Is going through one of the TSA porno-scanners (now at selected airports near you!) really safer than eating a banana?
Let's hope so. If you object, you are going to get groped, even if your child is a pre-school girl. But White House science adviser John Holdren recently received a letter signed by five physics and medical professors professors noting that the scanners actually don't work all that well and the ion chamber used to test the scanners can get overwhelmed by the levels of radiation the backscatter deposits and might not have provided accurate readings in testing.
The risks are "truly trivial," said Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a UC San Francisco radiologist in an article for the Archives of Internal Medicine last year. A passenger would have to undergo 50 airport scans to reach the level of a dental X-ray, 1,000 for a chest X-ray, and 4,000 for a mammogram.
But the machines that were tested were not actual production machines in use, they were instead specially built and sent by RapiScan, the manufacturer, who has 5-folded its lobbying expenses in the last few years and their CEO has even become a friend of Obama, accompanying him on a trip to India.
"There's really unnecessary fear related to these scans," Smith-Bindman told Michael Grabell of
ProPublica. "What I'm not as comfortable with is that there has not been access to these machines. They are not being tested on the same regulatory basis that we see on medical equipment."
And when she mentioned that to the government, they said allowing outside testing would tip off people who want to avoid detection. In other words, if scientists ask questions, the terrorists win.
