The Clever Badger I'm not dead yet!

Keeping Abreast of Terrorism

A story showed up last week at FOXNews about the use of explosive breast implants in terrorist acts.  Apparently, British intelligence has picked up on chatter discussing the use of explosive-filled plastic shapes that can be implanted under the skin, which then become very difficult to detect by typical airport scanners.  (The article focuses on breasts, but also mentions that the shapes could be implanted in the buttocks - so presumably anywhere with a significant fatty layer would be workable.)

That this actually surprises anyone is interesting - drug traffickers have been using variations on the theme for quite a while - but what really piques my curiosity is how anyone would even begin to develop a workable policy to counter threats like this that doesn't involve groping every female passenger that goes through a security line.  (And make no mistake - it would be the women getting groped, and it would somehow be justified that the amount of explosives that could get implanted undetectably in a man's buttocks wouldn't be enough to take down a plane, but imagine the carnage if the Pussycat Dolls all blew up on a flight...) 
   

The Pussycat Dolls: Musical Act or Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Perhaps some new X-ray scanner can determine the difference between normal implants and explosive ones without requiring the groping step, or perhaps the way to screen for this sort of thing is to look for detonation devices and not the explosives themselves. 

The bigger problem here, I think, is that if the terrorists are determined enough, they'll find ways to blow things up regardless of how many additional steps get added to passenger screening processes.  An associated issue is that (at least publicly) we seem to be constantly reacting to threats - Richard Reid tried to light explosives in his shoes, so now we have our shoes screened at the airport - rather than anticipating new threats or addressing broader categories (such as better detection of explosives in general rather than explosives hidden in specific ways.)¹

It's a tough problem to tackle. 

-Jay
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¹This is, in some ways, an artifact of the way news gets reported. There is work being done to improve explosive detection, but it doesn't seem to get as much press as the latest restrictions that travellers see in security lines.

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