I’ve seen this demoed before, and it’s a great system in certain applications. It can actually be used from a distance and on moving subjects, unlike millimeter wave scanners. I was under the impression they were targetting this at knive and gun crime in railway stations and the like.

It’s pretty clear that this guy was set-up. He doesn’t speak German, he gets railroaded into allowing the guy to wear a jacket, doesn’t get to use a metal detector, he isn’t allowed to pat him down. He also doesn’t appear to be the most charismatic or quick-thinking character and ends up getting pwned. I’d seriously be questioning the reasoning of the people who sent him out there.

I guess it’s a good reason to keep that old leatherman rather than upgrading to one of the big clunky ones, though.

1) Everyone flies naked.
2) No carry-on baggage allowed.
3) Crazy purple knock-out gas.

There you go, nude, unconscious, and nothing to grab if the gas doesn’t work.

I side with George Carlin on this one:

“Shit, there are a lot of things you could use to kill a guy. You could probably beat a guy to death with the Sunday New York Times, couldn’t you? Suppose you just have really big hands? Couldn’t you strangle a flight attendant? Shit, you could probably strangle two of them, one with each hand. That is, if you were lucky enough to catch ‘em in that little kitchen area. Just before they break out the fuckin’ peanuts. But you could get the job done. If you really cared enough.”

but I think thats still enough to make these horrible things obsolete.
body scanners suck!

The worst remark is the one from Mr. Bosbach after they show the possible effects of the material burnt. He says that “people shouldn’t make fun of these scenarios” which is silly, as he is one of those guys who try to elevate his points by imagining scenarios that are far fetched.

Further more the demonstration is of diffrent scanner and at the airports the scanners will be diffrent.

This is a passive scanner. Meaning, it does not emit energy, it only reads it. The image seen under this scanner will be much more blurry than the nice sharp images from an active scanner. An active scanner,the millimeter wave scanner, bombards the subject with millimeter radio waves and reads the results much more accurate.

Capt S B Tyagi, India

I hope someone volunteers an english transcript eventually. I’m curious what exactly is being said… beyond the obvious.

There’s not much beyond the obvious. Basically the “morbidly obese” (from another commenter) Austrian guy hides thermite in his jacket, get’s scanned without taking said jacket off, removes the thermite afterwards and claims that it “could put a hole in a plane.”

Since BB doesn’t seem to post anonymous comments today, here’s what I wrote a couple of hours ago:

I’m no fan of these scanners and don’t think they really improve security but with all due respect, you leave out relevant facts here.

For starters, the “bomb components” were essentially thermite and a lighter. Thermite doesn’t explode but burn at high temperatures.

It would also be fair to mention the comments of the scanner guy. Basically, in a real airport scan he would have to turn sideways and remove his jacket (in which all the “bomb components” (thermite) were hidden).”

Also, this is a passive thermal scanner, not one of those millimeter-wave “naked scanners.”

The whole airplane thing is a big distraction at this point. The last few real targets haven’t been airplanes, they’ve been trains, entire governments, etc. The last few people trying to blow up planes were disposable amateurs that the terrorist groups didn’t even try to recruit, they were just off-balanced individuals given minimal direction and used to distract from the real targets.

I think the idea with that would be for it to go unnoticed until it could cause some sort of structural failure in an important avionics component. A few streaks of mercury and gallium smeared across a few different swaths of interior components hastily, for example. With so much redunancy in aircraft it’s unlikely to harm a soul, but it would scare people quite well.

It’s a stupid and obtuse idea that has a slim chance of actually working, but then again so are most of the ones that actually get attempted anymore.

Kind of a good example of why making reactionary security measures is such a bad idea, I think. All it takes is one person to try doing this and society would spend more money and human effort preventing it in the future than they would have lost if it succeeds. You don’t need to harm people to terrorize them, you just need to make them think they could have died, or could in the future.

Whether or not the machine would have caught these things had the actually-used protocol been followed, we have no idea of knowing. More importantly, anyone who defends the use of the machines will simply jump on that — “well, you didn’t use the machine right, so of course it didn’t pick those things up” — and they’d have a valid point.

They’d probably shoot me on the spot, thinking that I am mixing the explosive gels together.

Checkpoint security scanner/screener accuracy rates will only improve significantly with the addition of machine vision/image analysis software that can be added to the scanner equipment. Currently scanner manufacturers don’t allow this — their focus is selling more scanners

One image analysis technology to look at is Guardian Technologies International’s PinPoint threat detection and identification software. It can accurately detect liquid and low density explosives and other threat items without the high false positives — this holds the potential to shorten security lines, enable people to carry water on the planes and lessen the likelihood that terrorist will breach security with threat items.

You all look like a bunch of ignorant morons.

Actually look at the 3rd party professional tests and scientific studies that have been done.
If the millimeter wave or x-ray backscatter can pick up and outline the underwire of a bra, i bet it can pick up wires/batteries needed to make a bomb.
Also in use in major airports is a mechanical bomb sniffer designed to sniff out chemical components needed to create any sort of detrimental reaction, and often times both machines are in one unit.

I’m so glad you based your opinions off a German talk show.

Part of me thinks I’m being silly and paranoid, but part of me thinks the terrorist was allowed to slip through the cracks because TSA thought it was losing its hold on our fear factor.

Bree M

(As Schneier mentions of course, there are tons of ways to circumvent even the highest resolution body scans, I could name a bunch more off the top of my head…)