Terahertz Scanners See Inside Sealed Packages

[DeepZenPill]

Don't much like the sound of this:

Kodo Kawase and his team from RIKEN (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research) have demonstrated a system that detects the presence of illicit drugs that are concealed within an envelope.

http://optics.org/articles/news/9/10/22/1

 

[GawdsGift]

well mdma and aspirin or a far cry away from sustanon and deca. i can see dbal being a problem here along with other orals, but as for liquid substances??? i didnt read anything about it.

did they say when this should hit airports and post offices? also it said it would ONLy be used for suspicious packagesdue to the 10 minute process.

scary for the future, but it look slike it may be a few years before the technology is good enogh to sell to the airports and post offices and even then onbly the LARGE ones wil probably get it, and with the amazing amount of packages they get a day. picking out a supicious package will not be easy.

PEACE

 

[DeepZenPill]

Although it only mentions meth and E in the article, I can see it being applied to many more substances.

 

[Sigmund Roid]

The x-ray scattering spectra taken from several incoming and outgoing x-rays are compared with a database of known substances. It would be a piece of cake to add gear in the database as well.

 

[plornive]

The x-ray scattering spectra taken from several incoming and outgoing x-rays are compared with a database of known substances. It would be a piece of cake to add gear in the database as well.

Is it possible to insulate a chemical with something to change the pattern?

 

[Sigmund Roid]

Is it possible to insulate a chemical with something to change the pattern?

It is a great advantage to turn something crystalline (for example test powder or dbol pills (pills contain tiny crystals)) into an amorphous substance. Crystalline matter in a mono- or dichromatic x-ray machine with multidetector and movable x-ray source will give a distinct spectrum with sharp peaks, while an amorphous material will show a dampened cosine function which is far less distinct. Liquids are by definition amorphous, so test liquids should be less suspicious. This apparatus can also measure absorption which is a function of the sample thickness and the effective atomic number (Zeff). The specific ratio of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen can be calculated from the measurement of Zeff, and can be compared with the database to see if it contains contraband. For disrupting the determination of Zeff it can be effective to blend in other materials (like zinc powder which has a hight Zeff and could easily be separated afterwards). For the x-ray spectra it just adds a few extra peaks, and any semi-intelligent program can still find the right material from the spectrum.

However, the vials themselves will show up on the screen of the conventional transmissive polychromatic x-ray machines which do not use scattering techniques.

 

[Sigmund Roid]

Oh, the topic was about microwave detection. However, such techniques are already used by x-ray machines. The advantage of microwaves is that they can be easily tuned to various wavelengths, while x-ray machines cannot, unless one uses a free electron laser, which are quite big, expensive and complex.

 

[plornive]

It is a great advantage to turn something crystalline (for example test powder or dbol pills (pills contain tiny crystals)) into an amorphous substance. Crystalline matter in a mono- or dichromatic x-ray machine with multidetector and movable x-ray source will give a distinct spectrum with sharp peaks, while an amorphous material will show a dampened cosine function which is far less distinct. Liquids are by definition amorphous, so test liquids should be less suspicious. This apparatus can also measure absorption which is a function of the sample thickness and the effective atomic number (Zeff). The specific ratio of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen can be calculated from the measurement of Zeff, and can be compared with the database to see if it contains contraband. For disrupting the determination of Zeff it can be effective to blend in other materials (like zinc powder which has a hight Zeff and could easily be separated afterwards). For the x-ray spectra it just adds a few extra peaks, and any semi-intelligent program can still find the right material from the spectrum.

However, the vials themselves will show up on the screen of the conventional transmissive polychromatic x-ray machines which do not use scattering techniques.

I am not versed in physics, but I am fairly well versed in pattern recognition and distribution segmentation. Maybe it's possible to design custom masking blends to mix with a substance - especially if the algorithms used are known.

I guess there is no way to actually distort the microwave beams at the point from which an image is being taken... that would only occur in the equipment itself, and be corrected in for each spectral snapshot anyway I would guess.

Great post, thanks.

 

[IJ26]

just add this to the list of things that make me nervous when waiting for a package. Honestly though there is no way they could use something like this on all packages the manpower required would be impossible to come up with.good post regardless

 

[lincoln]

This will never have widespread usage because:

Perhaps the biggest drawback of the current system is its measurement time of 10 minutes.

Even if they get it down to 30 seconds per envelope, it is way to slow.