"Three frequent air travelers are joining EPIC in the lawsuit: security expert Bruce Schneier, human rights activist Chip Pitts, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations legal counsel Nadhira Al-Khalili. The Petitioners have brought claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Fourth Amendment."
This isn't about religion. It's about invasion of privacy and degradation of the human spirit by an uncontrolled government bureaucracy that thinks it has a free hand by waving around the fear flag. This smells like the McCarthy era.
Of course its not about religion in itself. Religion is only one aspect of this, there were others: "Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Fourth Amendment"... there 4 other reasons.
Not sure why you choose to pick on religion in itself when it was within context of other reasons. For those of a religious persuasion the invasion of privacy may be an additional problem on top of the normal intrusiveness of these scanners.
Almost no politician would ever vote for removing this awful "security" measure. They would risk being blamed when another incompetent terrorist mastermind passes security and hopefully gets stopped by, now much more vigilant passengers. Going to the courts seems like a good way around that - sue the TSA.
If someone with experience on these types of issues could comment I would be very interested to learn if this has any chance of removing those damn machines from airports.
Make a list of congressmen and senators that require you to let nude photos of your children to be taken by government employees. It's all about how you frame the argument
It depends on how you position the wedge. You start by asking officials why they want to take naked pictures of innocent children. Once they are sufficiently embarrassed about the notion of taking naked pictures of children, you ask why they want to take naked pictures of innocent adults. Every time a TSA or DHS official talks about how they don't store the pictures, bring up the US Marshals Service storing naked pictures of children and adults (http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20012583-281.html) using the same technology, despite providing the /exact/ same assurances the TSA is providing now.
When the TSA officials talk about the opt-out process and the subsequent genital groping, ask about the TSA agent that was charged with raping a kid (http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100310child...) and wanting to keep that child as a sex slave. Do parents really want strangers feeling up the breasts and genitals of their underage children? What type of person applies for a job where they are allowed to grope children? Is it any better when those same agents want to grope adults?
It's not advanced screening technology, it's a machine that takes naked pictures of children and stores them.
It's not a thorough pat down, it's having your genitals groped by strangers.
Control the language and you control the discussion.
"They" aren't similarly so squeamish about waving fear and flags around to force body scans and invasive pat downs on us. This is an issue that is important and we must use tools that work to get it to stop.
A good first step would be to eliminate separate security lines for First Class/VIP and everyone else. I suspect security lines would end up being shorter if our elected officials had to go through exactly the same process as the rest of us.
As a hack, just go through the first class line regardless of the class you're flying in. I know several people who do this, and none have been questioned about it. The obvious response is: "Why should paying the airline more money get people better treatment from the Federal government?".
In my experience this works every time at Dulles international (IAD) but never works at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL). At ATL you get sent to the back of the normal line.
The hack is to print FIRST on your boarding pass. The person checking whether or not you are allowed in the priority line does not have access to the reservation system to check that you are actually in first class. You keep your real boarding pass in your pocket and show that to the TSA and gate agent.
Note: untested. I get to use the first-class lines anyway :P
His intention is to make them secondary. I'm sure the TSA would have none of that - it would just be magnetometer set to the highest sensitivity first - scanner second - for everyone.
Why didn't they add some kind of protection act for children to this lawsuit as well?
They are making children go through these things and then showing them naked to who knows? That violation should surpass the far more vague "religious freedom".
On that note, who says only two sides can play the "think of the children" card? To demonstrate otherwise, I'm going to make a third side which says that naked children aren't inherently that big a deal, and that greater harm comes from the implicit sexualization of children, and the paranoia about sexual predators that it causes. I don't really mind backscatter machines in airports; I find them funny and entertaining, if only for the vaguely Caramelldansen-like hands-above-the-head pose they had me assume last time I went through one.
What does bother me is how every time there's a sensational incident -- a terrorist attack, or someone getting kidnapped, or whatever -- people start screaming for someone in the government to DO SOMETHING!!1, and we end up spending an inordinate amount of time and resources guarding against something that happened once and isn't too likely to happen again. Smart terrorists would stay the hell away from airports; they'd get a higher marginal return on their efforts if they went for easier targets like sports stadiums or crowded subways. And if that starts happening, what are we going to do? Put backscatter machines and security guards everywhere? Completely sacrifice all privacy to assuage our fears about the most unlikely events, while neglecting the real killers, like car crashes and cancer?
