only a metal detector, manned by someone who barely cares enough to stand there, and no one has successfully committed an act of terrorism (a la 9/11) with a plane due to it.

Also when I was traveling in Japan, they had machines that could scan the contents of your water bottle so you didn't have to empty it or throw it away while going through security.

I'm mildly convinced other countries don't have this because the beverage industry can sell more water/soda you're forced to throw it away when you go through security.

I've also stopped arguing about going through the machines. I know they do nothing, but it's not worth the hassle security employees give you to opt out. Just stand there, knowing it's pointless, and move on.

> I'm mildly convinced other countries don't have this because the beverage industry can sell more water/soda you're forced to throw it away when you go through security.

That makes sense, Japanese airports have distinctly non-airport prices for food and drinks even past security.

Anecdata: Japanese airport staff are also humans, and treat you like a fellow human. Most pleasant immigration experiences I've had were at Narita. My own country (AU) treats me like a criminal on _departure_.

To be fair, the threat model of those countries doesn't include terrorist hijackings. You will surely experience a thorough screening in Israel or Frankfurt.

Every major U.S. airport I've been to in the past 5 years has had ample bottle filling stations.

> You will surely experience a thorough screening in Israel or Frankfurt.

I think Israel is special, because they use behavioural profiling on you as well.

I've been through Frankfurt on an inter-EU flight, and we were put into the priority lane because things were quiet. The priority lane only had (has?) a metal detector, no body scanner.

So if the body scanners were really about security, why would they have a lane that allows you to bypass them completely?

I once flew from Frankfurt to Barcelona without anyone checking my passport (I am not European but have a valid residence permit for an EU country). Did online checkin and printed my boarding pass. No checked luggage, and automated boarding pass scanners at the gate. So yeah, really thorough...

Frankfurt and Barcelona are both in the Schengen zone. Just like you can drive from Austria to Hungary without a passport, you can fly from Germany to Spain without one. It's only on the edge of the zone that they check your passport.

> It's only on the edge of the zone that they check your passport.

I am aware. My point wasn't clear. I wasn't surprised I was not asked for my passport, however I was surprised I was able to fly from Germany to Spain without anyone verifying I was the person my boarding pass said I was.

I could have given my ticket to a friend and they would have been able to fly under my name, because at no point did anyone ask for government ID to confirm I was the same person as my boarding pass.

I value the freedom of movement Europeans have very highly, but it just goes to show how dead easy it is for someone to travel undetected (e.g. have an associate buy your ticket).

If you are flying to a destination outside the Schengen zone from Frankfurt, you have a strong chance of receiving a close frisk. The frisk is far beyond what is acceptable in U.S. culture and norms.

Who's the guy you mention? It's hard to find the right search terms to look it up, and I haven't heard that story before.

Rapiscan, the maker of the device, was a client of Michael Chertoff's consulting company, and he was the head of Homeland Security when the scanners were put in place by his department.

I can say that I was required to use one to get back into the U.S. while transiting through Schiphol back in October 2013. No opt out, just the scanner and "I'm not forcing you to fly today - you can stay here." Pretty rude, too.

Since then, I always transit through Heathrow. It's a logistical nightmare with all those buses, but they've never coerced me to go through a scanner. Those biometric checkpoints, on the other hand...

[Note: This was with Dutch staff for British Airways; not sure if that's relevant.]

I experienced this at Schiphol as well, a bit after you. I told them I couldn't because of a medical condition, they gave me a pretty thorough pat-down, and let me on.

I don't know why you say that, while there are not scanners on every security lane at Heathrow they _cannot_ be refused, there is no pat-down alternative like in the US.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/26/new-body-scanners...

I believe this was previously the case, but it is now possible to opt out. I flew from Heathrow (Terminal 2) on Friday, refused the mm-wave scanner and had a pat-down in a private room instead.

