UN Official Wants to See End to Airport Scanners

March 10, 2010

Prison Planet

A senior official in the United Nations has warned that the growing use of full body scanners at airports breaches individual rights.

Martin Scheinin, the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur, said the scanners are more of a political response to terrorist attacks than a carefully designed security measure.

He added that the technology which intrudes excessively into individual privacy is also ineffective in preventing terrorism.

Not only are they “ineffective in detecting a genuine terrorist threat” but they also create “a false feeling of security and allow the real terrorists to adapt their tactics to the technology in use.”

Scheinin also told journalists that although the scanners violate human rights generally, there are “particular sensitivities in respect of women, certain religions and certain cultural backgrounds.”

The top official, who has been in charge of monitoring the impact of anti-terror measures on individual freedoms for the last five years, suggested that other existing detection technologies which do not harm privacy should be used instead.

Scheinin’s comments come just days after the US Transportation Security Administration announced that eleven more airports will begin using the technology soon.

The full-body scanners, otherwise known as the “virtual strip searching,” see through clothing to produce images of the whole body.

The plan to use the device at airports was introduced after the failed Christmas Day bombing of a US-bound airliner by a young Nigerian man.

Click here for the full report.

TSA Grills Student Over 9/11

February 12, 2010

Philly.com

By Daniel Rubin

A federal agent sizing up Nick George might peg him as Most Likely To Be Recruited By The CIA. He’s a physics major at a top college, he minors in Middle Eastern studies, speaks Arabic, has lived in Jordan and is adventurous enough to have backpacked through Sudan and Egypt.

At Philadelphia International Airport last August, his interest in the world got him handcuffed.

The Wyncote native was detained for five hours after Transportation Security Administration screeners grew suspicious about something in his pockets.

Arabic-language flash cards.

George, who was 21 at the time, and about to fly back for his senior year at Pomona College in Claremont, Ca., says he answered every question to the best of his abilities, and figured he’d be quickly sent on his way.

But what questions…

According to a federal suit filed Wednesday on his behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, a TSA supervisor asked him, “How do you feel about 9/11?”

He said he hemmed and hawed a bit. “It’s a complicated question,” he told me by phone. “But I ended up saying, ‘It was bad. I am against it.’ ”

He was asked if he knew who “did 9/11.”

He answered, Osama bin Laden.

Then he was asked, “Do you know what language he spoke?”

George answered, Arabic.”

The supervisor then held up his flash cards. “Do you see why these cards are suspicious?”

To George, they weren’t suspicious at all. He was using them to translate Al Jazeera, whose coverage in Arabic he considers critical to understanding America’s place in the world. The 200 cards included words for “terrorist” and “explosion,” George said. His interest in the Middle East came not from 9/11 but from watching Lawrence of Arabia with his father, Paul George, a Philadelphia attorney and former public defender.

Nick George says he started taking classes in Middle Eastern history, politics and languages while at Pomona. He spent a semester in Amman. He has applied for a State Department program that encourages the study of Arabic and he has plans to take the Foreign Service exam after college.

He says he did the right thing when questioned.

“My mentality was, ‘Do what they say, and pretty soon they’ll see this is ridiculous and let you go,” he said by phone. “That was my mentality until they put the handcuffs on me. Then it was surreal.”

TSA called the Philadelphia Police, who marched him through the airport to a small office where he sat for more than an hour in cuffs, awaiting FBI agents.

In the suit he contends the agents asked him if he was an Islamist or a Communist. He said no. After about 20 minutes they released him. He missed his flight that day.

Neither the TSA nor the Philadelphia Police would comment yesterday, given that legal action was pending. But in a September Daily News column, TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis said behavioral-detection officers had selected the student for screening even before the flash cards were discovered. Those officers are trained to look for “involuntary physical and physiological reactions that people exhibit in response to a fear of being discovered,” she said.

George says he cannot imagine what they mean – he was calm.

A police official, meanwhile, was quoted as saying it was George’s ID in Arabic that caught their attention – from his Jordanian studies – and police were suspicious that the student’s hair was shorter that day than it was in his Pennsylvania driver’s license photo. “That,” Lt. Louis Liberati said, is “an indication sometimes that somebody may have gone through a radicalization.”

