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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

The new scanners (ones that can differentiate water and explosives) would pick this up.

It does make me wonder if there delay in the UK/EU is related to this; the delay happened within the same time frame of these devices being delivered.

How would you know this?

Lots of different explosives exist and if it is sealed in an airtight container, good luck finding it.

I don’t know how those scanners work, but I’ve always presumed they’re looking for individual chemicals. There’s not many you’d need to detect to find explosives (probably just high concentrations of carbon, nitrogen and metals?)

There are lots of different explosives. High concentrations of nitrogen you can also find in the air for example. And metal all around in an airport. Carbon as well.

There’s not a lot of solid state nitrogen or metallic powders in an airport. The rest of the high explosives that I’m aware of are all rather dense organics. Possessing those things is how you get yourself selected for secondary screening.

Again, I’m not an expert in how these things work, so I’m happy to be corrected. That to me just seems like the most obvious way the new dual energy scanners would be put to use.

> Lots of different explosives exist and if it is sealed in an airtight container, good luck finding it

The new scanners take a CT scan [1]. Airtightness is irrelevant. It's not foolproof, largely because we man the scanners with idiots [2]. But it would be detectable and, particularly after the element of surprise has been lifted, likely to be caught.

Interestingly, "Lebanon has one of the highest number of computed tomography (CT) scanners per capita in the world" [3]. Hezbollah being Hezbollah, they could repurpose these from healthcare.

[1] https://www.internationalairportreview.com/news/32019/analog...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09698...

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