On Thursday, December 27, 2001, at 05:45 PM, Dr. Evil wrote:
Sniffers are one way to detect things, but as you point out, it is possible to get emissions so low that they cannot be detected. However, the new methods are based on other exotic things like neutron scanning and mass spec, which can detect chemical composition, right?
Tough to do NAA on a living person. Likewise for getting a sample from the inside of someone for mass spec.
Also things like CAT scan X-rays and maybe even ultrasound can detect different material types; ie, bone and flesh look different, so perhaps C4 has a different X-ray opacity than other things? With things like neutron scanning, it should be possible to detect stuff anywhere in the body, perhaps? That's why boobs are the perfect place for this. A big homogenous-opacity shape in a body cavity or the abdomen is suspicious, but boob implants are "normal".
All of these scanning technologies are ultra-expensive. Even for hospitals, where such scans routinely cost thousands of dollars. While a security scan may be faster (less analysis by doctors...), and while there may be economies of scale (as the number of scans jumps from hospital-type numbers to airline-travel-type numbers), the math is clear: deploying an arsenal of NMR scans, x-ray body scans (lawsuit issues, too), etc. will not be economically feasible. People will stop traveling by air unless absolutely necessary, which will accomplish the effect the terrorists sought.
I know little or nothing about these things. Maybe someone can give us a summary of the different super-scanning technologies?
There are dozens of explanations on the Web. I can't imagine anyone knowledgeable will write such an article for you, though I could be wrong. For one thing, time. For another, relevance, as we are not scannerpunks.
Interesting stuff. At the beginning of the 20th Century, four countries had the opportunity to become empires: The US, the Russians, the Germans and the Japanese. After much bloodshed, the US won (I'm glad about that, especially when you look at the alternatives). Now the US is having to put up with some of the unpleasant aspects of being an empire, and that's why we're even discussing neutron scanning to detect explosive boobs (aka "booby traps").
Speaking of the U.S. having "won" the opportunity to become an empire, why not think about alternatives? I can imagine that a North American continent operating as roughly 5-15 regional states, each trading freely with each other, with none of them sending gunboats to far off shores and none of them sending taxpayer monies to prop up dictatorships and satrapies would be an improvement. My own state, California, is already the sixth largest economy in the world. (Before someone jumps in with a claim that the only reason California thrives and can trade with China and Japan and Mexico and so on is because the U.S. government intervened in past European and Asian war and now sends $5 billion a year to prop up Israel, I don't believe it. We can debate one specific war, WW II, as a separate issue. Even that war could have been fought from this side of the oceans with 5-15 regional states, if necessary.) Empire is not necessary. Empire brings on precisely the foreign engagements that Washington warned us to avoid. Empire brings on "peace keeping troops" in far-away lands...and attacks like 911. Empire will eventually get us nuked. --Tim May "Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity." --Robert A. Heinlein