Candace Putter, George’s mother, thinks that’s an amazing statement. She is a longtime advocate for teens in trouble with the law. She said she came of age in the 1960s, when long hair was associated with a different sort of radicalism.

“You can’t change the world on me that completely,” she said, laughing.

Putter said she understands in the post-9/11 world why security officers would pay attention to someone who had been to Muslim countries and was learning Arabic. So can Mary Catherine Roper, George’s ACLU attorney. So can I.

“Clearly we want them to be paying attention,” Cutter said. “But we want them to be paying smart attention.”

Security technologist Bruce Schneier was less polite.

“This is just stupid,” he said. “There’s no other way to explain it. Someone saw these Arabic language cards and just freaked. It should have taken TSA 15 seconds.”

The problem, he said, was that there is no cost to the security agent for doing the wrong thing. “If I detain someone and he’s not a terrorist, nothing happens to me. I’m probably praised. If I let him go, and he is, my career is over. The TSA incentive is to overreact. Terrorism can’t do this to us. I think only we can do this to ourselves.”

Click here for the full report

Full Body Airport Scanners and Radiation Exposure

February 12, 2010

Natural News

By Ethan A. Huff

The attempted flight 253 terrorist attack on Christmas Day gave way to the immediate unveiling of full-body human x-ray machines that some alleged experts believe should be installed at every airport in order to ensure national security. These large, expensive machines emit a hefty dose of ionic radiation that can cause DNA damage and may contribute to the development of cancer.

Each time there is a terrorist attack or an attempted terrorist attack, the federal Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seem to have yet another invasive technology up their sleeve that they claim will make our skies safer. This time, TSA has proposed using giant backscatter x-ray machines on every passenger.

These devices send ionizing radiation a few centimeters into the skin which outputs an image of a passenger’s naked body. TSA officials can then inspect the image to see if a passenger is hiding weapons or other prohibited materials somewhere on or in their bodies.

Aside from the fact that the new protocol is grossly invasive of personal privacy and an obstruction of individual liberty, the ionizing radiation emitted from the machines threatens to damage chromosomal DNA and human cell proteins which can lead to cancer and other problems.

TSA Security Laboratory Directory Susan Hallowell insists that the x-ray technology used in the machines is perfectly safe, equating it to be “about the same as sunshine.” Recent research, however, is indicating that there is virtually no safe level of ionizing radiation; even very low doses can cause significant harm over time.

Dr. John Gofman, Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been studying ionizing radiation for years and has determined that low doses can accumulate over time and induce things like cancer and ischemic heart disease. Americans receive x-rays so often that the radiological impact is quite high. Dr. Gofman says that x-rays play a role in 50 percent of cancers and 60 percent of heart diseases in the U.S. In breast cancer, x-rays are a co-factor in about 75 percent of cases.

Since heart disease and cancer are the top two causes of death in the U.S. and x-rays play a role in the majority of cases, it is valid to question the legitimacy of introducing yet one more source of ionizing radiation. The irony is that, according to Dr. Gofman, TSA is responding to an attempted terrorist bombing by suggesting the forcible “bombing” of our DNA with damaging radiation.

Click here for the full report

Facts Contradict That Image Scanners Can’t Save or Print

February 10, 2010

Prison Planet

By Paul Joseph Watson

Heathrow Airport’s denial that Indian film star Shahrukh Khan’s naked body scanner images were printed and circulated by airport staff because the devices have no capability to print or distribute images contradicts leaked government documents that prove the x-ray backscatter machines do have the option to store and send images, as well as actual images of the print outs that are freely available on the Internet.

Heathrow today denied that naked body scanner images of Khan were printed and circulated by airport security staff, telling the London Telegraph ^[2] the claims were “completely factually incorrect” because the body-scanning equipment had no capability to print images.

The BAA spokeswoman “stressed that images captured by the equipment could not be stored or distributed in any form”.

Heathrow are trying to avoid any investigation into the incident by claiming it “simply could not be true”.

