The Transportation Security Administration is reanalyzing the radiation levels of X-ray body scanners installed in airports nationwide, after testing produced dramatically higher-than-expected results.
The TSA, which has deployed at least 500 body scanners to at least 78 airports, said Tuesday the machines meet all safety standards and would remain in operation despite a “calculation error” in safety studies. The flawed results showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.
These were the aptly-named “Rapiscan” machines.
Update: If you read the whole article, which I did, the claim is that the Rapiscan techs didn’t divide by 10 when collecting data. I find it hard to buy that a manufacturer that has a huge interest in the radiation values matching spec would allow that to happen, and so I thought this was worth posting. But, if you buy that Rapiscan would let that kind of an error happen, then it wasn’t worth posting, or even worth writing about in Ars Technica.
Punchy
Fixed for the only thing that really matters nowadays.
Underwear gnomes solved!
1) Make scanners
2) Make up data
3) Profit!
Comrade Javamanphil
Don’t nuke my junk!
bkny
a calculation error
jesusfuckingchrist. but, then, the only numbers the manufacturers were interested in was the billions to be extracted from the u.s. taxpayers.
Dave
I was supposed to go through one of these for my flight from Boston to Toronto and I told them to pat me down precisely because I didn’t believe the TSA’s rad claims. Also, the TSA guy who gave me the once-over was professional about it. No real delay at all. Compared to the TSA group in Newark who seem to delight in torturing passengers…
Dennis SGMM
Does this mean that the scanners were put into use on the basis of expected results rather than actual testing? It seems to.
TSA: “Well, no one actually, you know, glowed after a scan, (at least under normal lighting) so we figured everything was cool.”
Ash Can
No one could have predicted…
Capri
Do the TSA employees wear badges to record their exposure to radiation? They should. X-ray technicians and others who work around radiation (even if they supposedly are never exposed themselves) do. If they belonged to a union, that would be one of those things that a union could insist on.
Bill ORLY
You mean that the security-industrial complex was slipshod/misleading in siphoning billions out of the Fatherland Security budget? NOBODY could have seen that coming…
bkny
@Bill ORLY: wanna bet the bottom line numbers anticipated were more highly scrutinized…
anyone hear of incidents re this t-shirt:
http://4thamendment.myshopify.com/
mk3872
Oh, puhleeze, cool your jets.
Comparing these devices to “RAPE” is pathetic and unnecessary.
MikeTheZ
“Don’t nuke me bro!!”
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
/Reasonpundit
You know, it was the government requirement to test the levels of radiation of these machines that caused the miscalcuation. If the free market were allowed to conduct their own tests and not meet these intrusive government requirements, all of this data would have been correct and posted on the internet for everyone to see. Then, the populace could have decided whether or not they wanted to fly based off the exposure to radiation.
/endReasonpundit
me
the main reason why we should be concerned about these machines is found in a case study called the Therac-25: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac_25
I have spent the last ten years managing projects in the pharma/biotech industry and a huge part of the projects have been ensuring that software and hardware used was validated per federal regulations. The software and hardware projects I managed were for clinical trials (which included data collection but also machines that measured patients physiological abilities – e.g. muscle strength, lung strength, etc.), safety data, etc. I don’t trust vendors design and testing procedures and have audited companies. I know what I’m talking about when it comes to design and testing per federal regulations. And interpretation of said regulations (interpretation is in the eye of the beholder, btw, which is a whole other problem).
But back to the Therac-25. The Therac-25 mostly had software design and testing problems but there were also technician errors. Notice how the TSA has admitted that “technicians made errors when calculating the radiation emissions”.
For those that argue “it’s not that much radiation emission” I counter with:
That assumes the technician doesn’t do something stupid. And it assumes that the right safety checks are designed in the software and hardware. And while one cannot think of all things to test or design we should be confident that we’ve tested well (and continue to test). That there are secondary and tertiary safety checks and balances (mixture of technology/human). And monitoring of each machine (re-calibrating once every x time period, for example). You’ll see by the Therac-25 that if things aren’t tested and designed properly and the technicians aren’t trained properly then things can go awry. Oh, and we don’t know what machine models they are using. Could we have a situation like the Therac-25 where the company has earlier versions of their machines and they are making assumptions about the newer models when they update and test their software and hardware? I also wonder what’s the max amount that could be emitted if not calibrated properly? (Does the thing go to 11? :)) Is there a procedure in place for TSA agents to report problems? And is there follow up to said problems? Does the TSA do independent testing or rely solely on the vendors testing? Etc.
My experience flying over the past year is I’ve avoided these machines because the airport either had them turned off or had a mixture of backscatter and normal scanners working so I just paid attention and chose the line that didn’t go through the backscatter machine.
Mike in NC
What would McMegan McEstimate have to say about this?