From Heathrow's security FAQ page (http://www.heathrow.com/more/help-with-this-website/faqs/sec...):

The only alternative that can be offered to a scanner is a private search which allows for a more extensive hand-search than usual. Passengers will be escorted to a different location in the airport from the main search area (eg a private search room). The private search may involve the loosening and/or removal of clothing. A person undergoing a private search may ask to be accompanied by a witness.

This alternative screening method will take significantly more time than passing through a security scanner.

Yes, they can be refused at Heathrow. I did so just a few weeks ago. The alternative process wasn't unpleasant but did feel deliberately inefficient.

They are used all over Europe. Maybe some countries have opted not to use them, but I go through them every time I fly. In some cases there might be an opt-out for passengers, but they are certainly not banned.

They're used heavily in Australia too. And I always get picked up by them.

I think the person at the monitor wants to look at my weiner.

And if you care about your radiation dose (some of us do) you will opt for a molestation rather than a zap.

I tried researching this a while back and opted for the molestation (at least one qualified for that term). I recently went back to zapping out of cumulative annoyance. Any good resources that review the radiation type and dose?

Uh, no. Many physicists don't like the now-discontinued X-ray backscatter machines, but the mm wave devices are not ionizing radiation. Some guy explained why non-ionizing radiation isn't a problem in 1905; won the Nobel Prize for it, too.

> but the mm wave devices are not ionizing radiation

The science is still out on whether it's harmful or not. I got TSA pre so I can just avoid it, but before that I always opted out.

The science is only still out if you believe that mobile phones are causing cancer as well- ie for those who can't, or refuse, to understand science. For everyone else it's throughly settled

Sorry, what?

"The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is part of the World Health Organization (WHO). Its major goal is to identify causes of cancer. The IARC has classified RF fields as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” based on limited evidence of a possible increase in risk for brain tumors among cell phone users, and inadequate evidence for other types of cancer."

I would not call that "thoroughly settled".

Good chat, despite it's mildly aggressive nature. Here's what:

So, an organisation that basically labels everything in the world as either a potential carcinogen or carcinogen [0] when the second lowest score they award still reads as 'potential carcinogen' is more powerful than actual evidence, accrued across enormous longitudinal studies, first from scandinavia [1] but backed significantly by australia [2] and integrated into a plausable mechanism for increases in >70 year olds [3] combined with a finding that would actually revolutionise physics and biology for suggesting a new mechanism for the interaction of electromagnetism and biology?

Alarmists are everywhere [4]. But that doesn't mean they are right. It's easy to listen to fear, but just because someone is screaming and crying doesn't make them right. Serious claims deserve to be looked at seriously, and this one has been throughly examined, in research that is continuing. And it continues to be debunked by huge datasets - not just the referenced studies but also the million woman study [5][6] and others.

So yes, I repeat, for anyone versed in science, physics and with their head screwed on straight, the science is settled, and I challenge you to demonstrate either a mechanism or a throughly vetted dataset that proves otherwise. And i'll remind you that hitting the first answer on google does not constitute research.

[0] http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/healthcare/299632-cha...

[1] https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.d6387

[2] http://www.cancerepidemiology.net/article/S1877-7821(16)3005...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15378499

[4] http://theconversation.com/new-study-no-increase-in-brain-ca...

[5] http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2014/05/14/back-in-t...

[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24078152

Thank you for the information, very interesting. Increased inflammatory response seems a reasonable potential mechanism:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994795/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25251956

Perhaps it doesn't cause cancer per se, but promotes tumor growth or otherwise creates a more favorable environment.

It's a pretty thin bow to draw, but could be - so could general increase in average population blood glucose as more of the population suffers from metabolic disorder/T2DM but again that's promoting tumour growth not necessarially causing cancer.. and there certainly isn't enough evidence to say that. Studies are continuing but again when early weak studies show a positive result, and later good studies show no result, the chance of drawing a positive p value become lower and lower

Reply on news.ycombinator.com