How One Radioactive Man Has Us Rethinking Airport Security

May 16, 2012 at 12:31 PM | by Omri | Comments (0)

We can't quite decide whether this story—which involves a traffic stop in Connecticut but which we'll connect to airport security in just a second—is quietly reassuring or deeply creepy. The things that police officers and security officials can do, and the different ways they can do them, are becoming harder and harder to catalog.

Stratford firefighter Mike Apatow was driving along a Connecticut interstate when he found himself getting pulled over for no discernible reason. It turns out that Apatow has high blood pressure, and just that morning he had been to the hospital for a medical stress test. Doctors had injected him with just a tiny amount of radioactive material so they could track what was going on with his blood. Hours later, the leftover isotopes in Apatow's body were still enough to light up his car as it drove by a state police vehicle equipped with a mobile radioactivity detector.

Keep in mind that he was on an interstate. That means he was either driving 65mph+ or stuck between a lot of other cars. Either way, the sniffer still picked him right out. Hmmm.

Ever wonder what's inside those empty squad cars parked around airports? Or on the dashboards of the ones that just seem to circle? We don't know either. But now we're guessing that whatever they're using, it's awfully sensitive. Maybe American airports are more secure than TSA's oft near-comical bumbling might imply.

As for how these kinds of stories actually affect the broader debate over TSA, the arguments cut both ways.

If you want to be sympathetic to the security agency, you take this example and say "See? There are lots of homeland security things happening invisibly under the surface. So let's take it easy on the whole 'TSA incompetence' thing, because we just don't know."

If you're a TSA critic the argument runs the other way. You look at this incident and say that it proves that real detection is quietly happening outside security lines. What goes on inside the terminal, according this story, is just so much security theater. We're not sure that's ultimately a winning argument - TSA still needs to line people up for police dogs, and dogs are still the world's most efficient bomb detection technology - but it's certainly not incoherent.

In any case, security officials apparently have really sensitive sniffers and they use them in lots of places. Reassuring! We think...

[Photo: basictheory / Flickr]

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