However, leaked government documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and confirmed as authentic by CNN ^[3] show that the devices must have the ability to store and send images when in “test mode.”

“That requirement leaves open the possibility the machines — which can see beneath people’s clothing — can be abused by TSA insiders and hacked by outsiders, said EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg,” according to the report.

“If you look at the actual technical specifications and you read the vendor contracts, you come to understand that these machines are capable of doing far more than the TSA has let on,” added Rotenberg.

Indeed, if there is no capability for the devices to save, distribute and print images, then how on earth have news organizations obtained print outs of such images like the one below?

This picture is a print out of a naked body scanner image taken at an airport. How can Heathrow deny this? Clearly the images produced by the scanners can be saved, distributed and printed. The public has been completely mislead about the fact that this represents a total violation of privacy and a system open to frightening levels of abuse, especially considering the fact that children are being forced to pass through the scanners.

Just like the government claimed the scanner images did not show details of genitalia, they have been caught again in another example of deception.

Journalists who researched trials of the technology reported that the images made genitals “eerily visible”. ^[4]

German Security advisor Hans-Detlef Dau, a representative for a company that sells the scanners, admits that the machines ^[5], “show intimate piercings, catheters and the form of breasts and penises”.

Images on the TSA’s own website ^[6] produced by backscatter devices also show that genitals are visible.

Indeed, when they were first being installed, Australian authorities admitted ^[7] that the machines don’t work properly if sensitive areas of the body are blurred out – and yet the British government still denies that the scanner pictures show details of genitalia – an obvious attempt to skirt child pornography laws which have been violated ^[8]with the introduction of the scanners.

With plans being readied by the Home Office in the UK ^[9] as well as authorities in Europe ^[10] to introduce mobile naked scanners as well as street scanners attached to lamp posts, it won’t be long before we are naked body scanned to get into public buildings, shopping malls, sports events, and even minding our own business walking down the street. Naked body scanners are already being used in courthouses across America.

It seems the only way to make this scandal go away will be for the authorities to convince Shahrukh Khan to retract his story or say it was all a joke – warning him that he might end up on a no fly list could achieve that objective.

People who work in airport security have been caught abusing their power on an almost weekly basis over the last few years. To believe that they will act with the utmost professionalism in dealing with images of our naked bodies is completely asinine. We read horror story after horror story ^[11] about TSA agents and others acting like thugs on power trips, thinking they can treat the public like animals just because they hold a petty position of authority.

However, unless we vehemently debunk the denials by emphasizing that the scanners do show details of genitalia and such images can be saved, distributed and printed, our daily lives will soon begin to resemble a nightmare that far outstrips anything George Orwell could have predicted.

Click here for the full report.

More Studies on Radiation and Full-Body Scans

February 8, 2010

Bloomberg.com

By Jonathan Tirone

Air passengers should be made aware of the health risks of airport body screenings and governments must explain any decision to expose the public to higher levels of cancer-causing radiation, an inter-agency report said.

Pregnant women and children should not be subject to scanning, even though the radiation dose from body scanners is “extremely small,” said the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety report, which is restricted to the agencies concerned and not meant for public circulation. The group includes the European Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Energy Agency and the World Health Organization.

A more accurate assessment about the health risks of the screening won’t be possible until governments decide whether all passengers will be systematically scanned or randomly selected, the report said. Governments must justify the additional risk posed to passengers, and should consider “other techniques to achieve the same end without the use of ionizing radiation.”

President Barack Obama has pledged $734 million to deploy airport scanners that use x-rays and other technology to detect explosives, guns and other contraband. The U.S. and European countries including the U.K. have been deploying more scanners at airports after the attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound Northwest airline flight.

“There is little doubt that the doses from the backscatter x-ray systems being proposed for airport security purposes are very low,” Health Protection Agency doctor Michael Clark said by phone from Didcot, England. “The issue raised by the report is that even though doses from the systems are very low, they feel there is still a need for countries to justify exposures.”

