Manufacturers of the lead vests used in dental offices to shield patients from x-rays may have a new source of revenue, thanks to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Courtesy of the never-ending "War on Terror," intrepid DHS bureaucrats have now deployed more than 500 mobile x-ray vans.
The van drives up to a suspicious looking object, vehicle, house, or individual, and zaps it (or him or her) with a focused stream of X-rays.
Technicians then analyze the reflection of the x-rays (the "backscatter") to determine if explosives, drugs, or other contraband substances are present.
Most of the vans are deployed outside the United States in the various and sundry wars in which we have chosen to involve ourselves. But not all of them—one might be rolling through your neighborhood, right now, surreptitiously zapping your teenage daughter to make certain she's not a suicide bomber.
That might not be as uncommon as you might think. This technology is similar to that deployed in the infamous full-body scanners used to produce full-body—and anatomically correct—images of passengers.
Not so coincidentally, it turns out that full-body scanners are useless to protect against their purported target—terrorists carrying bombs into airplanes. "I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,” the former chief security officer at the Israel Airport Authority recently testified. “That’s why we haven’t put them in our airport.”
So, what's the rush to employ full-body scanners—or backscatter x-ray mobile vans? Well, maybe it is to check out your teenage daughter…and not for drugs or bombs.
Maybe it's time for a lead vest after all…if not for you, for her.
Copyright (c) 2010 by Mark Nestmann
(An earlier version of this post was published by The Sovereign Society, https://banyanhill.com/)
