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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guests on the show today are Pierre de Rochemont and Morgana Galloway.
Pierre is the founder of a company called Giga Circuits.
He's a physicist who holds several patents on nanotechnology and ceramic conductors.
And he's an Austin entrepreneur and industrialist.
The principal inventor on 25 issued and pending US and global patents.
Holds a BSc in physics and masters in electrical engineering, both from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
And Morgana Galloway is an activist concerned with civil liberties, the 10th amendment, economic policy, foreign policy, and security issues.
She holds an MA in international relations from the University of St. Andrews in the UK.
Her debut novel, The Nightingale, about the war in Iraq was published in 2009 and has been translated into several languages.
She also currently lives in my hometown, which I miss so dearly, Austin, Texas.
Welcome to the show, y'all.
How are you doing?
Very well, thanks.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
You there, Pierre?
Thank you very much for inviting us.
Yeah, sure.
No problem.
Well, my buddy, Michael Osterling, seemed to think that you guys had something important to say.
And from what I can tell, you sure do.
Your issue, at least right now, is the TSA scanners, the, I don't know what you call them exactly, the see-through scanners there, and particularly at Bergstrom Austin International Airport, where I guess you guys are working on what the city council and trying to get these scanners removed?
Yeah, that's right.
We were trying to work with Austin City Council to get them to pass a resolution that would maybe oppose the body scanners or try and work with the TSA to try and keep them out, like other cities have done.
I think New York City has a resolution up about something like that.
But our city council isn't exactly civil libertarian at the moment, so we're exploring other options.
Yeah, well, they never have been in my lifetime anyway.
All right, so it's stopaustinscanners.org is the website, Opt Out Austin.
So what's this?
First of all, tell me, Morgana, if you could, about Opt Out Austin.
Opt Out Austin really started out back in November as part of the larger grassroots National Opt Out Day.
And if you remember, that was on November 24th, the day before Thanksgiving.
And people across the country were going to be opting out of the scanners wherever they were at the airport, getting a little enhanced pat down instead, which is more uncomfortable, but a little safer for your health.
And it really just started out as seven or eight local activists holding up signs in front of the airport.
And here it news spread so fast, we got lots of media coverage locally.
And that turned into the Austin Airport Advisory Commission actually passing their own resolution.
And they're a body that advises city council on aviation matters.
And they said, these body scanners are a terrible idea.
They're going to hold up the security lines at Austin.
You know, the airport's quite small.
It's not, you know, some huge thoroughfare for people.
So they were worried about that.
They were worried about the civil liberties issues.
And we found some unexpected allies.
And we got 50 or 60 protesters out at the airport a month later in December.
So with some local activism, we've definitely raised awareness of the issue.
And the more and more people we talk to, I mean, we can't find anyone who's in favor of these things now.
You know, people used to say, oh, better to have some security on the airplane than, you know, whatever we have to give up.
That is fine.
And now people are realizing this is more of a scam.
I mean, to me, it's just a moneymaking scam.
Well, and so let's get into a bit of the science about this.
You know, it's the kind of issue that affects everyone.
You know, the TSA flying at the airports is something that pretty much all segments of society, you know, have to do at least sometimes.
There are a lot of, you know, bogus terrorism cases and and, you know, wars based on lies and lots of, you know, very important issues going on in our society that seem to affect the other, somebody else, someone far away or somebody maybe in our neighborhood, but Muslim.
And and so, you know, it seems kind of detached.
A lot of these issues seem kind of detached from our daily lives.
But this is the kind of thing where pretty much everybody's attention has been grabbed by this issue of these scanners.
And so I wonder, well, I guess I kind of wanted to say, too, that means that there are real scientists like yourself here.
And there are also a lot of hacks spewing a lot of propaganda on all sides on this issue.
So I was wondering if I could get some clarity from you about, you know, first of all, what she was saying about this maybe just being a scam to make money.
Perhaps these things aren't all that effective at what they're supposed to be doing.
And then secondly, perhaps you could begin to address some of the dangers or supposed dangers, at least, of these X-ray machines.
Well, first off, if you the best evidence for the scam is that a number of nations, a number of experts in the field have come out and said that they will not detect any explosive material.
And that includes the government accountability office is that they were doubtful.
And yet we're going ahead and spending billions of dollars.
Supposedly, they will detect guns and things that are very close to the skin.
But we recently put up on our website, stop Boston Scanners dot org, a news clip to a Dallas Fort Worth NBC station that ran a piece and has a video on how a high ranking TSA undercover agent went through the scanners five times with a gun inserted between her body and her underwear.
And they didn't detect that.
So the if you look at just the cost of one of these scanners, they're about two thousand dollars apiece, whereas a well-trained bomb sniffing dog, which does not require the number of administrative assistance, only cost about eight thousand dollars apiece.