3-D Imaging

A backscatter x-ray is a machine that can render a three- dimensional image of people by scanning them for as long as 8 seconds, the report says. The technology has also raised privacy issues in countries including Germany because it yields images of the naked body.

The Committee cited the IAEA’s 1996 Basic Safety Standards agreement, drafted over three decades, that protects people from radiation. Frequent exposure to low doses of radiation can lead to cancer and birth defects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Most of the scanners deliver less radiation than a passenger is likely to receive from cosmic rays while airborne, the report said. Scanned passengers may absorb from 0.1 to 5 microsieverts of radiation compared with 5 microsieverts on a flight from Dublin to Paris and 30 microsieverts between Frankfurt and Bangkok, the report said. A sievert is a unit of measure for radiation.

European Union regulators plan to finish a study in April on the effects of scanning technology on travelers’ privacy and health. Amsterdam, Heathrow and Manchester are among European airports that have installed the devices or plan to do so.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has said that it ordered 150 scanners from OSI Systems Inc.’s Rapiscan unit and will buy an additional 300 imaging devices this year. The agency currently uses 40 machines, which cost $130,000 to $170,000 each, produced by L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. at 19 airports including San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington D.C.

Click here for the full report.

TSA Screener Puts Cocaine In Woman’s Luggage

January 22, 2010

The Philly

By Daniel Rubin

In the tense new world of air travel, we’re stripped of shoes, told not to take too much shampoo on board, frowned on if we crack a smile.

The last thing we expect is a joke from a Transportation Security Administration screener – particularly one this stupid.

Rebecca Solomon is 22 and a student at the University of Michigan, and on Jan. 5 she was flying back to school after holiday break. She made sure she arrived at Philadelphia International Airport 90 minutes before takeoff, given the new regulations.

She would be flying into Detroit on Northwest Airlines, the same city and carrier involved in the attempted bombing on Christmas, just 10 days before. She was tense.

What happened to her lasted only 20 seconds, but she says they were the longest 20 seconds of her life.

After pulling her laptop out of her carry-on bag, sliding the items through the scanning machines, and walking through a detector, she went to collect her things.

A TSA worker was staring at her. He motioned her toward him.

Then he pulled a small, clear plastic bag from her carry-on – the sort of baggie that a pair of earrings might come in. Inside the bag was fine, white powder.

She remembers his words: “Where did you get it?”

Two thoughts came to her in a jumble: A terrorist was using her to sneak bomb-detonating materials on the plane. Or a drug dealer had made her an unwitting mule, planting coke or some other trouble in her bag while she wasn’t looking.

She’d left her carry-on by her feet as she handed her license and boarding pass to a security agent at the beginning of the line.

Answer truthfully, the TSA worker informed her, and everything will be OK.

Solomon, 5-foot-3 and traveling alone, looked up at the man in the black shirt and fought back tears.

Put yourself in her place and count out 20 seconds. Her heart pounded. She started to sweat. She panicked at having to explain something she couldn’t.

Now picture her expression as the TSA employee started to smile.

Just kidding, he said. He waved the baggie. It was his.

And so she collected her things, stunned, and the tears began to fall.

Another passenger, a woman traveling to Colorado, consoled her as others who had witnessed the confrontation went about their business. Solomon and the woman walked to their gates, where each called for security and reported what had happened.

A joke? You’re not serious. Was he hitting on her? Was he flexing his muscle? Who at a time of heightened security and rattled nerves would play so cavalierly with a passenger’s emotions?

When someone is trying to blow planes out of the sky, what is a TSA employee doing with his eyes off the ball?

When she complained to airport security, Solomon said, she was told the TSA worker had been training the staff to detect contraband. She was shocked that no one took him off the floor, she said.

“It was such a violation,” the Wynnewood native told me by phone. “I’d come early. I’d done everything right. And they were kidding about it.”

I ran her story past Ann Davis, regional TSA spokeswoman, who said she knew nothing to contradict the young traveler’s account.

Davis said privacy law prevents her from identifying the TSA employee. The law prevents her from disclosing what sort of discipline he might have received.

