Come on TSA....
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.....
......Except of course where you want to hide that your new kit CAN make kiddy porn, along with pics of wobbly wangers and saggy boobs....
US airport body scanners can store and export images
Full body scanners at US airports can transmit digital strip search images of people, contrary to US Transportation Security Authority assurances. The TSA has maintained that such scanners cannot store or transmit scanned body images of people, stating that "the machines have zero storage capability." A TSA release stated …
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 12:28 GMT Mark 110
Poor security staff
I really feel for the operators - they are going to have to look at some horrendous stuff. Lerts face it the average human looks pretty ropey naked.
As for anyone trying to say these images are pornographic thats utter tosh. Surely porn involves a sexual context - standing in a scanner in an airport has no sexual context. Embarrising yes - porn no.
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Wednesday 13th January 2010 00:54 GMT heyrick
What's porn?
To some odd people, pictures of shoes involve sexual content. I once peripherally knew somebody who enjoyed nappies (US-diapers) a little too much.
To YOU and I a bunch of monchrome pictures taken at airport security is probably not in the slightest bit titilating. I'm sure there's somebody out there who'd pay for them..... especially if, say, Katie Holmes, Sandra Bullock, or somebody else frequently seen in glossy mags was "scanned".
Embarrassing? Always. I still fail to see why these pictures are even necessary, can't a member of staff just look and say "nope, not carrying an Uzi"?
Pornographic? That depends on who is looking.
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Wednesday 13th January 2010 01:10 GMT TimeMaster T
Porn?
How an image is generated is irrelevant to how the viewer perceives an image.
How many males (and females) where sexually excited as teenagers by photos of topless native woman in National Geographic? The photos in NG are not sexual in nature nor where they meant to be sexually exciting but some viewers still considered them sexually exciting. Remember "Porky's"?
Or the Page 3 Girl, those are not sexual in content or context, just a topless buxom baby against a plain background and yet look at how exciting they are to some.
Its =>perception<= of an image, not the context of its creation that matters.
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 12:28 GMT Paul_Murphy
I see now.
'Our scanner cannot store data' - but you can plug in a USB device and it can store it on that, or you can use the ethernet port and a NAS, or indeed a remote networked server with petabyte RAID.
'But it's not ON the scanner' - true but you're still lying aren't you?
'err - no?'
Ok - so which political party will remove all this stupid over-mothering of the population and bring back some decent values and the concept of personal responsibility?
Roll on the elections.
ttfn
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 12:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
well,
I'm more bothered about the scanners in the first place. They seem to go down the same route as our police state - "you are guilty until proven innocent".
I will happily pass through any unintrusive detection system that leaves my privacy intact and does not impact on my journey time. But to be forced to basically submit to a full strip search is disgusting and only hands the terrorists their victory. I'm fully in favour of profiling. That would mean I can walk through a simple scanner and be on my way and those who fit the terrorist profiles can be subjected to any inhumane treatment imaginable. Then the terrorists would've LOST, normal people would be able to carry on as before but the terrorists kind would be treated in a more harsh way.
We mustn't let the fuckers win.
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 13:26 GMT gjw
Well...
You basically describe a kind of Israeli system (although it's not nearly as brutal) which works very fine for them. I wouldn't mind if they introduced this worldwide and it's really worth to think it over.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/what-can-israel-teach-the-u-s-about-airport-security/
Human rights is, always have been and should be, a multilateral relationship. Perhaps it's time that our Muslim friends are going to recognise that fact. And yes I do see that generalisations are bad, in principle.
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 18:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: well ...
And how exactly can you tell (by looking) that someone is Muslim?
What about white converts? What happens if you just so happen to look like a Brazilian plumber? (or have some other dusky / swarthy appearance that is nothing to do with Asia, the Middle East or Africa).
Basically you're saying that any non-white is fair game (regardless of where they're from or what they believe in).
Perhaps these 'anything goes' interrogations should only be applied to circumcised men (regardless of race) because all Muslims are circumcised, so you can be sure that uncut men are not followers of Islam.
That way my black ass could get through customs no problem (seeing as I'm wholly in tact)
:oP
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 12:34 GMT david wilson
Testt/training modes are presumably needed?
Surely, a scanner that didn't have the capability of saving images for training (or testing) purposes would be pretty crap, unless it was thought worthwhile buying different scanners to do the testing on (even if they were basically the same scanner with different firmware).