So right there, you should question whether or not the government is making wise use of taxpayers' money.
On the science front, there are basically two types of scanners that are out there.
There are backscattered X-ray scanners.
And I'll start with that first.
Just about everybody that I know has had an X-ray.
And they all remember that the technician hightails it out of the room before they turn the device on.
And the technician is hiding behind a lead wall to protect himself from the X-rays.
Before doing so, the technician will cover the patient's reproductive organs.
In the case of men, it's the genitals.
And women, it's the memory glands.
You look at these backscattered X-ray machines.
Nobody has any of their reproductive organs covered as they're going through these.
And the real tragedy is you'll have TSA officers, if you want to call them that, standing by these machines.
They're not standing behind lead walls.
And they're being exposed to cumulative doses of soft X-rays.
Now, soft X-rays is another important issue.
Because when an X-ray machine generates its X-rays, it generates two varieties, soft and hard X-rays.
Medical imaging only uses hard X-rays to form the image of your body, the interior of your body.
Soft X-rays are always shielded from the patient and the technicians in these devices because these devices are concerned about protecting their health.
And the reason for it is that soft X-rays concentrate their dose in the skin.
And most hard X-rays will pass through you, and only a minority of them will be absorbed.
So when you look at a minority of them being absorbed, say for instance, you're exposed to a million X-rays, and a minority, say for instance, 30% of them are absorbed, you're going to have cellular damage in 300,000 cells.
Well, 300,000 cells divided by the billions of cells in your entire body represents a damage rate of one cell in 10,000 or less.
And at that rate of damage, the likelihood that the DNA in your cell will be permanently damaged is very low because it's unlikely that two X-rays will enter and be absorbed by the same cell.
When an X-ray is absorbed in your cell, it will snip a strand of your DNA.
But if you have another healthy strand remaining, that healthy strand can repair the damaged DNA strand.
Right.
So it doesn't sound like we're sacrificing too much here, right?
We got to go out to this break.
We'll follow up when we get back.
Everybody, it's L. Pierre de Rochemont and Morgana Galloway.
The website is StopAustinScanners.org.
This is anti-war radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
We're talking with L. Pierre de Rochemont and Morgana Galloway.
He's the scientist.
She's the civil liberties activist.
The website is StopAustinScanners.org.
And this is about the X-ray scanners at Austin Bergstrom International Airport and their efforts to stop them.
So I want to get back to the science with you, Pierre, and then we can get back to some more of the local politics with Morgana.
Now, you were talking about the backscatter machines.
You brought up the health risk, apparently, to the actual TSA people.
They're not leaving the room like at the doctor's office and whatever.
But is that a fair analogy?
Is this basically the same kind of X-ray technology that we use at the doctor's office?
Because I guess we all know when they put that lead apron on us that this is okay once in a while, but not all the time, right?
It's actually very similar, except the soft X-rays are not powerful enough to go through your body, which means that the entire dosage is now concentrated in your skin.
So it's worse, in a way, you're saying.
If it was a stronger blast, the X-rays would go through you.
But the way they're doing it now, they're just irradiating the hell out of us?
Well, to a certain extent, yes.
What happens with the hard X-rays, the more energetic ones they use in medical imaging, only a minority of them are absorbed in your body, and they're distributed over billions of cells.
With the soft X-rays, the majority of them are absorbed in your skin and the tissue immediately underneath it, say, for instance, like the male testes, right?
And a minority of them are reflected back.
So prior to the break, we talked about what happens if a million hard X-rays, if you're exposed to a million hard X-rays, and what the cellular damage rate would be.
With the soft X-rays, let's say a minority, 30% of the million hard X-rays are reflected back and used to form the image.
That means 700,000 X-rays are now absorbed by the millions, not billions, but by the millions of cells in your skin.
That means that the damage rate there could be one in 100 or more.
And at that point, the likelihood that two X-rays penetrate the cell and damage both strands of the DNA, which means the cell is no longer able to repair itself, is significant.
And people who've used established radiation, radiological protocols, have gone out and calculated that if we accept TSA's exposure data on good faith and reapply it to soft X-rays, what you're finding is that this could be producing 225,000 new cases of skin cancer per year that would result in 1,700 fatalities per year.
Whoa.
Well, Morgana, I think we just found our loophole into the political issue here.
You just get the TSA employee union on your side, right?
They have power.
Yes, they do.
They do indeed.
Right.
See, make it not about us, but about the government employees whose lives are worth 10,000 times one of us regular people's, right?
The TSA people could get cancer.
Yeah.
And of course, that would be a tragedy.
But then again, they might just make a lead wall for them and make the rest of us mundane go through the machines anyway.
But really, on a legal level, and there have been some actual legal challenges to this, not to the body scanners, but definitely to these enhanced pat-downs.
And the enhanced pat-downs that we've all heard about, the groping and this and that, that's connected to the body scanners because they put that policy into place because too many people were opting out of the scanners.
