A Former Digital X-Ray Sales Rep Looks at the Possibilities With Naked Full-Body Scanner Airport X-Rays
I was first introduced to digital x-ray technology nearly 14 years ago in St. Louis at the Mid Continent Dental Congress Dental Show. In less than two years, I was selling digital x-ray systems from companies like Kodak, Schick, Trophy, and Air Techniques to dentists. I sold CMOS, Super CMOS, CCD, and phosphorus plates. The technology 14 years ago was impressive, especially the technology coming from France. When I left the dental industry, the technology had grown tremendously.
When I first saw Trophy, a system developed in France, the Trophy Rep named Joe showed me technology designed for the military that Trophy licensed to find and verify dental caries on a digital x-ray. It was impressive. Today, you can take a digital image of a tooth, feed the data into the computer, and make a dental prosthetic that matches the tooth perfectly. The technology is amazing.
With technology comes a great responsibility to use the technology for good. I fear, knowing how I saw it advance in dental x-rays in a short period of time, the full-body scanners at the airport could be used for other purposes including biometrics.
Most standard digital x-ray equipment comes software that has tools similar to the caries detector feature I mentioned that Trophy licensed and used that was developed for military applications. (The military used the technology to analyze troop and equipment movements in satellite images.) My first thought is why does the TSA need to take such detailed x-rays that clearly define a person’s naked body at airports. Couldn’t they let up the exposure so the body parts aren’t defined and use software to detect abnormalities just like the software looks for cavities on teeth? Of course, so why not just allow on software with a proven track history to search for weapons? That’s a good question.
There has to be other reason the government wants to record a person’s naked body. I fear, with all the talk before the election and with the formation of a national database, rumored to be under development by GE’s Healthymagination, these images could easily be stored and used for other purposes, including technology that matures from today’s face recognition software—bio metric software. These images could be used to identify people later on.
We know the Department of Homeland Security is also considering taser bracelets that do more than just tase the bad guys on an airplane so the good guys can contain them. The bracelets have an ID chip in them that recognizes you throughout the airport once you check in and the bracelet is placed on your wrist. One would think the bracelet would reveal your identity at any TSA checkpoint, and obviously it would index your information and assign it to any image a TSA agent captures of your naked body. This would make it easy for the government to store and track you throughout the airport and to your destination, all the while storing information about you on a government computer. These are tools found in basic enterprise content management systems which quickly index documents like x-ray images currently used in hospitals and government agencies.
Digital x-ray equipment comes with basic imaging tools that you would find in any photo editing software like Photoshop. These include zoom in and zoom out. If you think they have just the power to take an image of your naked body, think again. I am willing to bet, based on the clarity that I have seen from these x-rays, the line pair resolution in the full body scanners produces a crystal clear image capable of being zoomed in on multiple times without pixelating the image. Pixelation occurs when you blow up an image so large it starts looking blocky because the individual pixels can be identified. With powerful line pair resolution, you radiographer can take a digital x-ray and not lose any quality while making it many times larger than the original. You can count on these airport scanners delivering the best in line pair technology.
A line pair is a pair of adjacent dark and light lines. In 2006 Kodak released a digital x-ray sensor with 20 line pairs per mm. When I worked for them it was 14 line pairs per mm, and the image was amazingly clear at 14. With the recent improvements in line pair resolution, a TSA agent or any other government official will be able to zoom in on their captured x-ray at the airport and see in great detail where a nipple ring meets the nipple or a pimple on your butt. Think about that for a while! Considering the crack pot team of TSA official as seen recently withlettuce woman at LAX, do you really have any doubts that someone working for the government is going to examine in great detail the private parts of an attractive man or woman? I don’t.
I don’t think people understand the technology. That’s why people think oh what the hell, what is it going to hurt. It opens up so many possibilities from perversion to big brother with biometrics. This digital radiography technology has been around since 1987. That’s nearly 25 years of technology. You better think about the research and development before just accepting the government is going to pump you full of radiation, particularly high does in this instance for the extreme details thy desire, and wonder what other motives could be behind the government’s decision to move so quickly on these full-body scanners. After all, the terrorist attempt on Flight 253 happened a few months ago, and look how prepared the US government was to install these things and have them fully operational an major airports around the country. There is more here than meets the eyes.
Let me remind you what Benjamin Franklin said. “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.”
