A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants. Experts said the explosive PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate) would be placed in a plastic sachet inside the bomber’s body before the wound was stitched up like a normal operation incision and allowed to heal. A shaped charge of 8oz of PETN can penetrate five inches of armour and would easily blow a large hole in an airliner. Security sources said the explosives would be detonated by the bomber using a hypodermic syringe to inject TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide) through their skin into the explosives sachet.
Professor Clive Williams of the Australian National University is finalising a report on internal IEDs (improvised explosive devices) for American law enforcement authorities.
”Realistically, even the powdered explosives in the underwear is not going to be picked by body scanners,” he said.
Professor Williams said explosive-detector dogs were cheaper than machines and the most effective form of detection, ”yet they’re not being talked about very much, surprisingly”.
Perhaps sniffer dogs weren’t being considered for passenger screening duties because of ”an element of political correctness”, he suggested. Some cultures have an aversion to dogs, he said. In Islam, human contact with dogs is considered unclean.
Ath te same time the head of Interpol said that body scanners also don’t do much against what he called the ‘biggest threat’: fake passports.
“The greatest threat in the world is that last year there were 500 million, half a billion, international air arrivals worldwide where travel documents were not compared against Interpol databases,” he said on the sidelines of the Davos World Economic Forum, where 2,500 business and political leaders are gathered.
Airport body scanners are a misguided solution to travel threats, the police group’s secretary-general Ronald Noble said. Mr Noble questioned “the amount of money and resources that go into these (body-scanning) machines.”
Noble also cast doubt on the usefulness of no-fly lists.
“(The lists) are useful but I don’t believe they are the be-all and end-all,” he said, expressing concern about their expansion.
Earlier incoming EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, told the European parliament she opposes the mandatory use of airport body scanners because of concerns about the privacy and safety of passengers.
“Our need for privacy cannot justify invasion of privacy. Our citizens are not just objects, but they are human beings,”
Under a newly revamped EU treaty, Reding could draft a law ruling out mandatory body scans at airports, but she did not say whether she plans to do that. If she did, such a draft would need to be approved by a majority of the 27 EU nations to become law.
At her confirmation hearing, Reding said she would propose bills to boost the rights and privacy of EU nationals and make them uniform across the 27-nation bloc.
Filed under: Technology
Interior ministers from the EU’s member states on 21 January agreed, in principle, to share passenger data more widely.
The idea is one of a series of measures to improve screening at airports and in-flight security that they are considering and that, ministers agreed yesterday, they will set out in a plan by the end of April.
The ministers also agreed to consider putting ‘sky marshals’ – plainclothes security officers – on European flights. Sky marshals are already present on the flights of US airlines, a measure the US introduced following the attacks of 11 September 2001 on New York and Washington.
The ministers did not, however, agree on the use of body-scanners, which produce a nude picture of travellers, although no member states appear to be opposed outright to their use.
Jacques Barrot, the European commissioner for justice, said that the EU should not get “obsessed” with body-scanners and that data-sharing would be as effective in preventing terrorist attacks.
The scanners have been in use at Moscow’s Domodevodo Airport in Russia for three years.
The procedure in Moscow is simple: a security official asks the passenger to raise his or her arms and step into a plexi-glass cabin. There the passenger hears a short buzzing sound, and a digital 3D image of the passenger’s body appears on a screen in a closed-off cabin, to be scrutinized by another security guard.
But many passengers at Domodedovo’s international terminal are surprised when they realize that they have just been sent through one of the controversial body scanners. They did not know that it was introduced there.
However, a new Financial Times/Harris Poll of adults under 65 finds support for increased security measures after the attempted bombing of a plane on Christmas Day. Majorities of those surveyed in the United States (64%), Great Britain (62%), Italy (58%), France (58%), and Germany (53%) as well as 46% of Spaniards and 44% of Chinese all agree that body scanners that X-ray the fill body should be introduced at airports.
[...] other points made about the fact that the scanners don’t work, consider the prospect of bombs implanted under the skin of suicide bombers. In that last link and also in this one you’ll see that MI5 has said there [...]