Corpsicle
To all the people who thought I was retarded for refusing to ever go through one of these machines:
Enjoy your cancer retards!
cleek
OT: A crapper for Rand Paul (via Making Light)
Corner Stone
We’ve been over this a thousand times during the initial blow up regarding these machines. Lots of people, specifically El Cid IIRC, mentioned multiple times that we couldn’t know what the result of the scanning was because no one running the damn things knew either (summarized re-cap).
Lots of very friendly and helpful people here in BJ told us to get over it, it was less radiation than stepping foot on an airplane or some shit.
Dennis SGMM
@me:
C’mon; TSA workers are required to have a high school diploma or GED equivalent. If a high school diploma doesn’t qualify you to work with radiation then nothing does.
Lynnia
I am no fan of the body scanners, but I think the important line in the article is this one:
Is it atrocious that the technicians don’t know how to take an average? Yes. Are the machines actually producing 10x the expected radiation? Probably not. Obviously further testing should be done to make sure, but it’s probably not time to panic just yet.
Jim C
I’m reminded of the words of Richard Benjamin on Saturday Night Live:
Carl Nyberg
If government isn’t improving people’s lives and it’s being administered incompetently, don’t be surprised when people vote against government.
There needs to be a vision for using the power of government to improve people’s lives.
MTiffany
@Lynnia: What’s atrocious is that those chimps at TSA probably 1) don’t know that to take an average of 10 measurements, just add all 10 measurements together, take the total and slide the decimal point one digit to the left, and 2) don’t know what a decimal point is.
Teh moar you dumb things down, teh moar dumb peoplez getz.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Yeah, it’s a poorly worded and written article. The government tests were coming up with Results that were 10x what they should have been because the testers were forgetting to divide by 10.
So radiation levels are 1/10 what the government was coming up with, sometimes, when they forgot to average.
Dennis SGMM
@MTiffany:
If taking an average wasn’t part of the standardized testing mandated by NCLB then you can bet the ranch that they don’t know how to take an average.
D. Mason
I knew that George Bush was up to no good when I first heard about these body scanners.
jwb
@Mike in NC: I think McMegan has been lending out her calculator.
Corpsicle
@Carl Nyberg: It’s called S_______m. I’m not allowed to say it for some reason, something to do with penis size or balding or some such bullshit.
New Yorker
Well, it’s nice to no longer be working as a traveling consultant. At least the Delta terminal at LaGuardia that I passed through every other week didn’t have them yet. I think I was only nuked 2 or 3 times at the Cincinnati Airport.
artem1s
geez, the least they could do is screen me for cancer while I’m going through security.
reduced health care costs. see how privatization works!
The Moar You Know
Not like this wasn’t predictable or anything.
The Moar You Know
@me: Whoops, missed your post on the same thing. But folks, read about the Therac. It’s really important that you NOT take these people’s word that these machines are safe at face value, for a slew of reasons that would take me far too long to type and post.
Villago Delenda Est
@bkny:
Michael Chertoff, chief lobbyist and representative of said manufacturers. Also, first head of the Heimatssicherheitshauptampt, the original name of the Department of Homeland Security.
Stefan
Rapiscan technicians in the field are required to test radiation levels 10 times in a row, and divide by 10 to produce an average radiation measurement. Often, the testers failed to divide results by 10, Horowitz said.
Maybe the testers all had gastritis?
Don
@me: The Therac-25 was discussed on the very first day of software engineering class for me and it’s stuck with me these *cough*cough* years since. It’s certainly always made me mindful of the importance not only of safety testing but of continued calibration and checks.
I think the scanners are a poor response, particularly when you consider their cost:benefit ratio, but I’d be more forgiving if the TSA’s statements seemed to bear the slightest hint of concern about having quality procedure set up and in place. Resistance to letting workers wear radiation badges is a move in the exact opposite direction of reassuring.
When someone wants me to submit to exposure to a machine they’re unwilling to discuss their safety protocols and maintenance of that’s a big sign that I should not trust them.
Sentient Puddle
@me and @The Moar You Know: It seems like a bit of a stretch to blame the Therac-25 problems on operator error based on that article. At worst, it sounds like operators might have been to blame inasmuch as not doing some sort of sanity check, but on the whole, it sort of reads to me like you’d be blaming them for failing to properly read the terribly-designed interface. Not exactly my field of expertise, but I’d like to imagine that computer design has evolved past this sort of thing since 1985, doing much more to assume that the user is dumb as a sack of hammers when required.
Warnings are good and proper and all, but I’m not sure I see much relevance in this example.
The Moar You Know
@Sentient Puddle: That’s a very bad assumption about software and control design.
However, it’s also irrelevant. We aren’t blaming the Therac problems on operator error. The Therac didn’t fail all the time; it failed rarely, under a special set of circumstances that were not tested for, and did not have adequate safeguards to protect against.
Nor would I blame any problem with the backscatter scanners on operator error – since no testing seems to have been done, much less published, for all we know it could microwave every thousandth passenger into a puddle.
Rathskeller
@Lynnia: Thanks, that’s exactly the key point in the article. This is just lazy journalism — and mistermix shouldn’t have posted it here, either.