“The TSA views this employee’s behavior to be highly inappropriate and unprofessional,” she wrote. “We can assure travelers this employee has been disciplined by TSA management at Philadelphia International Airport, and he has expressed remorse for his actions.”

Maybe he’s been punished enough. That Solomon’s father, Jeffrey, is a Center City litigator might mean this story isn’t over.

In the meantime, I think the TSA worker should spend time following passengers through the scanners, handing them their shoes. Maybe he could tie them, too.

Click here for the full report

TB Passenger On ‘Do Not Board’ List Flies From Philly to San Francisco

January 13, 2010

CBS3.com

The Centers for Disease Control said a passenger with tuberculosis has been detained after boarding a flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco despite being on a “do-not-board” list.

CDC officials said the passenger was detained and taken to a local hospital after a U.S. Airways flight arrived in San Francisco Saturday night.

The unidentified male passenger was apparently placed on a do-not-board list submitted to the TSA and CDC on January 8, 2010.

Investigators are trying to determine how the noticeably ill man made it through security checkpoints and onto the flight.

Travelers at Philadelphia International Airport want to know how a man who was on the “no-board-list” was able to clear security and get on the plane.

CDC officials said the risk to other passengers aboard the plane with the man for the six-and-a-half-hour flight was low, because the flight was less than eight hours.

The airline told Eyewitness News it is up to the TSA to enforce the “no board list,” but a TSA spokesperson says it is the airlines’ responsibility.

TSA released the following statement about the incident: “We are just a conduit. We receive information and provide it to the airlines. All proper protocols were followed.”

The CDC and the airlines emphasized passengers faced little or no risk.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a potentially deadly infectious disease that typically affects the lung, but can attack the rest of the body. It was once the leading cause of death in the U.S.

Symptoms include a cough, sometimes with blood, that lasts more than three weeks, chest pains, chills and fever.

Click here for the full report.

Worries About Airport Full-Body Scanners Not Limited to Health

January 11, 2010

Natural News

By Mike Adams

The TSA has been lying to the American people about full-body scanners. The agency has insisted that these “digital strip search” machines are incapable of saving, storing or transmitting the images they take. This, we are told, makes it okay for people to be digitally strip-searched.

But secret documents uncovered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center  have revealed that these machines do indeed posses precisely such capabilities. According to TSA specification requirement documents that have been uncovered by the EPIC, all full-body scanners purchased by the TSA must have the ability to both save and transmit the scanned images of air passengers.

The documents were obtained by EPIC through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. They have also been shared with CNN, which has viewed the documents and published a story about what they reveal.

These documents contradict the claims of the TSA, which include the statement that “the system has no way to save, transmit or print the image.”

TSA misleads the public
The TSA’s own “imaging technology” page  claims, “This state-of-the-art technology cannot store, print, transmit or save the image. In fact, all machines are delivered to airports with these functions disabled.”

That in itself is an interesting statement because by stating those functions are “disabled,” it also admits that the machines inherently have these functions. And just because the machines are delivered with the functions disabled doesn’t mean those functions can’t be re-enabled at the flick of a switch.

In other words, these machines are designed and constructed with the ability to save, store and transmit the images.

“I don’t think the TSA has been forthcoming with the American public about the true capability of these devices,” said the Executive Director of EPIC, Marc Rotenberg in a CNN interview. “They’ve done a bunch of very slick promotions where they show people — including journalists — going through the devices. And then they reassure people, based on the images that have been produced, that there’s not any privacy concerns. But if you look at the actual technical specifications and you read the vendor contracts, you come to understand that these machines are capable of doing far more than the TSA has let on.”

In other words, the TSA is telling the public and the press one thing, but the machines they’re buying are capable of something far more insidious, these documents reveal. Is the TSA intentionally lying to the public in order to mislead people over the real capabilities of these machines?

If these full-body scanners can save, store and transmit images, then it’s only a matter of time before some rogue TSA employee finds a way to copy off the images or display them on the screen so that they can take snapshots with their own portable cameras.

The TSA says it’s protecting your privacy. But its own scanner specification documents tell a different story: The TSA won’t even buy these machines unless they can save, store and transmit revealing images of air passengers.

