Cancer Risk from TSA X-Ray Backscatter Scanner

A blog called My Helical Tryst has posted a lengthy review of the TSA X-ray backscatter body scanner safety report.

The review raises many excellent health questions by a biophysics and biochemistry expert. The subtitle is “hide your kids, hide your wife” but another interesting angle is that the scanner operators are not wearing radiation badges. A badge could be a simple and inexpensive way to demonstrate safety or exposure risk of the scanner.

Finally, I would like to comment on the safety of the TSA officers (TSO) who will be operating these machines, and will be constant ‘bystanders’ with respect to the radiation exposure. The range of exposure estimates is a function of where an officer stands during their duty, what percentage of that duty is spent in the same location and how often the machine is running. A TSO could be exposed to as much as 86-1408 mrem per year (assuming 8 hours per day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks per year and between 30-100% duty and 25-100% occupancy, as defined by the Johns Hopkins report), which is between 86%-1410% of the safe exposure of 100 mrem. At the high end, if for example a TSO is standing at the entrance of the scanner when it is running at maximum capacity, then that officer could hit their radiation exposure limit in as few as 20 working days (assuming an 8 hour shift). While we may not be very happy with our TSOs at the moment as the face of these policies, we need to keep in mind that they really should be wearing radiation badges in order to know their specific exposure (especially for those officers who may also have to receive radiation exposure for medical reasons).

Somali Portland Bomber Foiled by Parents

Excellent analysis of the Somali bomber plot in Portland, Oregon. From The Agonist:

These are well-known among local fellow [Somali] nationals.

1.) The suspect’s father two years ago notified federal authorities that his son was in sympathy with Islamicist terrorists, and even turned over to them his passport, so that he was unable to leave the country.

2.) The young man entered the United States at 3 years of age and had been at odds with his parents for quite some time, since they appreciated the opportunities here much more than he did.

3.) So assimilated are his parents that his mother was present among the crowd celebrating the beginning of the Christmas shopping season while he was engaged in attempting to kill everyone in it.

I have every reason to believe these assertions to be valid. One man after another started to tell them to me, right after joining the conversation at the table, without having spoken to the others about it. Taking them as credible, then, means that the effort to characterize this case as one of entrapment is both weak and superficial.

The real reason for the safe outcome of this incident of a disaffected Islamic man has little to do with the vigilance of our national police. We are no safer today as a result of the efforts of the National Security State. Rather, the potential for violence was averted, fundamentally, due to the unusual openness of American society, which made the parents of the young terrorist wannabee feel welcome enough in the U.S. to sacrifice their own child to the protection of the community of which they felt themselves to be a part.

Science-fiction under Soviet rule

A historical science-fiction exhibit in Prague illustrates how writing about the future was controlled and then relaxed under Soviet authority

“Unlike Western science fiction, which was more plot-oriented, Czech writers tended to be more oriented to ideas, and maybe moral issues,” added Ivan Adamovic, another curator at the show. It was not until the 1960s that they devoted more attention to action and gripping plots, he noted.

Pospiszyl also pointed out the emphasis on the positive posed particular difficulties in creating plot lines.

“It was actually quite a problem for writers and artists of that time to even find dramatic situations,” he said. “Because the future was supposed to be optimistic and great. They found a solution in ceding little pockets of capitalism that somehow travelled in time, or were rediscovered in the future.”

A more fundamental change also happened around the same time; when the party-line optimism was relaxed, a more critical look at the risks from technology became possible:

“It came in the second half of the 1960s, when people realised we would not reach communism within the 20th century,” Adamovic said. “Also they noticed that technological progress will not solve everything, as they thought before.”

Secret Service Nabs Hacker Poo

The US Department of Justice made an announcement on November 18th that gives only a shadow of the story of Lin Mun Poo. It says he is a Malaysian citizen who made a stop in New York on his way home from Europe. He was detained by the Secret Service not long after arrival.

A more complete version of events and allegations is found in his detention letter.

…the defendant appears to have traveled to the United States for the sole purpose of engaging in criminal activity; within hours of his arrival at JFK on October 21, 2010, United States Secret Service agents observed the defendant selling stolen credit card numbers for $1,000 at a diner in Brooklyn and arrested him shortly thereafter. In his post-arrest statement, the defendant admitted that the primary purpose of his journey to the United States was to meet with an individual who the defendant believed was capable of regularly providing the defendant with a large volume of stolen card numbers and personal identification numbers, which the defendant said he planned to use to withdraw cash from automated teller machines.

I see a problem in this story: Poo is made out in most reports to be a “career” criminal hacker. He is alleged to be very proficient stealing card numbers and identification from financial institutions. Why was he in a New York diner trying to find someone to give him stolen card numbers if he already had a way to get them remotely?

It seems foolishly risky for him to fly into the US. It would make some sense, in terms of risk, if he had to meet a buyer. That is how the allegation starts out — he has 400,000 card numbers and someone (the Secret Service must have set him up in a sting operation) offered him $1,000 for some amount of them.

Why would someone like Poo fail to use a mule for this operation on American soil? It is obviously high-risk — career-ending for a criminal. Why would he also fail to use a mule to make ATM withdrawals?

Maybe he could not figure out a mule system? That seems unlikely, given that he was said to have hacked into a bank anonymously. Even if I assume he could not figure out mule systems to sell his bounty of stolen card numbers, I have no good explanation for why he would need to arrive in the US to acquire more stolen card numbers.

The full story thus sounds like one of three things: a mule was arrested and has been made out to be a mastermind to block his escape, this criminal mastermind is actually not much brighter than a mule, or the Secret Service has been doing some top-notch social engineering to get a criminal mastermind to walk straight into their arms.