I apologize that I got punked with the image. It is a known fake.
Having said that, the technology really does take naked pictures of folks. The only question is how much image manipulation the software performs (and how easily it can be hacked)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray - " it performs a virtual strip search, easily penetrating clothing to reveal concealed weapons; however, it raises privacy concerns in that it appears to screeners essentially as a nude picture of the subject, and may allow screeners to gain access to otherwise confidential medical information, such as the fact a passenger uses a colostomy bag, has a missing limb or wears a prosthesis, or is transsexual."
From http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/backscatter.htm - "And yes, it's possible for backscatter X-raying to produce photo-quality images of what's going on beneath our clothes. But because of privacy concerns, for the time being, the peep show has been distorted: "
Very sorry about the slip-up. I'm also sorry that this was taken as a political rant. This same thing happens in large organizations when dealing with other things that cause political risk, and for the same reason. And it's just as upsetting. I simply used the security business as a theme. It's what upsets the most folks, and it seemed to be easily understandable by the largest audience.
I've updated the blog to remove the naked picture and make the correction.
Right now I see one removed, but the other one is a fake as well.
I was watching the way (some of) these are "cleaned up" for display at the airport the other day. It was basically a stick figure with little boxes showing where items were on the person. Pretty interesting.
Just a hint for your future reference- you should have been able to immediately discern that the second image was a fake. X-ray can NEVER reproduce color in the visible spectrum.
Artificially colorized SEM and Hubble images trick us into believing otherwise, but I am not aware of any way to extract the color of an object without shining it with that wavelength of light. (Besides perhaps spectroscopy followed by reconstruction, but that still requires OTHER wavelengths of visible light)
In a functioning constitutional republic we would not first be asking what Amendments prohibit government power, but rather by what constitutionally-delegated power does the government assert its authority to act. Alas we've spent the better part of two centuries carving out an ever-widening reading of Federal power.
There are those who are perfectly willing to read into the Interstate Commerce Clause the power to mandate individuals purchase health insurance. There are those who are perfectly willing to read into the Interstate Commerce Clause the power to forbid purely intrastate sale of otherwise legal drugs. How sadly humorous that these two groups, likely opposed in most political issues, can agree on near-limitless Federal power, and in so doing they have left us with only "penumbras and emanations" as defense.
A "99% accurate" paedophilia test would quite possibly falsely accuse as many innocents as catch positive people (given that only a tiny fraction of people are paedophiles) and being wrongly accused of being a paedophile has a pretty substantial negative impact on your welfare.
I'm not sure the airport scanner argument is really connected: it causes mild embarrassment to 100% of people asked to use it. The real question is whether having the mild embarrassment of being subject to certain security procedures (voluntarily; you bought the ticket) is worth a reduced chance of a fiery death in mid-air. Personally I'd say yes even though the chances of the latter occurring are vanishingly small.
If anything the "99% rule" is the defending the opposite argument: >99% of the time it reveals nothing or throws up false positives, same with passport control and with the delay-inducing regular maintenance checks on the aircraft and the costly OEM approvals required for each and every component fitted on the aircraft and the extra hours spent by the pilot getting type-rated on the newer variant and the slight adjustments to the flight path to take into account the remote possibility of bad weather and extra airspace assigned to that particular aircraft because of mildly reduced visibility and the minute corrections of altitude shortly before and the possibility of deploying the autopilot.... and actually, I quite like the way having all these seemingly easily-dispensed-with checks ensures that an aluminium tube travelling at several hundred mph thousands of feet above the ground is the safest mode of transport.
Even stating it as 1% is very misleading. There have been a total of what 4 incidents since 9/11, out of the billions of total passengers that have flown within the us and europe since? The statistics simply don't support the added cost and scrutiny.
Talk for example about false positives in airport security. An error rate of 'only 0.01%' looks pretty good at first. But if you put in the actual numbers, you see a very different image.
Airport Frankfurt had about 50 million passengers in 2009. An false positive rate of 0.01% would cause trouble for 5000 people. Each day about 13 people would be falsely accused.
