Friday, November 16, 2012

Will Michael Chertoff Get to Find Out What a Full Body Naked Cavity Search is Really About?


The firm Michael Chertoff represents , Rapiscan, which makes those cancer causing naked scan machines, is under investigation.
Boing, boing reports:
Rapiscan, makers of the naked-scanner technology used in many US airports, are in a lot of trouble. The TSA has accused them of falsifying their tests results on the software that supposedly protects flier privacy by rendering them as cartoon characters with suspicious blobs wherever the scanner's image-processor thinks they belong. If convicted, the execs at Rapiscan could go to jail, and the company would be assessed for stiff fines and be barred from any future government contracting. Here's more from  
Wired's Kim Zetter: 
DHS has spent about $90 million replacing traditional magnetometers with the controversial body-scanning machines.
Rapiscan has a contract to produce 500 machines for the TSA at a cost of about $180,000 each. The company could be fined and barred from participating in government contracts, or employees could face prison terms if it is found to have defrauded the government.
It’s not the first time Rapiscan has been at the center of testing problems with the machines. The company previously had problems with a “calculation error” in safety tests that showed the machines were emitting radiation levels that were 10 times higher than expected.
It turned out the company’s technicians weren’t following protocol in conducting the tests. They were supposed to test radiation levels of machines in the field 10 times in a row, and then divide the results by 10 to produce an average radiation measurement. But the testers failed to divide the results by 10, producing false numbers.
I'm dreaming here a bit, but Chertoff should be considered the scheming crony mouthpiece of the operation and should be the first one thrown into chains, and forced to go through daily full body cavity searches before breakfast at some maximum security prison.

8 comments:

  1. Hey, Wenzel, are you gonna link to this story about Rand Paul from antiwar.com? Or does this go against the narrative that Rand is traitorous sellout that eschews liberty and embraces statism?

    http://news.antiwar.com/2012/11/15/sen-paul-stalls-military-spending-bill-over-summary-detention/

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  2. That would make my day for all of them to end up in jail!

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  3. More poetic would be for him to have to undergo not regular cavity searches, but daily exposures to the radiation of one of his Rapiscan machines. Less revenge, but much more irony.

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  4. This does not excuse the TSA. THEY made the statements to the public that nudity could not be seen and recorded, and stated that the machines were safe. EVERY person at the TSA that made a false statement to the public should also be facing prison time. No private business would ever do such a massive and expensive rollout of equipment and not do their own preliminary tests first to make sure it will work as advertised.

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  5. Is it me, or if you failed to divide by 10, the reported radiation levels would be 10x higher than actual. Second, this would be the stupidest math error known to man, well, except for that $16.244 Trillion one ;)

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  6. That's exactly what the paragraph above says, in another test they were reporting a 10x error.

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  7. Everything should be voluntarily funded. I wish far more Americans felt that way. It would be my pleasure to see airports and airlines go bankrupt when passengers got sick of being mistreated and took their business elsewhere.

    I wish I could start an airline/airport that does just that: provides its own security (or subcontracts some things) in a manner that reaches back to when flying was exciting and more convenient. One can dream. Imagine customer service meaning something in this field again?

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