tfb •
@cybershow
I had forgotten about the ADE 651. But the situation is slightly more complicated than it looks. I knew someone whose job involved making sniffers for various chemicals, including explosives. At the time (late 70s I think, not after about 1982 anyway) you could make good sniffers which were portable in the ‘backpack with the guts of the thing in it’ sense, very expensive and probably required expensive and frequent looking-after to keep them from getting contaminated. Or you could make cheap sniffers which you could hand-hold and which … worked, just about.
The company he worked for made both, but they sold a lot of the cheap sniffers. They did not lie about how effective they were: the specs were available and the people who bought them (airport security people really) knew their limitations.
Because only one of the reasons they were buying them was how good they were: the other, arguably more important reason, was psychological: when you decide to sniff someone’s luggage, you watch them like a hawk. If they’re just bored and annoyed, fine; if they’re sweating and nervous, neither they nor their luggage gets on the plane and (if the cheap sniffer didn’t find anything) you crank up the good sniffer you have in the back room. And because you can afford ten times as many cheap sniffers, you can look at ten times, or more, people.
Note 1: the cheap sniffers were not fake like the ADE 651: they did work, just not enormously well. Note 2: things later converged and good, small, cheap sniffers are now much, much easier. In fact I would not be at all surprised if machine learning has not helped things a lot recently as it should be a good application for it (the person I knew is now dead so I don’t know anything that’s happened in the area for the last more-than-a-decade).
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