They were like, I don't want to be exposed to radiation.
I'm going to go through a metal detector.
Well, too many people were doing that.
So they had to make this punitive pat-down, which is a law enforcement style pat-down.
And the police actually can't do it because it's not considered a reasonable search.
If a policeman did that to you without any kind of cause or suspicion, they could get sued for it.
But the TSA does it anyway because they're not deputized, they haven't taken an oath to the constitution, and they're not actually law enforcement officers.
So it's a whole big legal can of worms in terms of civil liberties.
And the naked body scanners, I guess you could say, are a virtual strip search.
And in the courts, a strip search is very, I mean, that's considered an invasive search as well.
So hopefully there are some lawyers out there who are willing to take on this kind of case because I think it would have a lot of legs on fourth amendment grounds.
Now, on the scientific angle, Pierre, I'm interested in, well, and I guess this actually, this question could go to both of y'all.
Are there not groups of scientists and doctors and healthcare professional types who, you know, I guess I could see why the insurance companies would be for this kind of cancer-causing thing.
But what about all the doctors out there?
What about all the scientists who actually know a thing or two about x-rays?
Are there organized groups of others in those professions working with y'all or at least working in tandem against this?
There are groups.
We're not getting a lot of airtime in the mainstream media, though.
And I know that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons has taken a position against the scanners, more so on civil libertarian grounds than radiological grounds.
I don't think that they understand the true nature of the radiological danger yet because a lot of that remains classified.
This is the first time in history that radiation-producing instruments have been put into the public forum without clinical safety trials and without EPA and OSHA standards.
So when you look at these devices, every safeguard we have within our government to protect the individual, either EPA or OSHA, or the taxpayer, the Government Accountability Office, has just been overrided to introduce these devices into our public forums.
Well, that's very interesting.
I guess they've found themselves exempt because it's a government thing, although I guess I was led to understand from briefly looking through this website that really it's up to the Austin City Council.
So it's not just a federal thing, right?
It's up to the local jurisdictions to decide whether they want to continue to go along with these things or not.
Yes and no.
Morgana, you want to comment on that?
Yeah, I mean, we do believe that the Austin City Council, because the airport is city-managed property, they're liable for whatever goes on there in the end.
And they are mandated to own, operate, and maintain that airport.
So we do believe that they have the jurisdiction to do this, but the City Council doesn't believe that they do.
And when this issue was brought up on their agenda recently, the mayor here, Lee Leffingwell, put on a big spiel about how he was afraid of offending the federal government and therefore losing any federal funding for the airport.
So they've pretty much taken a stand that they're not going to go against the feds on this.
And so in terms of local activism, there's not a whole lot more we can do in terms of the City Council.
But fortunately, in the Texas legislative session now, there's one of our new representatives, David Simpson, is going to be introducing something that would ban the use of body scanners in the state of Texas and hopefully do some funding cuts on them, like no state money can go towards these, or maybe they have to be tested by a radiologist to see what kind of health risks are really being exposed to.
And so on the state level, and maybe on a Tenth Amendment level, the individual states could do something about this.
Well, and now it's a pretty good political climate for that kind of thing.
And I notice here, Morgana, that in your coalition members, you have a lot of libertarian and Republican groups, as well as the ACLU.
Can you tell us a little bit about the coalition you're putting together here?
I like that whole left-right libertarian thing against the state there.
Yeah, it really is.
It is a cross-partisan issue.
And everyone is concerned about the left, right, center, and for a lot of different reasons.
Some people are concerned about the pat-downs.
They don't want to feel invaded.
They don't want the virtual strip loops.
Some people are maybe cancer survivors or pregnant women, and they don't obviously want to be exposed to that kind of radiation.
And some people are concerned about the efficacy of these machines and that they don't make us safer.
They actually give us the false sense of security, as Pierre was saying earlier about the many, many security experts who say that they're not effective.
So in that sense, yeah, we have the ACLU definitely on board.
We have EPIC, which is the privacy coalition.
And we have the Travis County Republican Party here, who have taken a stand against it.
And hopefully we're trying to get actually the Travis County Democratic Party against it.
And so yeah, we have so much response from so many different quarters of the political spectrum that it's very encouraging.
Right on.
You guys need the editorial pages of The Statesman and The Chronicle too, right?
That would be very nice, yes.
All right, well listen, I'm sorry we're out of time.
I got more questions, but we got to go.
I really appreciate y'all's effort, everybody.
It's L.
Pierre de Rochemont.
He's the scientist in Morgana Galloway.
She is the activist, and she's also the author of the book The Nightingale, a novel about the war in Iraq.
And check out their website.
It's stopaustinscanners.org.
I don't live there anymore, but I appreciate y'all fighting for freedom in my hometown.
Thank you so much.
