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Comment by tetrep | Hacker News Reader

There's a wealth of public transit options that will reliably get you from Manhattan to JFK in about an hour.

I haven't waited in a security line at an airport for more than 30 minutes in years. When lines get long they drop the security theater and start letting people through very quickly. I imagine people who are willing to pay for SST would also pay the troll toll and spend comparatively very little time in security lines.

For context, I fly (usually coast to coast) about a dozen or more times a year.

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I was (trying) to fly out of jfk terminal 7 yesterday coast to coast. The line at security was 2-3 hours long and there is no precheck lane. They were still naked scanning over 50% of passengers. I had to cut the line to make my flight.

This is not typical, but it does still happen even at the airports you mentioned.

Just curious, which terminal did you fly out of?

>jfk terminal 7

> they were still naked scanning

The X-ray scanners with the naked images have all been removed. The RF backscatter machines do not produce full body imagery, they highlight areas of concern on a cartoon figure.

Turn around after you go through and you can see exactly what they see. There are no back rooms with naked images connected to the RF scanners.

The software dumbs the images down before displaying them, but the actual resolution of the scan is greater than what's shown on the screen.

The display is a generic human outline, but the TSA still requires[1] that its scanners all save the full images and the images produced by millimeter wave scanners. Those images[2] are about as revealing as the backscatter ones. NB: check the source for that image- it comes from the TSA's own site about how the millimeter scanner works. It's not a backscatter image, it's from the machines they use currently. That page has since been taken down. In a previous version of the machine[3] some marshalls improperly saved over 35,000 images of naked people, which were then leaked.

So you aren't literally being seen naked by people 10 feet away any more, but you're still being photographed through your clothing and if the TSA has any reason to check their archives at the time you were passing through the passport (ie checking if someone snuck something onboard, or validating the machines by hand), people will be looking at you in your birthday suit.

And for the record, I am not a nut about this stuff. There's no health issue with them, or even with the backscatter machines. It seems slightly puritanical to be outraged over it, and I personally am only slightly more indignant than I am about having all of my stuff X-rayed. If it was actually justified I'd be less bothered by the scanners than I am by getting naked for my doctor. However the TSA is a ridiculous imposition and the leadership is every bit as insane as the leadership of MADD or the NRA. They actively believe they're entitled to this kind of thing and were actively trying to extend their domain to other kinds of transport, sports arenas, public buildings etc. The TSA is fucking awful and its often more practical to assume the worst about anything they're doing until proven otherwise.

[1]: https://epic.org/open_gov/foia/TSA_Procurement_Specs.pdf

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mmw_large.jpg

[3]: https://gizmodo.com/5690749/these-are-the-first-100-leaked-b...

Here’s what I thought mmw actually looked like;

https://www.nap.edu/read/24936/chapter/4

https://www.nap.edu/read/24936/chapter/15

Also the Gizmodo video showing the leaked mmw images matches up with that fairly well;

https://gizmodo.com/5690749/these-are-the-first-100-leaked-b...

But then on L3’s site you see this for their SafeView product:

http://www.sds.l-3com.com/advancedimaging/safeview.htm

But then for the version TSA uses:

http://www.sds.l-3com.com/advancedimaging/provision-2.htm

Interesting.... I believe the difference may be “active” vs “passive” millimeter wave scanners, where the active type can provide a higher resolution image?

The Gizmodo images are the older Brijot passive scanners that look like this: https://sm.asisonline.org/ASIS%20SM%20Article%20Images/10-12...

Passive can also do high resolution[1]. It depends heavily on the wavelength being measured. Your second link is talking about far infrared (300+ GHz), or close to. Those waves are blocked more by clothing compared to the <100 GHz (30 GHz?) that Brijot and the current scanners use. The high frequency stuff will show a dark spot where something may be hidden, but is very dim compared to active scanners. They have similar resolution but are much blurrier.

Passive scanners at 30 GHz are by necessity lower resolution at the same price point, because the human body doesn't emit too much around there. However since all the waves are coming from the body, anything hidden under the clothing will block the waves completely and show up as an obvious dark spot. You don't need detail because of that.

Active scanners on the other hand are super detailed, again by necessity. That wavelength goes straight through clothing but since waves are being produced by the machine, anything besides metal will look basically the same as skin. You need to be able to make out the shape and texture to identify it, so the sensors are very high resolution. They need to see the trigger of a gun to know it isn't just a weird rectangle, so that means they can also see your foreskin.

[1]: http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/sites/default/files/...

30 minutes is still a hell of a long time to wait, especially for a TSA check which is next to worthless.

> When lines get long they drop the security theater and start letting people through very quickly.

Which airports? US domestic flights? Because internationally I've never seen this happen.

US airport security is not separated between international and domestic flights. I don't know what the parent poster meant but it can't be that, at least not for US airports.

Any airport which doesn't fly to the USA.

Generally, security rules are made and enforced by USA authorities. Any airport which doesn't fly to the USA only needs to follow local rules of the country they are in, which while typically are as strict as the USA rules, are typically not enforced.

Some airports for example only xray one in 10 bags at peak times, or none at all if the machines broken.

Source: Personal experience only, but I've been to a lot of airports.

Hartsfield International does this regularly in Atlanta when lines backup too much. They'll open additional security lines, divert people into the Special Needs and TSA Pre-Check lines, a shut off the nudy scanners (backscatter x-ray) and just run everyone through the metal detectors as fast as possible.

> I haven't waited in a security line at an airport for more than 30 minutes in years. When lines get long they drop the security theater and start letting people through very quickly. I imagine people who are willing to pay for SST would also pay the troll toll and spend comparatively very little time in security lines.

I fly very frequently, and JFK is (unfortunately) my home airport.

For all my complaints about how awful security at JFK is, it's relatively fast. With pre-check, it's always under ten minutes from the moment I step in line to the moment I have my bags in hand on the other side.

Without pre-check, it is slower, but nothing close to 30 minutes, unless you get pulled aside for secondary and/or detained (at which point there's no predicting how long things will take).

For what it's worth, security at JFK tends to be a bit slower than other US airports that have pre-check, but still noticeably faster than most other airports that I've been to globally in the last few years.

Ditto. I waited in line at SFO once for 25 minutes and it felt like an eternity. For domestic flights, I don't bother showing up to the airport more than 30-40 mins before boarding time. Even on international flights, I target maybe 90 minutes before boarding, and even then, it's usually WAY too much. But you have to be mindful of the baggage checkin deadline.

It still happens. Just last night, I was stuck in line for over 30 minutes, at a small regional airport.

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