To be honest, I don't think that's a big deal - 'false positives', whatever those might be in the case of backscatter machines, can be easily caught at the second stage - a pat-down. The bigger issue is blindly forcing everyone to effectively strip naked for the authorities before they are allowed to board a plane.
Agree, but actually I was not thinking about backscatter machines. I had biometric passports in mind while writing... and people missing flights as a consequence.
Of course the arguments for governments doing full backscatter body image scans are fundamentally the same as the arguments for getting access to encrypted mail and voice calls.
If we're happy to have government agents inspect our private parts to board a plane, why shouldn't we be happy for them to inspect our emails and phone calls to be able to communicate with each other?
Email and phone calls aren't any more of a right than freedom of movement are they?
Technology should be increasing not decreasing the effectiveness of our freedoms. And us folks who make it should have liberty on our brains as we hack away.
Can someone with a scientific knowledge tell me if we'll one day have technology to package the full body scanner into glasses? That will open a massive can of worms for humanity :/ What happens when everyone can see everyone else naked...
Of course. Your body radiates waves of various types through your clothes, or waves can be bounced off your body, that are not visible to the human eye. The waves can be recorded through various methods and converted to an image that we can see on a video screen. Once we have augmented reality glasses which is inevitable, this will certainly be on the market somewhere. Google for "night vision see through clothes" and "infra red see through clothes".
I think the grandparent was asking if the X-ray machines themselves could be miniaturized enough to fit in the glasses. In case you wanted to use them when a giant machine wasn't around.
I'm surprised image filtering technology doesn't have a way to just view a silhouette of the skin. I.e., establish the skin color gradients and then remove them...
I work in image processing / computer vision (albeit in completely different applications), and the technology is not very good at doing that, at least yet.
On the other hand, whenever you mention 'skin color' in a research proposal, that does not have an easy route either, even when it has nothing to do with racism.
A few years ago I was on a school trip, and we were flying back to the US from London. The security at the airport asked me if I minded going through a new type of scanner with a shorter line. The airport was doing a test run of the same kind of backscatter machine. Everyone likes short lines, so I agreed. After the scan was over, the security showed me the scan of my backside. It was literally an inverted naked picture of my ass. They looked at the scan of the frontside, but didn't show it to me. I wasn't expecting anything like this, because the technology was so new and it hadn't been widely publicized. It was really embarrassing to think that I had just been practically strip searched.
That image is a fake, but it's not very far from the truth.
Basically it includes some screenshots of the supposed effectiveness of the Airport scanner... e.g. a nude woman, then has the images inverted. I didn't read the article too closely, I'm not sure that the author understands those images are from an image catalog that has nothing to do with the airport scanner, but have been misrepresented as being so. Can't provide citation, but saw that on an earlier article from HN about a month ago.
Reminds me of Hearst: "You furnish the images, I'll furnish the war!" He got images like this one of a woman being strip-searched NSFW http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spaniards_search_women_189... which (he knew) was totally fabricated, and published them to rally pro-war sentiment.
Quick nitpick: The Court that issued the judgment on the GPS case was the 9th circuit (not district). Otherwise, I do agree. The right to privacy is something that is not explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution. It only exists because it was read in by Justice Douglas as a side product of "penumbras and emanations" of the Bill of Rights. The balance between freedom and government protection has always been tenuous. After 9/11 we have certainly seen a tipping toward the latter. Only time will tell if this trend continues, but in a world in which technology can reveal even our naked bodies, I certainly hope not.
Thats exactly what I meant. Sorry if it wasn't clear. I was trying to say that we are leaning toward government protection over personal freedoms. So, yes I agree.
There are airport scanner photos of a naked woman.
This isn't really a 99% case is it? He's saying that someone making fun of a scanned persons genitalia is part of the 1% where it doesn't work. I would argue that 100% of the time this practice is demeaning. I think that using spy satellites on American Citizens (I'm Canadian) is a bad idea 99% of the time. It's the other way around. You're catching the bad guys maybe 1% of the time or less, not the other way around.
