Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body Scanners

Re:Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body ... by batbomb on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @02:34PM (#8203750)

Hi,

Have you tried concealing things under a couple of inches of a biological material and wrapping that to the body (beer gut, pregnant lady)?

Specifically, I'm thinking a a few large chunks of ham, coupled with some transglutaminase to aid in the forming of a "meat shield".

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Re:Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body ... by kmowery on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @02:53PM (#8203865)

Yes we did! Any organic material shows up pretty well under backscatter X-ray, and so can be used to cover darker contraband. You can see this done with Teflon in our gallery: https://www.radsec.org/gallery.html under "Concealing a Knife by Masking".

We didn't try meat due to the mess, but it would almost certainly work as well!

(Technically, in this X-ray energy spectrum, the amount of backscatter is related to the "effective Z" of the material, where Z is the atomic number of the elements involved. Materials made from lighter elements like carbon and oxygen? Backscatters well. Heavy elements like iron? Absorbs x-rays.)

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Re:Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body ... by batbomb on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @03:30PM (#8204093)

Yeah, I guess I thought they might have something a bit more spectographically advanced to determine molecular makeup rather than just backscatter (something that might distinguish teflon with it's abundance of fluorine from organic matter). It seems like a much more crude instrument than I thought.

For millimeter wave, I'm pretty sure the teflon wouldn't work though, since the millimeter wave machines are likely tuned for organic makeup rather than just backscatter.

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