Security expert Bruce Schneier has a nearly complete roundup regarding the superlatively counterproductive new restrictions on US commercial air travel.

If you recently flew on a commercial airline in the United States, you can document your choice and compare notes.

Via cofax: Jason Bell, a biochemist who researches susceptibility to cancer -- specifically breast cancer -- reviews the existing documentation on the cancer risks of going through or operating the backscatter machines. It is not good. I keep having these flashes of history in my head.

Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant's testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!...

It just repeats over and over again. Shoe-fitting fluoroscopes, arguably Thalidomide and DDT, now this. When you introduce a new force or procedure, it's not just going to affect one standard 5ft10 white man once. It's going to happen over and over again, to humans of all sexes and ages and backgrounds, and to the interdependent ecologies we're in, and it will disproportionately affect the vulnerable new.

Essentially, it appears that an X-ray beam is rastered across the body, which highlights the importance of one of the specific concerns raised by the UCSF scientists... what happens if the machine fails, or gets stuck, during a raster. How much radiation would a person's eye, hand, testicle, stomach, etc., be exposed to during such a failure. What is the failure rate of these machines? What is the failure rate in an operational environment? Who services the machine? What is the decay rate of the filter? What is the decay rate of the shielding material? What is the variability in the power of the X-ray source during the manufacturing process?...

The entire medical technology field has the lessons of the Therac-25 burned into its brain, but I bet the TSA's vendor pool doesn't.

A TSO [TSA worker] could be exposed to as much as 86-1408 mrem per year ... which is between 86%-1410% of the safe exposure of 100 mrem. At the high end, if for example a TSO is standing at the entrance of the scanner when it is running at maximum capacity, then that officer could hit their radiation exposure limit in as few as 20 working days (assuming an 8 hour shift). ... they really should be wearing radiation badges...

This is the asbestos of the coming decade (in terms of how perversely valuable the word "mesothelioma" is). Especially if the TSA will not provide dosimeters nor allow their workers to wear their own.

You know how the US government invaded Iraq to prevent further terrorism, and provoked the growth of local Al Qaeda cells? Now it's replicating that triumph by firing high-energy particles indiscriminately into innocent travelers' bodies, turning a little of each body into sleeper cells.