Airplane security...

[AustinChief]

I have been following the recent debate regarding the new screening machines available to be used in airports and came up with an interesting idea...

If an individual airline (say American Airlines) installed the most advanced backscatter imaging devices and you simply had to walk through them to get onto the plane... would it bother you? Would you choose a different airline or possibly would you choose AA over other airlines ... KNOWING that they had 1000% higher security?

[BlackHelicopters]

Thanks bin Laden.

[jspchief]

I'd continue to choose flights the way I currently do. By price.

[Earthling]

Backscatter X-ray
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Health effects[edit]


According to the TSA, "The energy projected by millimeter wave technology is thousands of times less than a cell phone transmission. A single scan using backscatter technology produces exposure equivalent to two minutes of flying on an airplane, but delivered in a few seconds."[35]
Unlike cell phone signals, or millimeter-wave scanners, the energy being emitted by a backscatter X-ray is a type of ionizing radiation that breaks chemical bonds. Ionizing radiation is considered carcinogenic even in very small doses but at the doses used in airport scanners this effect is believed to be negligible for an individual.[36][37][38][39] If 1 million people were exposed to 520 scans in one year, one study estimated that roughly four additional cancers would occur due to the scanner, in contrast to the 600 additional cancers that would occur from the higher levels of radiation during flight. However even with this exposure no one can guarantee that an individual would not develop cancer as a result of a scan and that individual would have to deal with the pain and anguish and possible death from the cancer at their expense. [40]
Since the scanners do not have a medical purpose, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not need to subject them to the same safety evaluations as medical X-rays.[41] However, the FDA has created a webpage comparing known estimates of the radiation from backscatter X-ray body scanners to that of other known sources, which cites various reasons they deem the technology to be safe.[42]
Four professors at the University of California, San Francisco, among them members of NAS and an expert in cancer and imaging, in an April 2010 letter[43] to the presidential science and technology advisor raised several concerns about the validity of the indirect comparisons the Food and Drug Administration used in evaluating the safety of backscatter x-ray machines.[44] They argued that the effective dose is higher than claimed by the TSA and the body scanner manufacturers because the dose was calculated as if distributed throughout the whole body whereas the most of the radiation is absorbed in the skin and tissues immediately underneath. Other professors from the radiology department at UCSF disagree with the claims of the signing four professors.[45]
The UCSF professors requested that additional data be made public detailing the specific data regarding sensitive areas such as the skin and certain organs, as well as data on the special (high risk) population. In October 2010, the FDA and TSA responded to these concerns.[46][47] The letter cites reports which show that the specific dose to the skin is some 89,000 times lower than the annual limit to the skin established by the NCRP. Regarding the UCSF concerns over the high risk population to sensitive organs, the letter states that such an individual "would have to receive more than 1000 screenings to begin to approach the annual limit".[48][49]

I looked this up to see if there was ANY reason for concern regarding gamma rays and thought this was interesting. Apparently there is a very small but seemingly negligible risk with these back-scatter imaging devices.

So yeah, I would use them...

[unlurking]

TSA PreCheck has been great. No backscatter. No removing shoes/laptops/liquids/coats/belts/etc. Jumping in front of everyone in the customs line is great too. Because of this, I pretty much only fly United and US Airways (well American now I guess).