So to hell with it. Go ahead and make me remove my shoes at the airport and strike a ridiculous pose in a backscatter machine; I'll just laugh it off. What worries me is the preposterous irrationality, and where it'll lead if we give it free rein for long enough. Won't somebody please think of the children?
> people start screaming for someone in the government
> to DO SOMETHING!!1,
This may have been the case with 9/11, but I didn't see anyone screaming at governments to 'DO SOMETHING!!11' the last couple of times that things happened (underpants bomber, shoe bomber, liquid explosives conspiracy, etc). If anything politicians and officials have been proactive (in the sense of being reactive before their bosses -- the general public -- hound them to be reactive).
I take from what you say as touching on something I've often thought, we're treating the symptoms of an example problem as though it was an epidemic. I think that there are two sides to the security theater, what they show, and what they don't. I think that these devices will catch people sure, and make a great number of people like yourself sort of a comfortable indifferent, but I do believe that there is indeed a total package of risk management, and these public faces of the effort is just the tip of the iceberg. The evidence I have of this is when I went to Mexico one time and my significant other bought some kind of pill with my card. They could care less about me at the border, they went for the exact pocket of her purse. It took a matter of minutes, and we were on our way. I have some theories about how they might have done it, and I'm sure it was simple, but it is by no means obvious (maybe my CC info? the way she carried herself?) exactly how it was done.
I want the airlines to pay attention to what I'm about to say: Until these electronic strip search machines are taken out, I will NEVER fly again. I've done nothing wrong and I will not tolerate being treated like a criminal simply because you think you can get away with it.
It's not the airlines. It's the TSA, an entirely separate organization. I've little doubt that most of the airlines hate this - it almost certainly negatively impacts their bottom line.
I wonder if women might, on mass, protest these machines by saying 'I may be pregnant' or 'I am breastfeeding'. If this is a suitable means of gentle civil disobedience, perhaps another method is suggest for men? I myself am considering to use the 'possibly pregnant' method next time I fly in the US and am curious what the response will be, and how I am treated in the pat-down.
The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of "administrative searches", which aren't targeted, don't require a warrant, don't require individual suspicion, and which are used to protect public safety and not to conduct criminal investigations.
IANAL, but I believe this also allows the cops to set up random DUI roadblocks (ie, untargeted, no warrant, no individual suspicion, public good, etc).
Those roadblocks clearly haven't been ruled unconstitutional (they happen in Illinois all the time), but it's worth noting that they're set up expressly in the service of criminal investigations, which is exactly what admin searches aren't supposed to be about.
For slightly more context, note that there is a scheme of "primary" and "secondary" moving violations, which is why technically you're not supposed to be able to get pulled over for not having your seatbelt on.
Mostly what they're doing at those checkpoints is racking up compliance tickets, which is obviously a load of BS.
Fortunately, this is a problem easily addressed by technology.
A few months back I went thru just such a 'safety check'. It was on the state line between Alabama and Georgia. Alabama had ~15 units and a portable command post stopping all the traffic east bound into Georgia, while Georgia had ~20-25 units stopping all the traffic west bound into Alabama.
They took my license, insurance, examined them carefully, then walked around and looked at my license plate, handed them back (with a smile) and said to have a nice evening. I've never seen so many blue lights in one place in my life.
A few days later I described this to a Florida Highway patrol trooper. He chuckled and said it sounded like someone wanted to look good for the 11 o'clock TV news.
The purpose of this lawsuit is to answer that question. Though I have to say that for the past 9 years, the constitution, judiciary, and legislative branches of the U.S. haven't seemed to have much influence on anything that is supposedly "needed to fight terrorism".
That's not true. The lawsuit doesn't challenge the doctrine of administrative searches, and goes as far as to concede that full-body scans are constitutional as a secondary screening measure (for people who set off the metal detector, or who can't go through the detector, or have prosthetics, or are on a watchlist, or become random selectees).
At issue in this lawsuit is the specific question of whether an electronic strip search can qualify as an administrative search, which must balance the public interest against the intrusiveness of the search.
