Body scanners were introduced after an alleged attempt to blow up a plane

The use of airport body scanners in the UK may be unlawful, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has warned.

Scanners already in place at Heathrow and Manchester Airports may be breaking discrimination law as well as breaching passengers' rights to privacy, it said.

It has now written a letter to Transport Secretary Lord Adonis.

The government said security concerns meant scanners had been needed immediately, but it was carrying out an equalities impact assessment.

The scanners are being introduced in response to the alleged attempt to blow up an American plane on 25 December.

But the commission said it had "serious doubts" that the decision to roll them out in UK airports was legal.

It said one of its chief concerns was over how people would be selected for the scans.

'Vulnerable groups'

Its chairman, Trevor Phillips, said: "The right to life is the ultimate human right and we support the government's review of security policies.

Given the current security threat level, we believe it was essential to start introducing scanners immediately Department for Transport spokesperson

"State action like border checks, stop-and-search and full body scanning are undertaken for good reasons.

"But, without proper care, such policies can end up being applied in ways which do discriminate against vulnerable groups or harm good community relations."

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne MP agreed.

He said: "The government seems intent on pressing ahead with the use of body scanners without addressing any of the privacy concerns and safeguard issues raised by the Liberal Democrats and others.

"The commission is right to suggest that security measures cannot simply be introduced without due respect for the rule of law."

Code of practice

The commission has previously said scanners could breach an individual's right to privacy under the Human Rights Act.

It has also previously written to the home secretary to ask that he set out in detail the justification for bringing in the scanners, and clarify what safeguards will be put in place.

They produce "naked" images of passengers, and the commission then said it was concerned especially for the privacy of certain groups such as disabled people, the elderly, children and the transgendered community.

The Department for Transport said it had published a staff code of practice for the scanners.

A spokesperson said passengers who were randomly selected for screening would not be chosen because of any personal characteristics.

"Given the current security threat level, we believe it was essential to start introducing scanners immediately.

"We are currently carrying out a full equalities impact assessment on the code of practice, which will be published shortly when we begin a public consultation on these issues."

 

By Cory Doctorow at 10:28 PM February 9, 2010

Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan claims that when he went through Heathrow, security staff printed out the naked image of his body from the full-body scanners (scanners that the authorities have claimed won't ever be used to generate printouts) and circulated them among the staff:

'I was in London recently going through the airport and these new machines have come up, the body scans. You've got to see them. It makes you embarrassed - if you're not well endowed.

'You walk into the machine and everything - the whole outline of your body - comes out.'

Khan said he did not know that the body-scans - installed in the wake of last year's abortive Christmas Day bombing of a transatlantic flight over Detroit - showed up every little detail of one's body.

'I was a little scared. Something happens [inside the scans], and I came out.

'Then I saw these girls - they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some forms you had to fill. I said 'give them to me' - and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them.'

Shah Rukh signs off sexy body-scan printouts at Heathrow (Thanks, Drew!)

(Image: S3010420, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike image from dodo_anji's photostream)

Cory Doctorow

POSTED AT 6:11 AM January 22, 2010

Check out this German TV clip highlighting the failure of the new, privacy-violating full-nude scanners going in at an airport near you. As Bruce Schneier notes, "The scanner caught a subject's cell phone and Swiss Army knife -- and the microphone he was wearing -- but missed all the components to make a bomb that he hid on his body... Full-body scanners: they're not just a dumb idea, they don't actually work."

German TV on the Failure of Full-Body Scanners

By Holden Frith | 07 January 2010

We're used to the idea that airport security is reactive - that liquid bombs beget liquid bans and shoe-bomb plots lead to scanning of shoes - but there's something odd about the new restrictions on flights to the US.

The pat-down search and swabbing of hand luggage make sense, and I presume that the security personnel who process passengers are looking for signs of anxiety as well as unexplained bulges. What seems less logical are the rules that govern the last hour of the flight, during which time passengers can't go to the toilet, use a blanket or read a book or magazine.

Yes, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab prepared his bomb in the bathroom and tried to detonate it under a blanket, and yes, he tried to do so in the last hour of the flight to Detroit, but who's to say that the next bomber will work to the same timetable? My own recent flight to Las Vegas had been over US soil for at least two hours before the new restrictions came into effect.

If granting us blankets and books is too risky for the last hour of the flight, why is it safe until then? If the risk is the same throughout the flight - and a bomb is surely no safer at 38,000 feet than it is at half that altitude - then the reason we're allowed to empty our bladders and cover our laps for most of the flight must be convenience. Even Ryanair would baulk at the prospect of putting its passengers in nappies.

