VeteransToday.com
Over the past month, in the face of unprecedented airport screening procedures that left human dignity, radiation concerns, privacy and the Constitution in shambles on the tarmac, Americans have been repeatedly counseled by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that the new body scanner machines and humiliating pat downs are necessary to make air travel secure. Now documents have emerged, on the government’s own web sites, raising questions as to whether the machines are little more than overpriced metal detectors with a “beam me up Scotty” futuristic design.
A scientist associated with one of the body scanner manufacturers, Ronald J. Hughes, has submitted patent documents to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for various devices involved in airport screening of passengers to detect terrorist threats. In those documents, Mr. Hughes details serious failings of the x-ray body scanning equipment, including its lack of reliability to detect plastics or ceramics used in bomb making.
Mr. Hughes is not just any inventor. His patents have been regularly assigned to Rapiscan Systems, Inc., one of the companies which currently has over 200 body scanners in airports throughout the U.S.
The problems are explained as follows in Mr. Hughes’ patent documents. While metal objects (like guns and knives) can be easily visualized in the body scanner images, there is “poor detection capability for a wide range of dangerous objects composed of low atomic number elements, such as plastics or ceramics, which are often masked by the low atomic number elements which comprise the human body.”
Mr. Hughes goes on to note that “conventional image processing techniques for protecting privacy… tend to diminish non-body images as well, and thus, degrade the image presented to the viewer. For example, but not limited to such example, employing a traditional combination of increased brightness and contrast to diminish anatomical features may also result in the washing out of smaller and thin threat objects, such as plastic explosives, because they have properties similar to human skin…When a filter is applied to the resultant images, using conventional image processing methods, almost all objects that are at the person’s side or located inside of loose clothing tend to disappear.”...
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