If it matters, I just flew out of SFO, and there were parallel lines going into a magnetometer and a backscatter machine. A TSA agent stood in between the lines and directed people into one or the other.
However, that wasn’t obvious at first, and I was in-line for the X-Rays. I told her I was going to opt-out (since I also don’t trust the TSA techs) and she barked not to tell her that, that she decides who goes through which machine — then she sent me through the magnetometer side.
My guess is that the TSA agents are now truly sick and tired of groping people’s crotches and they’re adjusting procedures so that they do that as little as possible.
Caren
@Capri #9
Not only do TSA agents not wear rad counters, but they are FORBIDDEN to do so. It might upset the passengers. We’re only supposed to be afraid of terra-ists, not the security theater set up to “protect” us.
me
@The Moar You Know and @Sentient Puddle:
I’m not sure how much more I’d add to The Moar You Know’s post. The user does have to be taken into consideration when designing systems as they are a part of the safety. Poor training, etc. makes it less safe. But you’re right, it’s not their fault.
Violet
@Capri:
They are NOT ALLOWED by the TSA to wear dosimeters (radiation measuring badges). It’s not part of the uniform.
Lee
Anyone know which airports use these? Or a handy way to tell the difference?
I’m flying with the family in July from Dallas to San Francisco and back.
Violet
@Lee:
FlyerTalk keeps a comprehensive list here.
sukabi
@Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac: except that the forms they fucked up reading were the company’s own testing form… thus proving the “free market” doesn’t know shit from shinola.
sukabi
@Lynnia: you can’t assume that from the article either… you don’t KNOW what number the technicians, that didn’t know how to “average” 10 readings, produced….
did they take the middle reading and enter it into the form?
did they add the 10 readings together and enter that number?
or were the individual readings 10 times higher than was expected?
you don’t know because they left that vague, leaving you to make assumptions.
They are blaming the technicians for not knowing how to do a simple math problem… either their technicians shouldn’t be working in the industry because they can’t do a 5th grade math problem, or the company is lying about the safety of the machines and is using the technicians as scapegoats to buy time.
Lee
@Violet:
Thank you very much!
matt
I was under the impression that these weren’t X-ray scanners. Some other type of ray.
Rathskeller
@matt: There are two types of scanners, one of which uses low-power X-rays, the other uses millimeter radar. both of them have the ability to penetrate ordinary clothing, so they both have the nickname of porno scanners. there’s also a fourth type, a puffer, that tries to sniff signatures of explosives by hitting your body with little puffs of air.
The potential dangers from the x-ray are:
– these are machines used daily, hourly; but they are not calibrated and maintained regularly
– an ordinary medical x-ray passes through your body. the design of the backscatter machines is that the x-ray touches your entire body and passes inside 1-2 cm before bouncing back. this difference has some scientists concerned.
– the TSA has declined to provide info to the concerned scientists that would let them calculate true exposures.
The other problem is that this is expensive and dangerous security theater. The devices work — if you’re an idiot. Say you had a ceramic knife or some explosives taped to your chest. You’d pass through a ordinary magnetometer scanner, but both of the other types of scanners would have a huge image. A small child could see the problem.
But if you were actually motivated to both blow a plane up and not get caught, you’d put that explosive somewhere harder to see: between your thighs, under your scrotum or soles, inside of a hoagie in your bag.
So it’s all absurd. I’d rather be fondled than x-ray’d, if I have a choice.
Joe
No amount of radiation is good or safe. And its effects on the body are cumulative. They tell you that one good sunburn early in life can greatly increase your risk of skin cancer decades later. But keep rationalizing America. It’s what you do best.
Stefan
But if you were actually motivated to both blow a plane up and not get caught, you’d put that explosive somewhere harder to see: between your thighs, under your scrotum or soles, inside of a hoagie in your bag.
Or you’d just put in inside your suitcase, load up the suitcase with shrapnel, wheel your suitcase into the security line right before the machines, and detonate.
You don’t get to blow up a plane, sure, you do manage to bring civil aviation in the US to a screeching halt.
sukabi
@Stefan: or you’d send something through airline cargo… they still aren’t checking that.
HyperIon
@Rathskeller:
I second that.
mistermix, shouldn’t you apologize for this BS?
it appears that mistermix did not read the entire article he linked to. why is this so hard? isn’t it obvious by now that SOMEONE will. geez. don’t we have enough REAL problems to think about?
mistermix
@HyperIon: I read the whole article, and posted a clarification above. I don’t take the TSA explanation at face value. But, I should have said something in the post about the TSA not agreeing with the claim.
HyperIon
@mistermix:
Why stop at The flawed results showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected. Why not include the supplied explanation whether you believe it or not?
It seems as if you were trying to mislead.
JD_PhD
How much education does the guy who runs the x-ray machine at the hospital have? Or the one who does sonagrams?
Now, how much education does the TSA agent who runs these machines have?