It seems to me the most expeditious way to keep people safe from bomb attacks at the airport would be to have more flights with smaller airplanes that way you reduce the concentration of people and remove the queues. If you have 40 passengers on a plane and 10 of them are terrorists, then that leaves 30+crew to resist them less small children and cripples (so probably, pulling a number out of the air, 15-25 people to resist 10).
But you still have queues as 100,000 people all have to get into the airport through one security point.
At my local airport they have even built it underground so you queue for security in a long sloping concrete passageway - brilliantly designed for maximum casualties, hardest exit and most difficult to fight a fire in
As exciting as this sounds, the dates are all at least several months old. Anybody know more about the current status of this, or the direction it's heading?
The first thing you have to understand here is that the constitutionality of airport searches isn't in question. SCOTUS has upheld a doctrine of "administrative searches", taken in order to advance public safety rather than criminal investigations, which are explicitly intended to apply universally, without a warrant, and without individualized suspicion.
The second bit of background you should have is 49 USC 44925, which mandates that the TSA research and deploy advanced screening technology, specifically to detect nonmetallic objects. I'm no lawyer, but I do enjoy reading SCOTUS civil liberties opinions, and by and large the court seems to give deference to the legislature when no clear constitutional issue is at stake. In sum: the court has an "out" here, which is "the intent to search passengers is already constitutional, so if this variant of the search is so bad, pass a law".
The Supreme Court has not outlawed strip searches (obviously they can't, as virtually everyone who gets arrested and booked is strip searched, guilty or not). If you read the Savana Redding opinion (8-1 "it's unconstitutional to strip search an 8th grade girl for ibuprofen"), you'll see things like "Its indignity does not outlaw the search, but it does implicate the rule that "the search [be] ‘reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place.’". That is, unfortunately, not a hard case for TSA to make. The fact that the Savana search was for "nondangerous contraband" also factored into the opinion.
(If you want to throw up in your mouth a little bit, track down Clarence Thomas' dissent which argued that it is indeed constitutional to strip search a 13 year old girl in school to track down Advil.)
Finally, the arguments EPIC makes here do not seem awesome. Part of their argument turns on administrative rulemaking procedures at TSA, which TSA seems to dismantle efficiently in their response. Other parts drag in things like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which is (a) a longshot argument for petitioners who can claim no personal religions infringed on and (b) is neatly sidestepped by the TSA "opt-out" rule. Speaking of opt-out: EPIC claims that there is no effective opt-out procedure, which is also a hard argument to defend without an example of someone refused an opt-out. And on this janky scaffold of arguments, EPIC wants an emergency injunction against the scanners?
Don't get me wrong, I'm obviously in their corner on this. I'm thrilled if they win. And they've got some painful evidence, such as FOIA docs showing TSA required machines with store/transmit capabilities (oops!). But my guess is that if we want to get rid of the strip search machines, we're going to have to do it by voting out the people who approved them.
You're mistaken in practically every assertion you make above.
Without going over a point-by-point of the various ways your post is incorrect (e.g. regarding the scope of administrative searches; the ability of the SCOTUS to regulate searches at jails; the actual lawsuits which have resulted in most jails being much more limited in the scope of their searches absent reasonable suspicion; the TSA's inability to detect shoe bombs with the normal x-ray machines and underwear powder bombs with the new scanners; people who HAVE been refused an opt-out (reports at FlyerTalk.com); "voting out" the people who approved them, when a primary mover behind them is the Chertoff group, headed by former DHS head Michael Chertoff, who stand to gain financially from their lobbying thanks to ties to Rapiscan; and so forth), I am going to repost something from the other day which bears repeating.
There are multiple problems with TSA screening in general, and backscatter machines in particular, which are listed below.
As these machines are ill-advised, you currently have the option to "opt out" and receive a pat-down instead.
PAT-DOWNS:
New guidelines just instituted for the pat-down procedure include groping of breasts, buttocks, and crotches. [8][15]
Even for minors. [13] [14]
"My wife tells me that they grabbed my [10-year-old] son's privates and he was crying the whole time and all she could do was stand there and tell him it was going to be OK." [16]
Due to this, the ACLU is now taking reports of pat-down abuse:
Note that going through a scan does NOT exempt you from a pat-down grope. You may be groped if you trigger a metal detector, or if your backscatter shows an "anomaly", or for any other reason or no reason at all. There are also gate screenings, where you will be pulled aside at the gate, and since there are no machines, you will be patted down / groped.