Where is even the 1% of crimes prevented by taking naked pictures of women and children? What is the benefit if the bomb won't be in underwear anymore, but an orifice.
"Sometimes the people in charge of tracking you have ulterior motives -- which are very easy to have when there's no warrant involved. That pesky 1%"
Yeah, my tracker is always calling me out when I'm off my diet.
No, he's right. The 99% comes from the justifications used to support bad ideas like backscatter scanners. It comes from the well-meaning but misguided (or just unethical) groups and individuals that say, "99% of the time, there won't be a problem. 99% of the people that pass through these will never have to worry about the pictures. We'll be able to stop 99% of all weapons. This is a good idea, 99% of the time."
This is basically about compromise. How much do we want to compromise our principles in the name of a little extra supposed safety? Are we really willing to keep endlessly compromising 1% of our principles ad infinitum for the sake of 99% effectiveness?
We've already made compromises in being willing to let our belongings be searched before boarding a plane; we've already made compromises in allowing those searches to be performed by people who aren't law enforcement; we've already made compromises in allowing our bodies to be searched; we've already made compromises in having to disrobe some while standing in line; and, each time, there have been people justifying it by saying that 99% of the time, this is a good idea.
You and I might not agree with that, but he's not arguing that to us; he's arguing the 99% rule to everyone who uses it.
The argument is not about whether the method is 99% effective. The argument is about whether the method works as intended 99% of the time, which means that 99% of the time, nobody is bothered by it and it may have the positive effect of catching a terrorist if one happens to pass by.
Incidentally, lets suppose the method was 99% effective and that one in a million passengers is a terrorist. That would mean that 10K innocent passengers would be suspected of being a terrorist for every real terrorist. There would be a 99% chance of catching the terrorist and a 100% certainty of harassing ~10K innocent folks, which gets them stripsearched, put on no-fly lists and demeaned in other ways. All under the guise of making air travel safer, which is complete BS, because the examples of journalists still making it through security with unchecked devices are numerous.
These example images that they always use to show the effectiveness of the backscatter X-Ray always crack me up. They show big, bright blobs of gun-shaped somethings. Gee, what gun is that for it get past the metal detector?
Sure, but someone that wants to get a glass knife through airport security can come up with much better ways of doing it.
My dad and I occasionally play a game where we try to one-up each-other with ways to get weapons or contraband through security. There are a lot of ways. These backscatter scanners -- like most of the rest of airport security -- do very little to actually increase the security of the system.
It is sadly quite possible to get things through the xray machine... all it takes is forgetfulness on your part when packing carry-on, and inattentiveness on the part of the operator. Now, I didn't count on it happening a second time on the same trip, and sent the offending item home by USPS, but uh, yeah.
I'm all for security in airports - and I'm not even particularly bothered by the idea of naked pictures floating around - but I am completely uninterested in a security blanket. If stuff slips through so easily by accident, how hard can it be for a determined person? :(
I apologize that I got punked with the image. It is a known fake.
Having said that, the technology really does take naked pictures of folks. The only question is how much image manipulation the software performs (and how easily it can be hacked)
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray - " it performs a virtual strip search, easily penetrating clothing to reveal concealed weapons; however, it raises privacy concerns in that it appears to screeners essentially as a nude picture of the subject, and may allow screeners to gain access to otherwise confidential medical information, such as the fact a passenger uses a colostomy bag, has a missing limb or wears a prosthesis, or is transsexual."
From http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/backscatter.htm - "And yes, it's possible for backscatter X-raying to produce photo-quality images of what's going on beneath our clothes. But because of privacy concerns, for the time being, the peep show has been distorted: "
I would also direct you to http://www.prisonplanet.com/exposed-naked-body-scanner-image... and http://oklahoma.watchdog.org/1053/naked-machines-do-store-an...
Very sorry about the slip-up. I'm also sorry that this was taken as a political rant. This same thing happens in large organizations when dealing with other things that cause political risk, and for the same reason. And it's just as upsetting. I simply used the security business as a theme. It's what upsets the most folks, and it seemed to be easily understandable by the largest audience.
I've updated the blog to remove the naked picture and make the correction.