In late August, I flew back to my home on the west coast on a Southwest Airlines flight from Boston's Logan International Airport. Before boarding, I encountered a backscatter X-ray scatter at the security checkpoint for the very first time. Luckily, there was no one behind me, so I asked the TSA agent nearby to confirm my fears.
"Is that an X-ray scanner?" I said.
"Yes it is," he stated.
"I won't go through it," I replied. I've already had six CT scans in my life so far, and given that each one amounts to roughly 200 X-ray exposures, I don't need any more excess radiation exposure than I already receive on the flight each way.
"You can go through it. It's safe," he reassured.
"I will not go through it," I repeated.
"We'll turn it off for you," he said. "Just walk through it."
"No," I insisted. "I refuse to walk through that. I'd like to opt-out."
"It'll be off!" he said, not seeming to understand the message. There was no way for me to verify whether the scanner was actually on or off, whether or not it had been calibrated correctly, or how much radiation I was actually being exposed to.
Finally, after a short standoff, a voice of sanity rang out: one of the other TSA agents, an elderly woman who had been listening to the exchange.
"He's opting out, he's opting out!" she said. A solution presented itself: the first agent eventually told me I could walk around the scanner by going through a small gate in front of it, which I did. I received a thorough pat-down afterward, but I didn't care and easily survived despite the temporary discomfort.
A few months later I flew again, this time from Salt Lake City, where five security lines led to metal detectors and one to a backscatter X-ray machine. I maneuvered into a line that led to a metal detector, but one of the scariest images I have ever witnessed was the line of unwitting passengers walking through the much larger X-ray machine nearby, arms raised, like a scene from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The woman behind me in line had no idea about the differences between the machines, let alone that she could opt-out of an X-ray scan.
You can opt-out, and you should. It may require repeating yourself four times, and it may hold up the people behind you, but it is most certainly worth it. This is not about the absolute radiation exposure you might receive from one scan, or about sexual assault, or even about airport security. This is about Government's right to subject citizens to ionizing radiation in any quantity at any time without a proper explanation of the consequences of that radiation, and without a proper exploration of safer alternatives. In the United States Constitution, this is referred to as "unreasonable search and seizure." That we have even reached this point represents a grotesque failure of our society on several levels, from Congress to President Obama himself, to the executive branch agency he controls (DHS), its subdivision (TSA), the employees it purports to train, the airports and airlines it works with, the intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA) that should be offsetting the need for such draconian measures, and the passengers who have until now put up anything but a fight.
Now is the time to put up a fight. Tell your relatives from afar that you will probably be late to Thanksgiving dinner, but when you get there, the world will be a safer place.
Aaron Greenspan is President & CEO of Think Computer Corporation and the author of Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era. He is the creator of FaceCash, a mobile payment system.
Follow Aaron Greenspan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/thinkcomp
Leave early. Enjoy your turkey.
We deserve to know how much radiation we are receiving during these scans and how they effect our risk of developing cancer. The younger you are, the more serious the risk of repeated exposures. I think these procedures must be stopped until this issue is answered, as it is a public health concern.
I'd like to have some kind of radiation badge if I went through. It seems like we have the right to know how much we are being exposed to.
Also, will "they" start keeping the images on file like fingerprints?
Fact: Backscatter technology is safe for all passenger and has been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, National Institute for Standards and Technology and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. All results confirm that the radiation dose is well below the standard for safety set by the American national Standards Institute. The technology is safe. A person receives more radiation naturally each hour than from one screening with a backscatter unit. In fact a traveler is exposed to less radiation from one AIT scan than from 2 minutes of an airline flight.
There is no zero effect level for ionizing radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
Fact: Unlike airline radiation or x-ray radiation, 100% of backscatter/milimeter wave radiation is focused onto the skin, which is prone to cancer. The result is that one scan subjects the skin to the equivalent amount of radiation that it would receive after 20 x-rays. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1290527/Airport-body-scanners-deliver-radiation-dose-20-times-higher-thought.html).
Fact - there is no way to know if a machine is functioning properly or if it is bathing you in a higher rate of radiation.
Fact - there is no effort made to protect the testes or ovaries of people while they are scanned. This could lead to genetic distortions, an outcome we don't know the risk of, since the TSA refuses to submit the machines to peer reviewed study.
Security? Please. This is about profit, pure and simple.
I'm just sayin....
I'm just sayin.... "
You are just blowin' smoke - THAT is what you are doing. There machines were purchased with STIMULUS FUNDS.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2010/1119/TSA-body-scanners-safety-upgrade-or-stimulus-boondoggle
You can't lie and blame everything on Bush (or Reagan, or Nixon) in perpetuity. Eventually you are going to have to man up and acknowledge that it's the dems that are screwing the pooch this time.
You are correct, while Bush did start it STIMULUS FUNDS did buy more machines this past summer.
The real problem with a lot of it (the purchase) is that Bush's Homeland Security Chief (Chertoff), and Obama's (until Napolitano took over), was pushing for these machines because his client was manufacturing them.
Seems Chertoff and Cheney both took advantage of the American people and bilked us for millions!
Chertoff has repeatedly talked about the need for expanding the use of the technology in airports, saying it could detect bombs like the one federal authorities say Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, carried onto the Detroit-bound aircraft.
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/200210-Ex-Homeland-Security-Chief-Chertoff-Pushes-Body-Scanners-While-His-Client-Manufactures-the-Machines
While I'm not happy with Obama at this present time I'm not about to give Bush a pass for anything!!!!
ScannerRadition (rads) = TwoMinutesIncreasedRadition (rads) at Altitude
So if the the fear is the amount of Radition then its unfounded...
The higher you go up in altitude the more Cosmic XRays you are exposed to.
So during your 2 hour flight you are getting 60 times more Xray exposure than these machines emit.
The privacy thang is another issue.
I'd like to moan and say things like - yeah, that's it, that's the spot! Deeper, yeah, yeah, that's it! Go go go god YES!!!
Might as well have fun with it!
http://www.ncrponline.org/Current_Prog/SC_1-20.html
The in-flight radiation is cosmic-rays, not low-energy X-ray photons. The in-flight radiation is delivered to single random molecules anywhere in the body, not the entire surface of the skin.
The effect on biological systems differs from the delivered energy, and the abstract of the study group expresses doubts about the existing statistical models.
I wonder what's inside them?
I was standing in a line waiting to go through security (I can't remember if it was BWI or Kansas City)
I thought I was walking through a metal detector, but they told me to raise my arms above my head. I didn't know why at that time.
Airport security guards wear guns, and there's also this air of intimidation, as though you MUST do as they say, or they may detain you under suspicion of terrorism.
I didn't realize I was being irradiated. They didn't ask me if I were pregnant or if my immune system were compromised.
Honestly, I feel violated. I feel that they should at least tell people that they are being exposed to radiation.
How many children will be born with various cancers because of airport back-scatter scanners?
Security is secondary when money is the motivation.
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Explanation be damned. No explanation about personal safety with respect to the form of scan (or pat-down) jusitfies engaging in such searches absent a level of cause making the search Constitutionally permissible. The government should not be permitted to just say "no harm, no foul" and, therefore, allow it to search anyone for no articulable reason specific to that person. Such a search is, itself, a harm to our personal liberty (the loss of which threatens our physical well-being), whether or not there is an actual deleterious effect resulting from the radiation.