TSA security officers flunk physics

Sunday, November 14, 2010 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: TSA, X-rays, health news

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(NaturalNews) Since publishing my story about the TSA's naked body scanners and the "opt out" procedure (https://www.naturalnews.com/030100_naked_body...), I've received a steady stream of reports from people who are traveling, all of whom are now choosing to opt out of the scanners. The reports coming in demonstrate an amazing ignorance among TSA security screeners about how the naked body scanners actually work.

One report from a very credible source (a famous health author whom I know quite well) reveals that TSA officers told her the naked body scanners don't even emit X-rays. "It's a myth," the officer said. "There are no X-rays from those machines."

Really? Then how do they work? Are they MAGIC? Do TSA officers cast a magic Spell of X-Ray Vision on the air travel passengers like some sort of Dungeons & Dragons adventure?

(Or maybe the TSA officers simply buy those X-Ray vision glasses advertised in the back of comic books and use those to gawk at passengers.)

That the TSA's own employees don't even know these machines emit radiation is a real whopper. But of course it only makes sense: They've probably been told this by the TSA because no person in their right mind would actually work 8 hours a day standing next to a machine that emits radiation every few seconds (no matter how seemingly small the dosage).

Even dentists and chiropractors who use low-dose radiation to take images of your bones still flee the room or hide behind heavy metal shields before zapping you (as they should). Being exposed to ionizing radiation on a regular basis is inarguably a health hazard.

More TSA lies

Another TSA officer told another contact of mine that the naked body scanner machines are "incapable of storing images." This, of course, is very different from even the official TSA line which now claims the ability of the machines to store images have been "turned off." All such machines are delivered by the manufacturer with image storage features built right in, as we previously reported: https://www.naturalnews.com/029378_full_body_...

How are we, the public, to know whether the image storage capabilities have been turned back on again? I bet we'll find out one day that one of these machines was accidentally left in the "store images" configuration and has been piling up tens of thousands of photos of naked air travelers.

It gets personal

In many cases that have been reported to me, when air travel passengers request to opt out of the naked body scanners, they are humiliated and nearly accused of being insane by TSA officers who keep questioning why they won't go through the scanner. Some TSA officers even start debating with people as if they are somehow trying to convince them the scanners are perfectly safe.

One TSA agent told a female passenger that the naked body scanner "is perfectly safe even if you're pregnant" and that it "wouldn't be harmful to the baby." Really? How do they know? Sure, they say the radiation levels are so low that you actually get more radiation just from flying at high altitude, but how do they know the radiation from the machine is calibrated correctly? CT scans are commonly found to be way off their configurations, to the point where they actually leave radiation burns and cause people's hair to fall out (https://www.naturalnews.com/029232_radiation_...).

Are we really to trust that the TSA has configured these machines correctly? It is especially difficult to trust an agency that hires people to run X-ray-emitting scanners who don't even know their scanners emit X-rays!

How do you explain to a typical TSA agent that the naked body scanner might be dangerous if the guy is so ignorant that he doesn't even realize the machines emit X-rays?

It's almost like we need to walk through the airport now with a book called Physics 101. And when we see these TSA agents, we need to sit them down and go through the laws of the universe. Okay, here's how gravity works, and that's why you're sitting down and not floating away into high orbit. And now, here's electromagnetic wave theory which explains how things like visible light, microwaves, radio waves and X-rays work. And here's why X-rays penetrate matter better than light waves, and so on.

Of course, they might think you were a terrorist. Try to explain anything intelligent and they'll think you're trying to trick them in some clever way. Because, let's face it, these agents are not the cream of the crop in the IQ department. They don't know much about X-rays or technology, but they've been convinced that making you go through the naked body scanner is somehow, somewhere, making some sort of difference "for the greater good..." although if you ask them how, they wouldn't be able to explain that, either.

It all reminds me of the use of X-rays by shoe stores in the early 20th century. They used to have X-ray machines where you could try on a shoe then place your foot under the X-ray emitter while seeing the "fit" of your bones through a viewing scope. It was all billed as perfectly safe and healthy. "Advanced," even!

Of course, a few decades later, some scientists figured out that this was promoting serious cancers in the feet, and these machines were eventually banned -- but not without a lot of protests from shoe companies who insisted the machines were totally safe! Yes, this is true history. It's not a myth. See the photos of the "shoe-fitting fluoroscope" right here: http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefitti...

The people pushing the most dangerous X-ray machines have always insisted they were safe!