from the Is-that-a-pistol-in-your-pocket,-or... dept.
Passengers on the Los Angeles subway system can, at their option, be checked for weapons and explosives by walking through a millimeter-wave scanner. The system, which began operation Wednesday, was installed by a partnership of Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Transportation Security Administration and the manufacturer of the scanner, Evolv Technology.
Travelers boarding the Metro Red Line at Union Station were met Wednesday with a new security screening system designed to detect possible "mass-casualty" threats, as part of a pilot project to explore the latest in transit-security technology.
The Evolv Edge screening system is billed as a high-speed, high-volume screening system that can scan 600 people per hour, without the need for passengers to stop or even slow down.
According to the manufacturer, Evolv Technology, uses a series of sensors that quickly collect data on people who pass through the machine and feed it into an "algorithmic model that automatically determines if there is a potential threat," rendering a decision in a matter of seconds.
[...] "You don't have to take all the things that you normally carry out of your pockets," he said. "You can leave your phone in your pocket, your keys in your pocket, and we're looking specifically for weapons and explosives. So this system's called a millimeter-wave scanner. It uses harmless radio waves and we're able to process well over 600 visitors per hour."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Entropy on Friday August 18 2017, @07:53AM (7 children)
You can conveniently be strip searched for no reason, to solve no threat...now in new locations now that the TSA abandoned their naked body scanners.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @08:09AM
It's not just useless idiocy; it's unconstitutional idiocy. I don't even know what to say anymore in response to this cowardly authoritarian country that pretends to be free & brave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @08:12AM (1 child)
No threat? Islam is no longer a threat? What happened? They all died?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @08:15AM
Even if Islam is a threat, the TSA cannot solve it. Even if the TSA could solve it, safety is not worth giving up our freedoms for.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday August 18 2017, @08:23AM (3 children)
With what alternative?
Why would anyone choose to be a useful idiot and volunteer for this?
Bomb vests and truck ramming attacks in Spain today.
Bomb vest guys all shot dead before they got near their target. and the truck killed 13.
No scanners involved yet, the vests got nowhere.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday August 18 2017, @09:38AM
With the alternative of automatically being suspect, since you obviously have something to hide?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Saturday August 19 2017, @09:56PM (1 child)
All you have to do to avoid that is not take Islamic "refugees" aka Terrorists into the country. Simple. Europe never had those kind of problems, then they took in a ton of "Refugees", now they are the new middle east.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 20 2017, @05:32PM
Apart from the IRA, yet another terrorist group subsidised by the Americans.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Friday August 18 2017, @08:06AM
Real life demo [youtube.com]
Safe for office, but may make your head 'splode [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @08:24AM (1 child)
New market, people travel in all sorts of ways!
next up millimeter scan for starting your car
Was there not a story of a company that wanted to implement this wavelength for wireless everywhere a few months ago?
(Score: 3, Funny) by WillR on Friday August 18 2017, @01:37PM
TSA agent with a handheld millimeter wave scanner in the back seat of every Uber
Millimeter wave scanners for school lunchrooms. (Allergen DEFCON 1! Clear the building, this kid's got a peanut butter sandwich! I REPEAT, PEANUT BUTTER!)
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Friday August 18 2017, @09:11AM (4 children)
Isn't 600 people per hour a very small number? That many people could easily move through a busy central station in a few minutes. The system had better be scalable, if it is to have any chance of being put into general use.
And what's this about the check being optional? Innocent passengers, feel free to be inconvenienced by standing in line, terrorists and mass murderers, go right ahead?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @09:39AM
That depends on what you're doing. It's abysmal for accessing public transportation. It's OK for checking tickets at a movie theater. But it's pretty damn impressive for stuffing people into a wood chipper.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @09:52AM (1 child)
> Isn't 600 people per hour a very small number?
The L.A. Times estimates "about 20" [latimes.com] scanners would be needed in Union Station (one of several stations). They cost "about $60,000 each."
> And what's this about the check being optional?
It was a two-day testing period. An official said "folks that wanted to participate probably weren’t carrying any weapons."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday August 18 2017, @05:10PM
> estimates "about 20" [latimes.com] scanners would be needed in Union Station
That's L.A. shitty public transport for you.
In NY, tokyo, or Paris, multiply that number a bit: Line A is one the busiest lines in Europe with over 1,200,000 passengers per day [wikipedia.org]. (numbers for Chinese cities must be a lot worse)
Counting 20 hours of operation (it's less), that's 100 $60k scanners (but since people are not evenly going through the same station across the day, you gotta multiply that by a lot), just for one of over twenty lines.
In major stations in big cities, a six-second pipeline stage at rush hour would cause a riot, and conveniently provide a giant mass for terrorists to target.
(Score: 5, Funny) by lx on Friday August 18 2017, @10:06AM
I bet they can get 1000x the throughput if they switch to meter wave scanners.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @10:21AM
be an hero and destroy that scanner and the rest of LA too
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Friday August 18 2017, @02:37PM (1 child)
For this post, assuming artificial validity to their model of no-fourth-amendment-land...
While I've never ridden any of LA's subways, I certainly have in Atlanta, where I have gone from turnstile to "on the train" in the abovementioned timeframe ("a matter of seconds").
In a moving mass of humanity, knowing "right now" that "this specific traveler" might be* carrying a tactical nuke** is information with possible (debatable) safety value.
Knowing that "some matter of seconds ago" that "a traveler who passed this way" might be* carrying a tactical nuke** is not actionable intelligence, but rather history that explains any ensuing destruction, due to something that wasn't prevented at the gate.
Do the passengers pass rapidly and easily through the invasive scan while the sensors "quickly collect" their data, as described, then stand under arrest for "some seconds" until the machine determines their intentions, body composition, and political affiliations and gives them either an "all clear" or an "enemy of the state" designation?
* - might be - the machines don't detect items, but rather data with probabilities of possibilities.
** - tactical nuke - or whatever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @05:10PM
This system has facial recognition (which was turned off for the test), so I suppose they have some hope of identifying specific passengers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @04:25PM (2 children)
Security is racist. California has told me so over and over.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 18 2017, @05:13PM (1 child)
Legitimate question: Can you legally carry in the LA subway?
(Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday August 19 2017, @12:35AM
Even without checking the laws, the answer is obviously YES - there is plenty of law enforcement groups in the country that are required to carry firearms, from the Sheriff and the police and the TLAs down to the Department of Education. If there are local prohibitions against carrying, they don't apply to them (such as an armed police officer can enter a school.)
The law is needed only to clarify if a concealed-carry citizen, not an LEO or the like, is allowed to carry in the LA subway. Not sure how the system would tell the difference between non-LEO and LEO types, though - and if it can, how easy it is to forge that token (a uniform? a badge? can't really be more complicated than that, even if LEOs have a separate passage.)
Given that the subway is a system for mass transportation, and people often transport bulky objects, I do not envision this scanner to be efficient for the claimed purpose. It's plenty good for many other purposes, though - just as intended, I'm sure.