We trade the marginal extra security we might gain from these rules for convenience and dignity. That's a sensible trade-off, but it strips away the logic of imposing the rules in the last hour of the flight. Since we were told in advance that the toilets will be off limits, and given time to make the necessary arrangements, any bomber among us would have known that he had to complete his mission at least 61 minutes before landing.

So scan us all before we board, and search our luggage as carefully as you can, but then have faith in your own security and let us open our books as we're coming in to land. I'm happy to take that risk.

Since 2001, when an Englishman named Richard Reid tried to sabotage a flight from Paris to Miami by detonating explosives hidden in his shoes, American travelers have become accustomed to removing their shoes and sending them through scanners at airport checkpoints. Last week a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to sabotage a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit by detonating explosives hidden in his underwear. One shudders to think what the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will make us send through the scanners now.

While a mandatory underwear check seems unlikely given the delays it would entail, it is at least as logical as many of the measures the TSA required in the wake of Abdulmutallab’s abortive bombing. “These measures are designed to be unpredictable,” said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. It often seems that the government strives to maximize unpredictability by taking actions that make no sense.

We can thank Reid not only for the shoe ritual but for the statutory ban on lighters, which was finally lifted last year after the TSA itself complained that confiscating some 22,000 lighters a day distracted its screeners from more significant threats. The disrupted liquid explosive plot of 2006 gave us the even more distracting, confusing, and haphazardly enforced policy regarding “liquids and gels,” while the post-9/11 obsession with sharp edges led to the confiscation of untold pocket tools, nail clippers, and cuticle scissors to prevent a kind of attack that is vanishingly unlikely now that cockpit doors are reinforced and the old wisdom of cooperating with hijackers in the hope of release has gone the way of the World Trade Center.

The reaction to Abdulmutallab’s fizzled bomb shows that the government continues to fetishistically focus on the details of the latest incident and impose conspicuous precautions without regard to whether the security payoff is worth the cost. Because Abdulmutallab used a blanket to conceal what he was doing, the TSA told airlines to ban the use of blankets during the last hour of flights to the United States. Also prohibited during the last hour: getting up from one’s seat, “passenger access to carry-on baggage,” and “personal belongings on the lap.”

Why the last hour? Because that’s when Abdulmutallab tried to set off his bomb. Therefore that is what all terrorists will do.

The TSA also instructed airlines to “disable aircraft-integrated passenger communications systems and services (phone, internet access services, live television programming, global positioning systems) prior to boarding and during all phases of flight.” And it forbade “any announcement to passengers concerning flight path or position over cities or landmarks.”

Those rules, combined with the focus on the last hour of flight, suggest the TSA believes Abdulmutallab wanted his bomb to go off as the plane was approaching Detroit, and it therefore is trying to prevent other bombers from knowing where they are. But these precautions are easily evaded by anyone who does a little preflight research and wears a watch (next on the list of banned items?). In any case, other terrorists may decide to strike at a higher altitude, where the damage caused by an explosion would be compounded by decompression.

Because Abdulmutallab “went to the bathroom for approximately twenty minutes” before trying to set off his bomb (according to the criminal complaint against him), anyone who lingers in the restroom will be treated like a suspected terrorist, as a man suffering from food poisoning discovered on the same flight two days later. He was arrested for being “verbally disruptive” after an air marshal demanded that he get off the toilet. You might have a similar reaction.

What all these measures have in common, along with their questionable enforceability and effectiveness, is a complete disregard for passengers’ comfort and convenience, which the government is willing to sacrifice on the slightest pretext. This attitude seems especially unfair because the passengers who subdued the underwear bomber were the one part of “the system” that really did work that day.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.

© Copyright 2009 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

December 29, 2009 -- Updated 1238 GMT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Incident on Detroit-bound plane led to tightening of airport security
• Bruce Schneier says politicians react to incidents by imposing "security theater"
• Trying to predict what terrorists will do next is futile, Schneier says
• He says it's better to put resources into investigations

Editor's note: Bruce Schneier is an author and technologist who specializes in security. His books include "Applied Cryptography," "Beyond Fear" and "Schneier on Security" and his other writing can be seen at http://www.schneier.com/

(CNN) -- Last week's attempted terror attack on an airplane heading from Amsterdam to Detroit has given rise to a bunch of familiar questions.

