A friend of mine was also queried about books in his bags before going through security. I was two steps ahead of him and was not.
This was in a comparatively small airport in Montana, so it's not an isolated trial, if it is a trial.
Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
31–40 of 130 posts
Re: Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was an MIT reasearcher a while ago (it may have been posted here) using THz wave radar to do this. I think it's the same band (ish) the body scanners use.
I kinda doubt those body scanners have anything remotely close to the spatial resolution required to find text written on a sheet of paper.
He said the same band. That wouldn't have anything to do with spatial resolution.
Re: Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
#33Because blobs of paper look to similar to blobs of potential explosives when xrayed. They arent scanning it so much as removing it from the scan of everything else.
Blobs of explosive normally have a chemical composition that is different from blobs of paper in a way that a X-ray scanner would detect. If somebody created an explosive that could pose as paper for X-ray, that would be noteworthy.
X-ray machines don't look at chemical composition, they care about density. Paper is quite dense, and a thick enough pile of it will show up as a solid block of 'something'.
Re: Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
#34Does cash have a unique identifier that can be scanned for? If someone was trying to bring a wad of hundreds in a hole cut out in a book, maybe they'd be looking for that?
Re: Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
#35I was at MCI on Sunday and can verify this. Even with pre-check, I had to remove my engineering pad from my carry on pelican case.
Re: Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
#36Kansas City Airport doesn't use TSA screeners, they have a private contractor doing the screening: https://www.tsa.gov/for-industry/screening-partnerships That said, it seems like this policy is likely a TSA imposed pilot program: https://thepointsguy.com/2017/05/paper-products-new-tsa-secu...
I don't believe this is true, how does one tell? They appear to be TSA agents, in the blue uniforms with the TSA badges
Their uniforms say First Line.
Re: Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know that to be true? Or is it that paper and/or ink blocks scanning and you can hide bombs in it?
It is the cellulose in the paper. Blocks of it are homogenous enough that they look similar in density to something dangerous. Add in ink, glue and other materials commonly soaked into paper and the situation is not totally unreasonable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose
I lack the expertise to comment on the sensitivity of the cellulose specifically, but the metro stations where I live will perform random stops as you enter, and the monitors are in plain sight. Notebooks, stacks of paper, and note cards are usually pretty clearly detected by whatever software they're using to help highlight items. It seems weird to me that there could be such difficulty with TSA scanners versus the small, older ones set up at stations here.
(St. Petersburg, Russia, just for reference for the location)
Re: Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
#38My guess, already voiced by "Ron" on Schneier's blog: they're looking for nitrocellulose. Nitrated paper is not obviously different in appearance from ordinary paper. Sheets of nitrocellulose have negligible vapor pressure and little dust so they could be missed by other means like the "puffer" detectors. If they're putting these materials through a separate machine my guess would be another detector based on optical…
Agreed. IMO the other plausible theory is disguising a bladed weapon of some kind in stacks of paper. The rest of the speculation appears to be based on misinterpretations of the headlines (scanning vs X-ray).
Re: Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
#39Seems like TSA does a lot of pilot programs that (luckily, imho) don't end up going anywhere. They once set up a folding table and searched everyone boarding my Greyhound bus.
They tried doing that at an Amtrak station a while ago and were forcibly removed from the premises by Amtrak police.
Re: Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. "Scanning paper" has spying implications. They are just xraying it in its own bin.
They seem to like dense things to be in their own bin. Books are pretty dense.
I always presumed that they wanted the laptops in a separate bin because they were comparing them to a set of known images (of commercially sold laptops), but perhaps I'm giving them too much credit.