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Actually I found two things very scary. 1. The ignorance on the part of the police and agents was stunning. Conflating Hindu and Muslim? 2. The explosive a
by einhverfr 13y ago
Actually I found two things very scary.
1. The ignorance on the part of the police and agents was stunning. Conflating Hindu and Muslim?
2. The explosive alarms.... Evidently they are set to detect some very common household chemicals. Based on the story I am assuming the culprit in this case was household ammonia. It isn't clear to me that the agents would have any idea as to what could trigger a false positive either.
- candeira 13y agoAbout the "ignorance" on the part of the FBI guy, I wouldn't believe anything an interrogating officer tells me. Playing dumb is one of the oldest tricks in the book: "So, tell me about the religion you claim to profess and about which I know nothing so you can bullshit me, really".
- lizardking 13y agoAnecdote: my sister in law is in the FBI and I can guarantee she doesn't know the first thing about Hinduism. Or Islam for that matter.
- praptak 13y agoThe detectors are most certainly cheap ion mobility spectrometers. They ionize the sample and sort the resulting cloud by the speed at which the ions move in an electric field in a low pressure gas. The resulting spectrum is fairly unique to each chemical. The obvious problem is that you get a superposition of spectrums of multiple chemicals from the sample and that the devices being cheap and fast produce "blurry" spectrums, so you get a lot of false positives.