How did the explosives get past security screening? What steps could be taken to avert similar attacks? Why wasn't there an air marshal on the flight? And, predictably, government officials have rushed to institute new safety measures to close holes in the system exposed by the incident.

Reviewing what happened is important, but a lot of the discussion is off-base, a reflection of the fundamentally wrong conception most people have of terrorism and how to combat it.

Terrorism is rare, far rarer than many people think. It's rare because very few people want to commit acts of terrorism, and executing a terrorist plot is much harder than television makes it appear.

The best defenses against terrorism are largely invisible: investigation, intelligence, and emergency response. But even these are less effective at keeping us safe than our social and political policies, both at home and abroad. However, our elected leaders don't think this way: They are far more likely to implement security theater against movie-plot threats.

A "movie-plot threat" is an overly specific attack scenario. Whether it's terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists contaminating the milk supply, or terrorists attacking the Olympics, specific stories affect our emotions more intensely than mere data does.

Stories are what we fear. It's not just hypothetical stories -- terrorists flying planes into buildings, terrorists with explosives strapped to their legs or with bombs in their shoes, and terrorists with guns and bombs waging a co-ordinated attack against a city are even scarier movie-plot threats because they actually happened.

"Security theater" refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards.

Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at U.S. airports in the months after 9/11 -- their guns had no bullets. The U.S. color-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.

To be sure, reasonable arguments can be made that some terrorist targets are more attractive than others: airplanes because a small bomb can result in the death of everyone aboard, monuments because of their national significance, national events because of television coverage, and transportation because of the numbers of people who commute daily.

But there are literally millions of potential targets in any large country -- there are 5 million commercial buildings alone in the United States -- and hundreds of potential terrorist tactics. It's impossible to defend every place against everything, and it's impossible to predict which tactic and target terrorists will try next.

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders.

When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event. We confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. We tell people they can't use an airplane restroom in the last 90 minutes of an international flight. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning.

If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.

Our current response to terrorism is a form of "magical thinking." It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.

Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities -- both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur -- and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare.

They do not include expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding.

The arrest of the "liquid bombers" in London is an example: They were caught through old-fashioned intelligence and police work. Their choice of target (airplanes) and tactic (liquid explosives) didn't matter; they would have been arrested regardless.

But even as we do all of this we cannot neglect the feeling of security, because it's how we collectively overcome the psychological damage that terrorism causes. It's not security theater we need, it's direct appeals to our feelings. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we -- and our leaders -- need to react with indomitability, the kind of strength shown by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II.

By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant "bring 'em on" rhetoric. There's a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.

We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice -- not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer.

Once a society starts circumventing its own laws, the risks to its future stability are much greater than terrorism.

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them.

Today, we can project indomitability by rolling back all the fear-based post-9/11 security measures. Our leaders have lost credibility; getting it back requires a decrease in hyperbole. Ditch the invasive mass surveillance systems and new police state-like powers. Return airport security to pre-9/11 levels. Remove swagger from our foreign policies. Show the world that our legal system is up to the challenge of terrorism. Stop telling people to report all suspicious activity; it does little but make us suspicious of each other, increasing both fear and helplessness.

Counterterrorism is also hard, especially when we're psychologically prone to muck it up. Since 9/11, we've embarked on strategies of defending specific targets against specific tactics, overreacting to every terrorist video, stoking fear, demonizing ethnic groups, and treating the terrorists as if they were legitimate military opponents who could actually destroy a country or a way of life -- all of this plays into the hands of terrorists.

We'd do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable.

The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don't need to pretend otherwise.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bruce Schneier. An earlier version of this essay appeared in New Internationalist magazine.

• By Noah Shachtman
• December 28, 2009

After an alleged terrorist unsuccessfully tried to detonate his explosive underwear on a Christmas Day flight to Detroit, current and former American officials are now using the failed attack to push for more airport scanners to spot such explosives — and a lot more.

The Transportation Security Administration in recent years has tried out a series of “whole-body imagers” to look for threats that typical metal detectors can’t find. These systems are the only way that smuggled explosives, like the one officials say was brought on the Christmas flight, can be reliably found.

“You’ve got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren’t easy to get at,” former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told The Washington Post. “It’s either pat-downs or imaging.”

The problem, privacy advocates say, is that a zap from one of the devices amounts to a “digital strip search” from a system “designed to capture, record, and store detailed images of individuals undressed.”

TSA has worked with two basic technologies to upgrade its passenger screening systems. Millimeter-wave sensors emit radio frequencies, and measure the differences in radiated energy. The result is a detailed, 3-D image of the passenger that looks sort of like a photo negative.