In the end you have to trust the people involved not to [be stupid enough to] capture images when they shouldn't be doing that, and then disseminating them, and/or trust the manufacturers to set functionality such that in normal usage, images are always transient.
Stepping back, however, and thinking more generally about a surveillance society, unless an image is identifiable as a person, or comes labelled with a name, there's no obvious damage that could result to the subject even if the image was posted on the internet - if the person involved never found out, nor did anyone who knew them, they couldn't be said to be being harmed in any obvious manner.
I guess if someone was paranoid, the worry it might be happening might be harmful to them, but they could worry whether or not anything was actually happening at all, let alone happening to them.
It's also hard to see there'd be much of a market for body scan pictures, unless they were identifiable (which would put people sourcing them at real risk of being found out).
People who want to look at naked bodies on the internet aren't short of choice, nor are people who want to look at more-or-less clothed bodies and use some imagination as to what's underneath.
For people who get a kick out of real or staged candid pictures, I'm sure they can already find enough.
Maybe there'd be a niche fetish market for body scan pictures, but I'm not sure it'd be one worth someone risking their job and/or a conviction in order to satisfy.
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 14:06 GMT TheMountain
You're forgetting a corollary to Rule 34
If you can imagine it, someone has made pr0n of it. The corollary being that, if someone makes pr0n of it, it's because someone out there gets their jollies looking at it. You can be sure there are plenty of sweaty palms over the idea of voyeurism at the airport.
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Wednesday 13th January 2010 01:00 GMT david wilson
Sweaty palms?
>>"If you can imagine it, someone has made pr0n of it."
Quite possibly, but I'd have thought there wasn't a great amount to distinguish one image from the next - might not quite be a case of seen one, seen them all, but maybe pretty close.
Personally, I reckon that there would be rather more sweaty palms among people who get a kick out of being paranoid about the idea than from people likely to lap up any possible blurry, low contrast and low resolution product.
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 12:55 GMT John Smith 19
Mark 110
"Surely porn involves a sexual context - standing in a scanner in an airport has no sexual context. Embarrising yes - porn no."
In the US perhaps (and boy do they have some bloaters, not least among the TSA airport staff, some of whom could contain 90g of PETN going off all by themselves. The males are'nt much better)
However in the UK, which is planning to introduce them as well *any* images of *naked* children would fall foul of the new p()rn law. Oh yes indeed, someone must think of the children and protect them from these uniformed perverts.
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 18:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
If you haven't seen it addressed in any detail,...
...that is merely because you are ignorant and haven't bothered looking. Try wikipedia.
"Twenty-five micro Rem is equal to the amount of background radiation every human is exposed to (from the air and soil) at sea level every 1.5 hours and is also equal to the radiation exposure from cosmic rays when traveling in an airplane at altitude for 2 minutes."
Black helicopter because you are paranoid, narrowly beating FAIL icon because you posted purely to show your lack of knowledge of something that is in fact well-known and easy to find out.
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Wednesday 13th January 2010 01:10 GMT TimeMaster T
Cosmic rays != X-rays
nor is background radiation, a small fraction yes but not much.
All radiation is =>potentially<= harmful, it depends on the amount and type. I would have no issues with working in an area high in beta radiation wearing a basic dust bunny coverall and a face shield because most beta particles can't penetrate a sheet of paper much less my skin. However I would have second thoughts about working in an environment with the same rad levels but of a penetrating radiation like x-rays.
And its pretty lame to insult someone while hiding behind the AC tag. Whats the matter? Afraid they might come after you? Isn't that a little paranoid?
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 13:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Wont someone think of the children.
I understand the need to security at airports however as a father of 2 young children I sure as hell do not trust anyone who has access to an xray machine which removes my kids clothes. I will give it 20mins before some perv guard post the 1st xray porn on the web and makes an ass out of the TSA.
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 14:06 GMT John Murgatroyd
Low risk, or less risk
Like the systems non-ability to store images (which it must be able to do for evidential purposes) we are assured that the system uses "low-level X-rays".
But breast scans use low-level X-rays...and according to the nrpb there are (statistically) 64 cases of breast cancer a year caused by mammography.
Children are not (yet) to be scanned by airports in the UK, but whether they should be exposed to unneeded radiation anyway is another question.
Basically: the older you are the lower the risk (less life remaining)
The reverse is also true.
And since the makers KNEW what they were saying was untrue anyway....
