TSA warning media not to report on body scanner weakness

[thewayne]

In case you're not up on this, a gentleman who is apparently a self-proclaimed anti-TSA activist decided to run an experiment. He bought a small sewing kit, some cloth, and basically created a sort of shoulder holster that would hold a small metal object against the side of his body. He was confident that said metal object would set off airport checkpoint alarms. He went through an airport x-ray machine, and the machine did not blink an eye.

He did this not only once, but twice. And he caught it on video. And he's challenged media to do the same thing.

Apparently the TSA isn't very happy about this. Disregard that previous stories have talked about this weakness, among others, for ages.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/08/2241229/tsa-warning-media-about-reporting-on-body-scanner-failures

Comments

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The concept is 'many eyes make all bugs shallow', but the TSA's security theater is trying to live on security by obscurity: if their bugs aren't publicized, then the terrorists won't know about them. A patently false proposition.

The problem with the Israeli security model is scale. Any major airport in the U.S. has more flights daily than the entire nation of Israel. Behavioral profiling with trained people is effective, but it's difficult to scale. The best airplane security is to (A) pilots board the aircraft before the passengers and never open the armored/reinforced door until after all passengers deplane, (B) all luggage is x-rayed and sniffed and matched to boarded passengers, (C) passengers and crew are passed through a magnetometer. Aside from this, intelligence and police work are the best protection for airports.

[silveradept]

Patently false, but lucrative for well-connected companies.

And if we happen to know what works best, then why don't we do it? We're all remarkably bad at applying the results of our experiments to real life...