IMPACT
About 1 in 5 people are sexually assaulted by age 18. [1]
This means that even "normal" pat-downs are extremely distressing or damaging to a significant percentage of the population, and these new procedures are simply sexual assault under color of authority, which can be traumatic. Victims of sexual assault, molestation, and rape often feel like they are re-living their experiences, and even those who don't have such a background may experience emotional damage from the procedure.
I defy anyone to belittle the experience of victims of sexual abuse, who do not want any unwanted touching forced upon them, least of all groping of private areas.
BACKSCATTER SCANS
All the official images have been redacted. Here is what it REALLY looks like, scaled down:
This is an artist's self-portrait using a Rapiscan Secure 1000 security scanner [17]. In addition to clearly seeing his genitals, note the penetration into his kneecaps, shin bones, and feet. Then consider the unprotected areas, such as face, neck, and eyes. Look more closely and you can see the bones in his forearms (radius, ulna), part of his humerus, and his hands.
Then consider the findings of people like David Brenner, the head of Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research, who explains that the dose is actually 20 times higher than the official estimate. [2] [3] [4] [5]
The energy is absorbed mostly in the skin, NOT throughout the volume of the entire body as with other types of ionizing radiation. Also, the dosage is delivered in a few (under 30) seconds. You have to consider dose per unit time; the figures often mentioned for long flights mention the total dose, which is distributed over a period of HOURS.
PRIVACY
The TSA originally claimed that these machines were simply INCAPABLE of storing images. That wasn't true:
"The documents, released by the Department of Homeland Security, reveal that Whole Body Imaging machines can record, store, and transmit digital strip search images of Americans" [6]
This also goes for MMW (millimeter wave) machines used by courthouses:
"Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images" [7]
ANONYMITY
Some locations are now using a full-color video camera in addition to the backscatter / MMW imager. This means your full-body color portrait and unclothed image can be linked; and if they scan your boarding pass or other identifying information, they can link your images to your name and other personal information (phone number, address, BIRTH DATE). [12]
SLIPPERY SLOPE
Originally the TSA claimed the backscatter machines were optional and there was no penalty for declining (no groping); that they had no capability to store images; that they would NEVER be used as primary screening instead of metal detectors (now they ARE being used as primary screening in some airports with plans for the rest -- see [9] [10]).
The supposed motivation for storing images would be in case of another attempt like the underwear bomber, to go back and "check the tapes" to see what they missed.
You should probably assume that if you are scanned, your full-color and naked images along with personal identifying information will be stored by Federal agencies in perpetuity.
EVEN DHS HEAD REFUSES BODY SCANNER
"Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano yesterday hailed them as an important breakthrough for airport security and the fight against terrorism."
"Yet when it came to testing the devices - which produce chalky, naked X-ray images of passengers - she turned the floor over to some brave volunteers." [11]
OPT-OUTS MAY NOT LAST
In the U.K., whole-body scanners have been mandatory for some time. This may well come to the U.S.
So, you will be forced to be scanned, after which you may be groped anyway, then groped again at the gate, and your images both clothed and naked will be in the bowels of a government database, which then gets turned over to various private industry bidders, who all will have a copy of all your information.
Some scanners take images in real-time at a decent framerate, which means your 3D biometric information of every part of your body will soon be recorded forever and used in any number of ways.
>The energy is absorbed mostly in the skin, NOT throughout the volume of the entire body as with other types of ionizing radiation. Also, the dosage is delivered in a few (under 30) seconds. You have to consider dose per unit time; the figures often mentioned for long flights mention the total dose, which is distributed over a period of HOURS.
First, your comparison is misleading. The dose of a backscatter x-ray is about 0.02 uSv [1]. The dose rate at 40,000 ft is around 6 uSv/hour [2]. Simply sitting in an airplane exposes you to the equivalent of a backscatter x-ray every 12 seconds (not "hours"). The dose rates are comparable; the flights last hundreds of times longer, hence give hundreds of times higher doses.
