What Are Scientists Saying About X-Ray Backscatter Scanners?
In advance of the publicity of the installation of naked scanners at US airports, some activists and scientists were already making some noise. A group of UCSF scientists – John Sedat, David Agard, Marc Shuman, and Robert Stroud – sent a letter to the President’s science advisor, John Holdren, in April 2010 expressing their concern about the scanners. I have written about this elsewhere.
The Republican wing of the mainstream media picked up on a peer-reviewed article published in between the holidays last December that ran some simulations of the x-ray backscatter scanners. Recall that this followed shortly on the heels of the protests of last fall – when the TSA was rolling out more and more scanners, and also stepping up the invasiveness of their so-called pat-downs (known as custody searches by law enforcement). The authors, Leon Kaufmann and Joseph Carlson (again of UCSF) concluded that the reported capabilities of the scanners and the reported safety of the scanners were not consistent with each other. That is, either they don’t work as well as advertised, or they are more dangerous than advertised. There are also a number of other results in their paper that should be of interest to travelers, and I summarized them at that time on my blog.
And now… the rest of the story. …..
Harold
