Jack Loftus | Gizmodo
Since current airport security technology is largely reactive to known threats, competent evildoers will eventually change their tactics to skirt by and do their worst. With that in mind, a new tactic could be pancakes.
Not pancakes you’d necessarily eat, of course, but PETN pancakes. Potential attackers could take the notoriously explosive material and smooth it into a pancake shape to mimic the contours of the abdomen using dimensions of about about 15-20cm in diameter and 1cm thick. Voila: hidden explosive.
This, according to a report in the Journal of Transportation Security (emphasis ours):
It is very likely that a large (15-20 cm in diameter), irregularly-shaped, cm-thick pancake with beveled edges, taped to the abdomen, would be invisible to this technology, ironically, because of its large volume, since it is easily confused with normal anatomy. Thus, a third of a kilo of PETN, easily picked up in a competent pat down, would be missed by backscatter “high technology”. Forty grams of PETN, a purportedly dangerous amount, would fit in a 1.25 mm-thick pancake of the dimensions simulated here and be virtually invisible. Packed in a compact mode, say, a 1 cmÃ4 cmÃ5 cm brick, it would be detected.
Where a simple pat down would effectively mitigate this threat, the multi-million dollar backscatter machines would do nothing.
Oh, and conspicuous wires and thin blades? Potentially invisible as well:
The images are very sensitive to the presence of large pieces of high Z material, e. g., iron, but unless the spatial resolution is good, thin wires will be missed because of partial volume effects. It is also easy to see that an object such as a wire or a box- cutter blade, taped to the side of the body, or even a small gun in the same location, will be invisible. While there are technical means to mildly increase the conspicuity of a thick object in air, they are ineffective for thin objects such as blades when they are aligned close to the beam direction.
This makes it almost less of a privacy issue, and more an incredible waste of money on an ineffective technology.
[Journal of Transportation Security (PDF) via Boing Boing]
The original version of the story appears here: http://gizmodo.com/5712481/fool-the-tsas-scanners-with-pancakes
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