Second, your emphasis on "dose per unit time" (or dose rate) isn't actually important. For low doses (and these are EXTREMELY low doses), there is no difference between fast and slow exposure [3]:
>When you are asked whether there is a critical time period over which 1 rem of dose may have a greater biological impact than it might otherwise have, the answer is "No." One rem of dose is sufficiently low that whether it was delivered within one second or spread over a year or more, we would not expect any difference in biological effects.
(Note 1 rem = 0.01 Sievert (Sv) -- 500,000x higher than a backscatter x-ray).
This is a little long, so I am going to summarize at the top. I will show that:
1) The estimates are much higher than what you cite;
2) Typical exposure when flying is much lower than what you cite;
3) Dose per unit time DOES matter;
4) The HPS article references their own position paper which doesn't mention differences with short time intervals;
5) The regulations for low-dose exposure are extrapolated from high dose data, because of a lack of studies at low doses;
6) Because of this, the HPS recommends against quantitative risk estimates, because the precise risk is hard to quantify;
7) The lack of data means they are being disingenuous when they say no, as they lack the data to establish it. Note the phrasing: "we would not expect" -- this despite the data we DO have, which establishes that units of time matter;
8) Despite that one position paper, which tries to dismiss health risks below 5-10 rem, their own position paper on backscatter scanners recommends per-screening and per-year (time limit!) maximums far below that threshold;
9) Going by the contact information and president, the HPS may have turned into an industry front. Citing HPS might be as credible on these issues as citing Philip Morris spokespeople on the dangers of cigarettes.
In order:
---------
1) "According to the Health Physics Society (HPS), a person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.005 millirems (mrem, a unit of absorbed radiation). American Science and Engineering, Inc., actually puts that number slightly higher, in the area of .009 mrem."
That's .05-.09 uSv. Secondly, as previously mentioned, Brenner estimates the effective dose is 20 times as high due to factors like less volume for absorption.
That means the estimated dosage is in the range of 1-1.8 uSv, or 50 to 90 times what you mention. Not a trivial discrepancy.
2)40,000 feet is close to the altitude ceiling for most commercial aircraft. With a 30,000-foot cruising altitude, the exposure drops in half; at 20,000 feet, it drops to a sixth; at 10,000 feet, it's about 1/35th. According to your second reference.
Short business trips may even be below 10,000 feet. It takes too much time (and fuel) to reach riskier altitudes.
So "simply sitting in an airplane" is not the same as cruising at 40,000 feet on a transatlantic flight.
3) You say:
> Second, your emphasis on "dose per unit time" (or dose rate) isn't actually important.
Let me quote from your own source:
"There have been numerous biological experiments conducted, with nonhuman organisms, that demonstrate that the rate at which radiation dose is delivered can affect the extent of biological response. Thus a sufficiently high dose delivered over a period of a few minutes may be expected to have a greater biological impact than the same dose spread over a year."
The only question is what constitutes a "sufficiently high" dose, due to extrapolation. See 5).
4) Further, the terse "no" answer looked disingenuous. The cited position paper link was broken but I tracked it down.
It appears to be "Radiation Risk in Perspective", PS010-2 (which I assume is the updated version of PS010-1).
It has nothing to say about doses over short time periods.
"the Health Physics Society recommends against quantitative estimation of health risks below an individual dose of 5 rem in one year or a lifetime dose of 10 rem above that received from natural sources."
7) The whole point of their objection was that we lack the empirical evidence to extrapolate from high doses to low doses. Then the article you cite does exactly that. They go from saying, "we lack proof that the answer is X" to saying, "the answer is ~X".
8) The recommended standard "limits the reference effective dose delivered to the subject to 0.25 microsieverts (25 microrem) per screening. Additionally, a screening facility should not expose any individual to more than 250 microsieverts (25 millirem) reference effective dose in a year."
"Use of Ionizing Radiation for Security Screening Individuals" PS017-1
How they can go from saying in the first paper, "However, below 5–10 rem (which includes occupational and environmental exposures), risks of health effects are either too small to be observed or are nonexistent" to supporting a maximum of 0.025 rem per year is entirely unclear.
9) Doing some digging, PS010-2 lists a single reference:
"National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements. Uncertainties in fatal cancer risk estimates used in radiation protection. Bethesda, MD: NCRP; NCRP Report No. 126; 1997."
