Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body Scanners • Hacker News Board

Re: Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body Scanners

#41

Post by schoen » Wed, Aug 20, 2014, 11:05 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #23

bane wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sucks, but you really have very few alternatives, only 1 of which will actually get you onto the plane so you can get to where you're going and most of which will ensure you'll never get on a plane again. The procedures may be stupid, but people do weight the options and can be surprisingly rational given that set of choices. Given a choice of "get scanned and get on the plane" or "instigate an armed overthrow of…

I opt out of the nude scanners every time I fly. I've never had an exceptionally unpleasant experience with the nut-gropers, but I'm a young, white, male so your experience may vary. I have a dream of everyone opting out, overloading the system and requiring a fundamental change. But I'm always the only person doing it.

I've opted out over 50 times (and I try to help collect data about screening methods on FlyerTalk, though I keep thinking this needs to be organized better -- there are so many people collecting it in separate places, including different FlyerTalk threads and different web sites). I think it's interesting that the attitudes of screeners, as well as the thoroughness of their pat-downs, has varied so much. (Some of them have tried to talk me out of opting out, others have been very matter-of-fact, others have fairly vocally criticized the body scanners or TSA itself.)

Three times there was another person opting out within my sight and at least twice I got to talk to a fellow opt-outer (opter-out?). As I recall, their concerns were always more health-related than privacy-related, unlike mine, so I had a bit less common ground with them than I first expected to.

On two consecutive flights (more than a week apart and from different airports) I alarmed the ETD and got detained and subjected to multiple pat-downs and a hand-search of my luggage. I still haven't figured out what caused it, but I put my shoes and backpack through the laundry and it's never happened again. One hypothesis is that I might have gotten a drop of plant food on my shoe, which has made me much more paranoid about touching fertilizers.

Re: Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body Scanners

#42

Post by schoen » Wed, Aug 20, 2014, 11:10 PM UTC

ejain wrote: post #32

legomylibrum wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always opt out. You'll get a pat-down instead and they'll make you wait 5-10 minutes, but I always do that unless I'm running very late. If enough people do, they usually get fed up and open the metal detectors.

Back when they had the backscatter x-ray machines at Sea-Tac, there always seemed to be one lane where the metal-detector was being used instead. Don't know if this was a coincidence (I don't fly that often), or if they hoped that trouble-makers would chose that lane, and save them from having to do too many pat-downs...

You can research this a bit on FlyerTalk -- the term favored by body-scanner critics for this situation is "SDOO" (self-directed opt-out, when passengers have a choice of screening methods based on which line or checkpoint they choose). SDOO opportunities appear to be getting rarer in the U.S. over time.

TSA is also giving people an incentive to sign up for TSA Pre because (at airports that support it) the Pre line is always metal-detector-only. Right now they are "testing" Pre and randomly directing large numbers of passengers through the Pre line, but the theory is that it will be available only, or mainly, by subscription in the future, which includes some kind of background check. I'm not very comfortable signing up for one kind of government information collection to avoid a different kind, but people who don't like the scanners and don't have that objection might be interested in signing up for Pre.

Re: Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body Scanners

#43

Post by tsaoutourpants » Thu, Aug 21, 2014, 12:25 AM UTC

kmowery wrote: post #9

Hi! Lead author here. We'll be giving a talk on this work tomorrow at the USENIX Security conference, but I'd be happy to answer questions here before then!

Jon Corbett here. Thanks for conducting this study. For some, watching a video of me beating the scanners isn't enough to prove it, but it becomes harder to ignore when a scientific study confirms it. It's also nice to see confirmation of the "pancake exploit" which those critical of the machines have suspected for years.

Re: Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body Scanners

#44

Post by pmorici » Thu, Aug 21, 2014, 2:28 PM UTC

herbig wrote: post #38

pmorici wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the X-ray scanners are still installed in courthouses, jails, and other government security checkpoints around the country."

Thus the falseness of the article title. The title suggests that terrorists can take over planes using these methods, which is not the case.

It is validating prior claims from a blogger whom the TSA did everything they could to discredit.