The TSA currently has 40 of these machines installed at 19 airports. Six airports have a machine each for primary screening. The other 34 are used for follow-up searches at 13 airports. The agency handed out a $25 million contract to Rapiscan Security Systems in October for 30 more of the machines.

Similarly, backscatter x-ray scanners send out low-intensity beams, and watch how the x-ray photons get reflected back. (Old-school machines simply sent the x-ray through the object.) “Elements with lower atomic numbers (fewer protons) on the periodic table scatter X-ray photons very powerfully, while elements located farther down on the periodic table tend to absorb more photons than they scatter.

Most organics are located closer to the start of the periodic table. So backscatter systems are very good at imaging organic material — much better than dual-energy systems.

They easily pick up the scatter patterns of drugs and explosives and body parts,” notes one helpful description. TSA has ordered 150 backscatter units, after 46 of the sensors were used at 23 airports in a pilot project.

But it’s unclear how far the TSA will be allowed to go in deploying these systems. Because the same technology that allows the scanners to find explosive underwear can also provide some rather revealing glimpses of passengers’ bodies.

The agency says there’s no privacy problem. “Facial features” (and, presumably, other body parts) “are blurred when our officers see the images,” the TSA insists. Nor will the agency “keep, store or transmit images. Once deleted, they are gone forever…. For additional privacy, the officer viewing the image is in a separate room and will never see the passenger, and the officer attending to the passenger will never see the image.”

“These images are friendly enough to post in a preschool. Heck, it could even make the cover of Reader’s Digest and not offend anybody,” the TSA noted on its blog.

But privacy groups aren’t exactly comforted by the agency’s assurances. TSA has already reversed earlier stands on the scanners, the groups say.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security on Nov. 9, to force it to give up information about the scanners. “TSA has stated that whole-body imaging would not be mandatory for passengers,” the Center noted in its complaint. “On Feb.18, 2009, TSA announced that it would require passengers at six airports to submit to whole-body imaging in place of the standard metal detector search, which contravenes its earlier statement.”

The House of Representatives voted 310 to 118 in June to pass a measure that prohibits the TSA from using whole-body imaging as a primary means for screening passengers. The legislation’s prime sponsor, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, said Sunday that he stands by the measure. “I believe there’s technology out there that can identify bomb-type materials without necessarily, overly invading our privacy,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune.

“Yes, there is some brief violation of privacy with a full-body scan,” Rep. Peter King, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, told Face the Nation. “But on the other hand, if we can save thousands of lives, to me, we have to make that decision, and we have to come down on the side of saving thousands of lives.”

But that logic makes about as much sense as the TSA’s new rules forcing passengers to stay in their seats for the last hour of a flight, says security guru Bruce Schneier. “It’s the same magical thinking we’re used to getting from the TSA,” he tells Danger Room. “Descend on what the terrorists happened to do last time, and we’ll all be safe. As if they won’t think of something else.”

Photo: TSA

Tahaya Buchanan, an American fugitive who'd been on the run for more than two years, dodging a national arrest warrant for insurance fraud, has spent her years underground gainfully employed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Buchanan had been indicted in New Jersey for insurance fraud in 2007, and a warrant for her arrest was issued that December and was posted to the National Crime Information Center in January 2008. New Jersey prosecutor Michael Morris said they believed Buchanan had been working for Homeland Security in New Jersey in 2007, and might have been transferred to the department's immigration office in Georgia at some point during the investigation.

That's where authorities lost track of her.

"We found it surprising [and] alarming," Morris said, "that an employee of the Department of Homeland Security is a fraudster, and we do not understand how she could have remained employed there with an open criminal warrant for her arrest remaining on the interstate system without being discovered."

Fugitive Located Inside Homeland Security Department Office

Johan Spanner for The New York Times

A device used by Iraqi forces to detect bombs and other weapons at checkpoints has been called useless by the American military.

By ROD NORDLAND

Published: November 3, 2009

BAGHDAD — Despite major bombings that have rattled the nation, and fears of rising violence as American troops withdraw, Iraq’s security forces have been relying on a device to detect bombs and weapons that the United States military and technical experts say is useless.

The small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel, is being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq. But the device works “on the same principle as a Ouija board” — the power of suggestion — said a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack, who described the wand as nothing more than an explosives divining rod.

