Scanners aren't the solution. This article proves why.
You should read it.
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A mere
three days
after the attempted bombing of flight 253, Obama, well-rested from his
Hawaiian vacation, strutted up to a microphone and told the world,
"We're in an emergency!!!" The emergency was that we weren't afraid
enough.
Despite the fact that air travel is the
safest method of travel per passenger mile,
the only thing that would keep us truly safe was something that would
strip us naked in front of airport security, shoot us full of
radiation, and possibly store our biometric information. You know, a
full-body scanner.
The astonishing thing was that hardly anyone
in the mainstream media mentioned that a full-body scanner would not
have been able to detect the chemical Abdulmutuallah brought onto the
plane with him. Full-body scanners only detect things that are high
density, like metal or wax,
not things that are low density,
like chemicals or plastics. That is the entire idea behind the
full-body scanner: its waves pass through lower density clothes to show
the higher density body.
So, if the motivation of the people
pushing for these things isn't actually to protect us, what is it?
Well, it's to take power from us, and to give it to themselves,
naturally. That isn't, however, something that the American people
typically like, so let's take a closer look at these scanners and see
just how angry the American people should be.
Aside from not
being able to detect low density objects, full-body scanners also can't
detect objects inside a body. Only a few months ago Abdullah Asieri
proved that this is a danger by concealing a bomb
inside himself while trying to assassinate the Saudi Arabian head of counterintelligence.
Even
with the TSA's additional purchases, there will still also be hundreds,
if not thousands, of airports with commercial airline flights inside
the US that have no scanners. The United States alone has over
15,000 airports, and approximately
600 airports certified to serve commercial aircraft with nine or more seats. Worldwide, there are hundreds of airports that help bring over
fifty million people into this country a year.
The US currently has
40 scanners in 19 airports. If the new scanners are installed in the same ratio, even if the TSA installs all
300 new scanners that it plans to buy, and the
150 that it simply allows to lay dormant,
they will still only cover roughly 225 airports, barely making a dent
in the total number of airports that have flights inside the US. This
of course doesn't even address the fact that the TSA says they may
actually deliver only
300 of the 450 scanners in 2010.
Cost is another issue. Obama directed Homeland Security to purchase
$1 billion worth of advanced-technology equipment for screening at airports. Each scanner only costs $
150,000,
so Homeland Security clearly won't be using all that money to just buy
scanners. We don't know exactly what they will be using it for, but we
do know that it will be going into the pockets of the
defense-industrial complex. We could be using that money on more
important things, like bailing out banks, or one bank, ...one teenie
weenie bank.
The scanners are also invasive. They take detailed
nude pictures of everyone who walks through them: the old, the young,
everyone. The images are so graphic that the British Department of
Transport confirmed that images of people under eighteen may be
considered "
child porn."
TSA
officials claimed that images of genitals would be blurred out, but in
October of 2008, an Office of Transport official in Australia said that
they would not blur out the genitals because it "
severely limits the detection capabilities." Last week, scanners in use in the UK made images of people's genitals that were "
eerily visible." Do we really think the TSA will be any different once the spotlight is off them?
Also,
although a patch is put on the image of a person to distort its color,
another patch can easily be put on the image to convert it into a clear
black and white picture.
It
also seems likely that these machines, although they might not do it
now, are capable of measuring and storing our biometric data. Israel
just introduced
facial scanning into an airport. British CCTV cameras are already capable of being
outfitted to recognize faces.
With the importance of biometric data growing every day, do we really
want the TSA to be one step away from being able to demand that we
allow them to store virtually all of our biometric data before they let
us on a plane?
As if that's not enough, the radiation from these
scanners is dangerous. In only six seconds, they pump us full of as
much radiation as
10,000 cell phone calls do.
Your scan goes an extra second longer than usual? Woops. That's an
extra 1666 cell phone conversations. In case you don't know, there is
evidence linking
cell phone usage and cancer.
Also,
the type of radiation the scanners emit is particularly harmful.
Terahertz waves, the type of radiation emitted, have been described by
Los Alamos researchers as "
ripping DNA apart."
Apparently, strands of DNA are loosely joined, so they can separate
easily for replication. The resonant effects of the terahertz waves
"unzip" the strands. If your DNA has been "unzipped," it can't
replicate properly.
Even the TSA's
additional screening
for US-bound flights from 14 nations is harmful, because it unfairly
focuses on Muslim nations, while not even including the Netherlands,
the country from which Abdulmutuallah departed.
The powers that be certainly have exploited this "crisis" well.
France,
the Netherlands,
Germany,
Italy and
Canada all plan to install full-body scanners in response to the attempted bombing. Other countries that
already have scanners are planning to expand their usage. In Britain, the number of passengers agreeing to be scanned has risen from 72% to
92% since the attempted attack. The Dutch police are even working on developing
portable body scanners that can be used on the street on people "suspected of carrying concealed weapons."
This is especially astonishing considering that in June of 2009 the House
voted to bar scanners from airports by a margin of 310 - 118, and members of the European Parliament
voted to ban them from airports in September 2008 by a margin of 361 - 16.
Perhaps
the most upsetting part is that the focus on scanners diverts attention
from where it should really be: the security failure that allowed this
to happen. Let's just take a look at some things that should have
garnered extra attention from the TSA and airport security:
- According to eye witnesses,
he had no passport, and the only reason he was allowed on the plane was
because an accomplice who was with him managed to convince an airline
employee that Abdulmutuallah was a political refugee from Sudan.
If
you think that any of these might be cause for suspicion, you're not
alone. In fact, the TSA would agree with you, because as it turns out,
even before the attempted bombing, TSA officials were actually
waiting to question Abdulmutuallah when he landed in Detroit.
Abdulmutuallah had clearly had triggered something in the security
system, and the TSA and airport security simply weren't fast enough to
act upon it.
As Rahm Emmanuel said, "
you never want to let a crisis go to waste. [...][I]t lets you do things you think you couldn't do before."
The truth of the matter is that we do have a crisis, but it is not what
the people in charge of the government and the media tell us it is. It
is not Umar Farouk Abdulmutuallah or Islamic fundamentalism, and it
won't be solved by turning our country into a police state. Our crisis
is that our leaders try to pump us full of fear in order to make it
easier for them to achieve what they want, even if that comes at the
expense of the country. Once we realize that is the real crisis, then
we finally will be one step closer to truly becoming safe.
Authors Bio:Josh Fulton is a writer and comedian (but you shouldn't necessarily be laughing at his political writing! Please?) who currently lives in NC. He has a BA from NYU, and is currently going for an MFA in creative writing.
My website is joshfulton.blogspot dot com