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 14:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
You what?
"In the end you have to trust the people involved not to [be stupid enough to] capture images when they shouldn't be doing that, and then disseminating them, and/or trust the manufacturers to set functionality such that in normal usage, images are always transient."
No - We "trust" them in exactly the same way we trust people not ot have minicams on their shoes, or put cams in changing rooms.
No, you have use profiling and intelligence properly. If you use scanners, they will find an alternative way of getting IED's on to aircarft.
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 14:18 GMT wgae
No surprise here
...really. Anyone who would have expected anything else (regardless of prior statements made by anyone on anything) is a fool. High-res images will probably transmitted over free & open WiFi connections to the server.
Ah, and if you supply the airline with your social networking account/s, the image/s will go right up there for all to see. If not, only Google will get the high-res image and will produce a pixelated version for Google to use.
After all, Eric "data privacy guru" Schmidt knows best how to deal with that.
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 14:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
What's so bloody exciting about air passengers without clothes?
For goodness' sake, you can go on the internet and get free photographs of nude people who aren't particularly attractive. Kissing and everything. I assume you can even still easily download informal pictures of children, although not with anything appalling going on, you will have to imagine it. Or join one of those awful rings. But my point is, all the nude pictures that anyone could want are available, without getting them out of these machines. I can only see anyone wanting to do that for (1) a famous person, (2) a neighbour or friend that they've always fancied but daren't... you know, or (3) using the scenario itself as an exciting fantasy. (I don't think it's wrong just to have an airport strip search fantasy, whatever your role in the story is. Fantasies aren't real.)
Anyway, it's quite well known that there are infra-red video cameras that also see through clothes quite well. I expect that pictures or video taken with those will be passed off as airport scanner pictures.
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Tuesday 12th January 2010 14:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Congratulations on being suckered
Congrats on falling for a classic con. Here's how it goes:
TSA: We're going to do virtual strip-search of everybody
Joe Public: ZOMG!!11! Personal privacy FTW!!1!
TSA: Oh, and it turns out the pictures could end up online...
Joe Public: Double ZOMG!!11! Not that!! Strangers might see blurry outlines of my dangly bits!
TSA: OK, we'll prevent the pictures being anything but transient
Joe Public: Whew, OK then. Go ahead with your virtual strip search
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Wednesday 13th January 2010 00:49 GMT Frozen Ghost
Useful to store them for evidence?
If there was ever a successfully attack on a plane wouldn't it be useful to go back and review the images of all passengers who boarded the plane to look for clues?
If the system was designed properly - e.g. encrypted storage that could only be accessed using master codes held by a central body, TSA/FBI/NSA (pick an acronym). As for pictures leaking, anybody can just photo the screen to get around the fact that pictures aren't stored.
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Wednesday 13th January 2010 00:49 GMT GeorgeTuk
Has anyone actually seen the pictures?
They are rubbish and if that consitutes pron then I for one am dismayed.
And of course it has the ability to store images, you want the evidence right? It is whether the ones shipped for use in airports actually have that ability switched on.
And lastly just what were the manufacturers going to do with these scanners before the terrorist attacks...makes you wonder eh? Lucky they had some ready to go.
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Wednesday 13th January 2010 11:11 GMT TeeCee
No need to store.
"...you want the evidence right?"
No, the evidence comes from the subsequent search and discovery when something untoward is seen. Which is more likely to be useful in court, a blurry picture with a bomb shaped bit in it, or the actual device confiscated (or, more likely, detailed photographs thereof)?
Also remember here that the blurry picture is of little or no use for positive indentification and thus would not be of help in proving that the accused is genuinely the person the device was taken from, should the "it's a fit-up" defence be trotted out.
The only reason I can think of for retaining the pics would be so when flight XXX to wherever goes off bang, you could go back through the pics, find what was missed, figure out from the timestamp who was at the screen at the time and throw them to the wolves.
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Wednesday 13th January 2010 01:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'll tell you what's so bloody exciting
So you've been waiting to go through check in, you're beyond bored and you've scoped the talent in the queue ahead of you. You see a bit of something nice you wouldn't mind being a mile high with. And that nice border guard probably would have similar thoughts. However that guard can get a little... closer... than you can to complete the picture in your head.
And on another topic, has anyone researched the long-term safety of millimeter waves? Should my pregnant wife be allowed to pass through the scanner?
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