Click here for the full report

The Real Purpose of Body Scanners

January 7,2009

Prison Planet

By Steve Watson

The clamor to ramp up airport security with invasive naked body imaging scanners has nothing to do with ensuring the safety of travelers. Rather it is part of an ongoing incremental push to break the will of the people and encourage mass subservience and meek obedience.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the body scanner push is that people are willingly accepting it. As Bloomberg news reports today, “Passenger acceptance of airport body scanners has increased following the failed terrorist attack,” with 92% of passengers at Manchester airport in northern England now agreeing to pass through the machines in a voluntary trial, compared with 75 percent before the incident.

The same report indicates that Around 90% of Muslims and Orthodox Jews were opting to use the scanners even prior to the Detroit incident rather than risking physical contact via pat downs and strip searches.

Travelers in Canada have indicated acceptance of the scanners, saying that they would “do anything for safety” and describing them as “a necessary evil”.

Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of Germans favour airports using full-body scanners, despite claims that they are an invasion of personal privacy, a new poll has shown.

The will of the people is being systematically eroded and incrementally broken down. Airports are serving as reservations where the fundamental right to privacy must be left at the door.

Travelers have been acclimatized over time to know they must remove their shoes, take off their belts, untuck shirts, discard water, baby milk, shampoo and toothpaste. During the flight hands must be visible on laps, and even bathroom visits can now become national incidents as we have recently seen.

A culture of extreme fear has been engendered where the only way to stay safe is to cozy up to big brother, a psychological response akin to that of Stockholm syndrome.

This is where the technological control grid plays such a key role. Imagine if TSA agents were made to take women and children and physically strip search them while they held their hands aloft, the public would balk at such an abuse. However, with the body scanning machines there is a divide that clouds the process in futuristic technology.

Click here to read the full report

Stimulus to Make Full Body Scanners at Airports a Reality

January 7, 2010

CNN News

By Aaron Smith

The U.S. government is using $25 million in stimulus money to buy and install full body scanners in airports this year, in an effort to ramp up security and create jobs.

The Transportation Security Administration is using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to purchase 150 of the full body scanners, according to TSA spokeswoman Sarah Horowitz.

These “backscatter” scanners, which use X-rays to provide detailed images of hidden objects in or under a person’s clothing, are manufactured by Rapiscan, a subsidiary of Hawthorn, Calif.-based OSI (OSIS). The scanners cost from $150,000 to $180,000 apiece, according to the company.

Peter Kant, vice president of global government affairs for Rapiscan, said his company received a $25 million contract from the TSA to produce the 150 backscatter scanners. The contract has helped create 25 jobs, mostly manufacturing positions in the company’s Ocean Springs, Miss. facility, as well as some engineering jobs, he said.

Kant said the U.S. government has given the TSA the green light to spend $173 million on scanners, which includes the initial $25 million contract.

“Should we get additional orders, we will have to hire additional manufacturing positions,” he said in an e-mail to CNNMoney.com.

Horowitz would not specify how much money had been earmarked for TSA spending on scanners, but she said the agency has enough funds that would come from the stimulus program and other federal sources to buy an additional 300 scanners.

The backscatter scanners will be used in airports around the country, but the TSA would not say where. One-third of the backscatter scanners have already been delivered, said Kant.

These scanners are used to detect “anything hidden on the body that is not the body” including metal, plastic, glass and liquids, said Kant, while using X-ray doses that are too low to harm the person being scanned.

“You would get more radiation from the first few minutes of your flight, just from the sun,” he said.

Kant said this technology could be effective in detecting explosives, such as those that were allegedly hidden in the underwear of a terrorism suspect on a Christmas Eve flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

If Rapiscan’s scanners had been in place, according to Kant, the incident could have been averted. “We do believe, from what we know from published reports, that we would have detected it,” he said.

The TSA has already implemented 40 scanners using a different type of technology called “millimeter wave advanced imaging” in 19 airports servicing Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, Dallas and other cities. These scanners were manufactured by Woburn, Mass.-based L-3 Communications Corp.

Click here for the full report

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