"In early 1996, Dr. Maher accepted the position as Director of the Environmental Laboratory for Yankee Atomic Electric Company. The laboratory provided ongoing environmental laboratory, remediation and consultative health physics services for commercial nuclear power, Department of Energy and Department of Defense clients. [...] In 2004, Dr. Maher joined Dade Moeller & Associates"
"Hirsch then zeroed in on Dade Moeller’s radiation plan and on the controversial company itself, whose namesake testified back in the 1990s that money spent on cleaning up Cold War-era nuclear facilities was being wasted since there would be a cure for cancer.
Hirsch also questioned the lab’s integrity and pointed out that it is a major Department of Energy (DOE) contractor. The area of Rocketdyne where most of the nuclear mishaps occurred was operated by the DOE, which is responsible for cleaning up the mess. It also borders Runkle Canyon, which leads Hirsch to believe that Dade Moeller shouldn’t be overseeing radiation sampling there.
Some of Hirsch’s harshest criticism was aimed at Dade Moeller’s plan to take a “tiny soil sample” every 19 acres based on the lab’s misconstruing of EPA standards regarding soil investigations of potentially polluted properties. The proximity of Runkle Canyon to Rocketdyne, and the fact that 58 soil samples in a previous test all read high for the leukemia-causing radionuclide strontium-90, were among several critical considerations that Dade Moeller ignored, according to Hirsch.
“If you want to hire someone to make your problem go away, you hire Dade Moeller,” Hirsch asserted. “That’s a generality, the reputation. If you read the actual report, I’m afraid it is completely reinforced. Every time you can manipulate an input, make a number go down, they do so.”
Dade Moeller was the go-to lab for a covert set of strontium-90 tests of Runkle Canyon’s soil in 2005, as this reporter previously uncovered. Those tests, which took just five soil samples, were later dismissed as useless by the California Department of Health Services, the very department that conducted the secret limited sampling with Dade Moeller."
"Hirsch said the conclusions of the report should immediately raise suspicion since the developer hired the consultant who created the report, Dade Moeller & Associates. He called for DTSC to use an independent consultant.
“The city wanted an independent study,” Hirsch said. “You can’t hand that over to the advocate for the developer.”"
This seems to be in stark contrast to the activities of the founder of the Health Physics Society. He was the first president of HPS, from 1955-1957, and was apparently a real thorn in the side of the nuclear establishment.
Yeah, uh, I don't disagree with anything (except your first graf) you wrote, and I'm glad to give you a chance to get that off your chest, but, want to bet?
(Oh, I get it. I read your comment and replied while waiting for someone for dinner; now, at home, it's apparent that you think I'm somehow in favor of full body scans. Read to the end of the comment. Note: I don't think you actually replied to any of my points.)
Well said nubian. I sent this link to a civil liberties lawyer who didn't think much at all of tptacek's comment and was surprised to see it rated so highly.
From my experience full body scanners are much faster and more convenient compared to traditional system when you take off your shoes and go through metal detector. If you are unlucky an airport worker additionally scans you with a hand metal scanner. With full body scanner you just enter the cabin and voila! The scan takes 3 seconds.
1776: "Then it's agreed, gentlemen, in order to secure our rights as a free people, we will risk embarrassment, imprisonment, expropriation, bankruptcy, bodily harm, exile and hanging."
2010: "Of course I'll waive my rights. I don't want to miss my connecting flight."
At SFO, my only experience with them, one still has to doff ones shoes, and walk through a metal detector. As such, the only choice you get is between a firm pat-down or an electronic strip search.
I choose the former. It annoys them and I get to make at least one TSA agent uncomfortable.
Yes, she certainly can and she will (she's certainly made of sterner stuff than I am), but I consider it my privilege to serve as an outer "bumper" to the real world for my family.
It's not even the nudity that bothers me, personally. It's the radiation. I didn't sign up for unshielded exposure to dangerous levels of radiation when I bought my airplane ticket.
Ultimately, I think a public health angle would have been a far more effective tact to take in the lawsuit or in the arguments against these scanners. It's the trump card. Privacy always loses an argument to fear and "security" in our post-9/11 national discourse. Sad to say, but that's true. Health, though? That's a different matter.
