TSA matching ID's

[streaker69]

Re: TSA matching ID's

It's nitrates, like nitroglycerin or ammonium nitrate, or that's what I've been told.

The city plant we work with has about 10,000 gallons of glycerin and they wanted to send it over to us for disposal. When I heard about it I quickly asked if we could get a railcar in of nitric acid so we could have some real fun with it. Needless to say, no one was as amused as I was by it.

[renderman]

Re: TSA matching ID's

It's nitrates, like nitroglycerin or ammonium nitrate, or that's what I've been told.

It's looking for any nitrate based substance and doesn't distinguish or quantify at the checkpoint. it's just a red light/green light. Obviously if there's a red light, they start tearing through the bag and asking questions.

Dragorn has a fun story about these machines. He went through security and the machine gave him a red light and the staff didn't know what the hell to do. Turns out that he had been at a quarry the previous day and traces of blasting material got on his shoes. They let him on eventually but not before freaking out and going through his stuff with a fine tooth comb.

Also be aware that even digging in the garden before a flight can trigger these since there's enough nitrates in fertilizer to set them off. I've often though an interesting DoS at an airport would be to 'spill' a big gulp in a major entrance that was water and diluted fertilizer. Everyone coming through the entrance would have their shoes set off the machine, grinding things to a halt.

Its interesting that we are letting the output of machines, rather than human decisions dictate our security?

[Thorn]

Re: TSA matching ID's

It's looking for any nitrate based substance and doesn't distinguish or quantify at the checkpoint. it's just a red light/green light. Obviously if there's a red light, they start tearing through the bag and asking questions.

Dragorn has a fun story about these machines. He went through security and the machine gave him a red light and the staff didn't know what the hell to do. Turns out that he had been at a quarry the previous day and traces of blasting material got on his shoes. They let him on eventually but not before freaking out and going through his stuff with a fine tooth comb.

Also be aware that even digging in the garden before a flight can trigger these since there's enough nitrates in fertilizer to set them off. I've often though an interesting DoS at an airport would be to 'spill' a big gulp in a major entrance that was water and diluted fertilizer. Everyone coming through the entrance would have their shoes set off the machine, grinding things to a halt.

Its interesting that we are letting the output of machines, rather than human decisions dictate our security?

With the amount of agriculture in this state, I've often wondered if the local farmers have a high hit rate due to the ammonium nitrate in fertilizers.

Of course, it would be interesting to find out what the ratio is on true hits verses false positives these machines. From Dragorn's story, positive hits aren't very common, and the Standard Operating Procedure(s) for dealing with a positive aren't well known, and don't seem to be trained and practiced.

That, of course, is the real problem here. Not that a machine is making a yes or no determination of the presence of a given substance, but that the policies and procedures aren't properly set up for what to do and how to do it once a given condition is met. i.e. How does the TSA staff make a the right determination whether or not an actual threat exists, and how to they do it correctly every time, and hopefully, relatively quickly.