Still, the Iraqi government has purchased more than 1,500 of the devices, known as the ADE 651, at costs from $16,500 to $60,000 each. Nearly every police checkpoint, and many Iraqi military checkpoints, have one of the devices, which are now normally used in place of physical inspections of vehicles.

With violence dropping in the past two years, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has taken down blast walls along dozens of streets, and he contends that Iraqis will safeguard the nation as American troops leave.

But the recent bombings of government buildings here have underscored how precarious Iraq remains, especially with the coming parliamentary elections and the violence expected to accompany them.

The suicide bombers who managed to get two tons of explosives into downtown Baghdad on Oct. 25, killing 155 people and destroying three ministries, had to pass at least one checkpoint where the ADE 651 is typically deployed, judging from surveillance videos released by Baghdad’s provincial governor. The American military does not use the devices. “I don’t believe there’s a magic wand that can detect explosives,” said Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe Jr., who oversees Iraqi police training for the American military. “If there was, we would all be using it. I have no confidence that these work.”

The Iraqis, however, believe passionately in them. “Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,” said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives.

Dale Murray, head of the National Explosive Engineering Sciences Security Center at Sandia Labs, which does testing for the Department of Defense, said the center had “tested several devices in this category, and none have ever performed better than random chance.”

The Justice Department has warned against buying a variety of products that claim to detect explosives at a distance with a portable device. Normal remote explosives detection machinery, often employed in airports, weighs tons and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The ADE 651’s clients are mostly in developing countries; no major country’s military or police force is a customer, according to the manufacturer.

“I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them,” General Jabiri said. “I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world.”

He attributed the decrease in bombings in Baghdad since 2007 to the use of the wands at checkpoints. American military officials credit the surge in American forces, as well as the Awakening movement, in which Iraqi insurgents turned against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, for the decrease.

Aqeel al-Turaihi, the inspector general for the Ministry of the Interior, reported that the ministry bought 800 of the devices from a company called ATSC (UK) Ltd. for $32 million in 2008, and an unspecified larger quantity for $53 million. Mr. Turaihi said Iraqi officials paid up to $60,000 apiece, when the wands could be purchased for as little as $18,500. He said he had begun an investigation into the no-bid contracts with ATSC.

Jim Mitchell, the head of ATSC, based in London, did not return calls for comment.

The Baghdad Operations Command announced Tuesday that it had purchased an additional 100 detection devices, but General Rowe said five to eight bomb-sniffing dogs could be purchased for $60,000, with provable results.

Checking cars with dogs, however, is a slow process, whereas the wands take only a few seconds per vehicle. “Can you imagine dogs at all 400 checkpoints in Baghdad?” General Jabiri said. “The city would be a zoo.”

Speed is not the only issue. Colonel Bidlack said, “When they say they are selling you something that will save your son or daughter on a patrol, they’ve crossed an insupportable line into moral depravity.”

Last year, the James Randi Educational Foundation, an organization seeking to debunk claims of the paranormal, publicly offered ATSC $1 million if it could pass a scientific test proving that the device could detect explosives. Mr. Randi said no one from the company had taken up the offer.

ATSC’s promotional material claims that its device can find guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies and even contraband ivory at distances up to a kilometer, underground, through walls, underwater or even from airplanes three miles high. The device works on “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction,” ATSC says.

To detect materials, the operator puts an array of plastic-coated cardboard cards with bar codes into a holder connected to the wand by a cable. “It would be laughable,” Colonel Bidlack said, “except someone down the street from you is counting on this to keep bombs off the streets.”

Proponents of the wand often argue that errors stem from the human operator, who they say must be rested, with a steady pulse and body temperature, before using the device.

Then the operator must walk in place a few moments to “charge” the device, since it has no battery or other power source, and walk with the wand at right angles to the body. If there are explosives or drugs to the operator’s left, the wand is supposed to swivel to the operator’s left and point at them.

If, as often happens, no explosives or weapons are found, the police may blame a false positive on other things found in the car, like perfume, air fresheners or gold fillings in the driver’s teeth.

On Tuesday, a guard and a driver for The New York Times, both licensed to carry firearms, drove through nine police checkpoints that were using the device. None of the checkpoint guards detected the two AK-47 rifles and ammunition inside the vehicle.

During an interview on Tuesday, General Jabiri challenged a Times reporter to test the ADE 651, placing a grenade and a machine pistol in plain view in his office. Despite two attempts, the wand did not detect the weapons when used by the reporter but did so each time it was used by a policeman.

“You need more training,” the general said.

Riyadh Mohammed contributed reporting.