The DHS's latest airport security device: Terahertz laser scanners

If these devices worked to accurately identify unknown materials from 50 feet away, they would already be used in thousands of labs and we'd know empirically how well they work, whether non-scientists can use them as accurately as scientists, what the false positive rate is, etc. If more accurate than a traditional lab spectrometer they would already be used widely. If less accurate, we don't need them to be used to get probable cause for "bomb" searches that "just happen" to turn up things like too much cash or a bit of pot. Even worse, we don't need their results as "evidence" that drug or bomb "residue" was found. Already we see many people arrested for "possession of meth precursors" because they have aluminum foil, plastic sandwich bags and brake fluid in their house. In many cases it is about coming up with a plausible reason for arresting people these days rather than actually holding criminals who cause trouble (such as those on wall street) accountable.

I like how the article goes to pains to describe this technology as NOT a visible laser beam and then uses a visible laser beam as their stock photo in the header.

It's a shame society at large has become so afraid of other people.

Hilarious! So now all it takes to shut down an airport is to sprinkle a bunch of blackpowder outside in the parking lot for people to track in on their shoes?

The government is making the "terrorists"' job way too easy.

If that technology actually works (that is, if it detects materials the way they believe it does), that's... actually pretty slick. There are definitely some privacy concerns, but it's a large step forward both in terms of privacy and (technical) efficacy. That, of course, doesn't mean that it's actually a Good Thing (TM) that we use these, regardless; just because it works technically doesn't mean it's actually an effective way of preventing terrorist attacks, or that any of that is worth the privacy hit, even if it is smaller than with previous tech.

Now this poses all sorts of new issues.

The 4th Amendment issues are quite interesting to consider. This is programmable meaning it can search for specific substances right?

Does this mean that the use of this device to find drugs will be an impermissible search under the test Alito articulated for the 3rd Circuit? It seems that this is a very promising way to get the bodyscanners challenged in court as needlessly intrusive, and force these to only look for explosives.

If this were a replacement to the current backscatter scanners, this would be more interesting. Since it doesn't seem like this would catch knives or other non-chemical weapons, this seems like yet another step at the airport that won't provide very much additional security and could provide a lot of false positives, as already mentioned.

So what are the health risks of exposure?

The company (Genia Photonics) is a Canadian startup that builds lasers. They appear to specialize in picosecond length laser pulses for a variety of imaging and sensing needs. They've published some papers/articles on their technology in biomedical imaging contexts. Link to one at the bottom. The point is that it doesn't look like some company 'inventing' some BS and pulling one on the DHS. Maybe.

http://www.opticsinfobase.org/boe/abstract.cfm?uri=boe-2-5-1...

If I'm not mistaken I believe the question the author is posing here is "Isn't it better to have a passive device that can, from 50 meters away, spectroscopically determine what substances you've been around than one that takes pictures of you naked?"

I don't know how to answer that. Is that better?

More to the point, it's not going to be an either-or choice. What'll happen is that these devices, if they are useful, will simply be added to the armada of devices already present. And, more importantly, just like all this other tech being developed for DHS, it'll end up with local law enforcement. In the history of the republic there's probably been about ten situations where something like this could have saved lives but now we'll end up with it everywhere.

When I say the TSA needs to be abolished its not simply because they are ineffective, expensive, intrusive into my personal affairs, and represent everything that's gone wrong with the security state. A bigger problem, it seems, is that they're creating huge markets for people to invent and commercialize things with really bad applications to my freedom.

A Star Trek tricorder would be awesome, but have we really thought about that? Do we really want everybody walking around with a device that could see through your clothes, tell what chemicals you've been around, diagnose your medical conditions, and so on?

Opt out. Every time.