The cutting edgeImagining new threats -- and countering them
DHS air transport security lab is in the business of imagining new threats — then developing the technologies to counter them; their dream? To build a “tunnel of truth” in each airport lined with hidden sensors, scanners, and rays; passengers would get zapped and sniffed as they passed, and would not need to take off their shoes, toss their liquids, or anything else
At the Transportation Security Laboratory, chemists, physicists, and engineers dream up ways a weapon might be slipped onto a plane, then figure out how to stop it. It is part science, part James Bond.
Bob Drogin reports that eight years after the 9/11 attacks, the front line in America’s war on terrorism runs through a little-known federal laboratory where engineer Nelson Carey holds what appears to be a bratwurst in a bun.
“This is a Semtex sausage,” said Carey, as he pinched the pink plastic explosive long favored by terrorist groups.
On his table lies a green Teletubby doll stuffed with C-4 military explosives, a leather sandal with a high-explosive shoe insert, an Entenmann’s cake covered in an explosive compound that looks like white frosting, and other deadly devices Carey and his colleagues have built. None have detonators, so they are safe. “We let our imaginations go wild,” Carey said. “The types of improvised explosive devices are endless.”
So are possible solutions, at least in theory. This is where the Transportation Security Laboratory comes in. Scientists here dream up ways an enemy might slip a weapon or a bomb onto a plane, and then try to build defenses to detect or counter the danger. The work is part cutting-edge science, part Maxwell Smart.
Staffers have experimented by exploding more than 200 bombs on junked jetliners. They also have filled a warehouse with nearly 10,000 lost or abandoned suitcases and other packed luggage. “We build bombs in them” and run them through airport-style screening machines, said Susan Hallowell, the lab director. If a bomb escapes detection, technicians try to figure out why and how to catch it next time. “We call it the art of bagology.”
Most important, the lab evaluates and certifies all equipment purchased from outside vendors to search, sniff, or scan passengers and their luggage at some 450 U.S. airports.
Dr. Colin Drury, distinguished professor emeritus of engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, calls the lab “one of the best in the world for the kind of work they do.”
“They think broadly and have new ideas, and maybe 90% don’t work,” he said. “But that’s OK, as long as 10% do.”
Drogin writes that about 125 chemists, physicists, engineers, and others work in the lab’s low-slung buildings on a wooded campus behind high fences and armed guards at the edge of the Atlantic City International Airport. Inside is an odd mix of