The Health Physics Society (HPS) reports that a person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.05 μSv (or 0.005 mrems) of radiation; American Science and Engineering Inc. reports 0.09 μSv (0.009 mrems). At the high altitudes typical of commercial flights, naturally occurring cosmic radiation is considerably higher than at ground level. The radiation dose for a six hour flight is 20 μSv (2 mrems) - 200 to 400 times larger than a backscatter scan. According to U.S. regulatory agencies, "1 mrem per year is a negligible dose of radiation, and 25 mrem per year from a single source is the upper limit of safe radiation exposure".
The radiation exposure with Backscatter X-Ray's is really a non-issue.
IMO its much more damning to bring on the "think of the children"/"The Chinese government can hack your wife's nude pics" angle to convince the public against these machines.
"However, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have argued that the amount of radiation is higher than claimed by the TSA and body scanner manufacturers because the doses were calculated as if distributed throughout the whole body, but the radiation from backscatter x-ray scanners is focused on just the skin and surrounding tissues"
"Furthermore, other scientists claim the health effects are backscatter are well understood whereas those from millimeter wave scanners are not"
Some of the machines being deployed by the TSA are millimeter wave scanners, BTW.
> The radiation exposure with Backscatter X-Ray's is really a non-issue.
Unfortunately that's not the case.
"David Brenner, the head of Columbia University’s Centre for Radiological Research, says the concentration on the skin – one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the body – means the radiation dose is actually 20 times higher than the official estimate."
The two issues are that 1) the energy is absorbed by the surface of the body instead of throughout the volume, so the effective dose to affected tissues is much higher, and 2) that the dose is received in seconds, instead of over a period of hours.
For a frequent traveler flying about once a week, ~100 departures per year, if scanned every time that adds a non-trivial 10-20 mrem.
And that's assuming that the cited dose is correct and not a significant under-estimate; where's the independent testing?
Here's a long post with numerous references regarding this general topic:
It doesn't matter if it's actually dangerous. All you need is a CNN headline to whip people into a frenzy: "Could Airport Body Scanners Give You [Cancer|AIDS|Herpes|Athletes Foot]?"
If this procedure causes 800 cancers per year then the flights themselves would be causing nearly a hundred thousand cancer cases per year. The radiation from the scanner is far, far safer than the exposure you receive during the flight that caused you to get scanned in the first place.
Also, we should keep in mind that the health effects of radiation may not be something you can linearly extrapolate to low doses, and there is evidence to suggest that they aren't.
That's not been my observation: queues are longer, and people have to take more stuff out of their pockets for the full body scanners. The scanner also takes longer: you have to be stationary for a bit, while you just walk through the metal detectors. The speed of the metal detector queues is limited by the speed of the hand-luggage x-ray machine, not by the speed of the metal detector.
FWIW, it's only in US airports that I've had to take off my shoes for the past year or so.
That's because the person in the other room can stare and share your image for quite some time after it's taken. 3 seconds for you, but as long as they want for them.
However, I feel entering a country which I'm not a citizen of (like the US), is a privilege, not a right. Thus, they can ask anything of me they want..and I can chose not to enter the country.
yes, I understand that, and I have no problems with a separate set of rules (which, in fact, already exist). I'm just pointing out a different perspective.
Note that (unless otherwise worded) the Constitution's "protections" are actually restrictions on the government, and apply everywhere and always to government agents acting under constitutional authority. As such, the nationality of the those with whom the government interacts is irrelevant.
I imagine that you can opt-out of the electronic strip search, just as US citizens can.
An interesting, though sadly irrelevant note: the Constitution does not grant to the Federal government the power to regulate foreign immigration.
> However, I feel entering a country which I'm not
> a citizen of (like the US), is a privilege, not a
> right. Thus, they can ask anything of me they want..
> and I can chose not to enter the country.
What about when your flight makes an emergency landing in the US (i.e. a passenger has a heart-attack)? You are forced to enter the country even though you may not want to.
This was the case with some Iranian refugees that were trying to seek asylum in Canada. They had fake Greek passports, and their flight had to make an emergency landing in the US. The US officials then arrested them for trying to enter the US with fake passports.
"Three frequent air travelers are joining EPIC in the lawsuit: security expert Bruce Schneier, human rights activist Chip Pitts, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations legal counsel Nadhira Al-Khalili. The Petitioners have brought claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Fourth Amendment."