This week’s New Yorker contains an interesting and useful article on a new surveillance system for detecting radioactive material–specifically, “dirty bombs”. Stephen already posted on the unusual politics-Bush support for ‘preparedness’ rather than interdiction-here. But the infrastructure is already being put in place, and on a global scale. “The federal government has distributed more than fifteen hundred radiation detectors to overseas ports and border crossings, as well as to America’s northern and southern borders, domestic seaports, Coast Guard ships, airports, railways, mail facilities, and even some highway truck stops. More detectors are being distributed each month. NEST and the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintain a permanent team to respond to events in Washington and along the Northeast Corridor; a second team trained to dismantle nuclear weapons is based in Albuquerque, and eight other teams able to diagnose radioactive materials operate on continuous alert elsewhere in the country.” Systems are already being distributed to foreign ports as wll, for example Sri Lanka. Of course, the same problems appear as in other surveillance systems: lots of false positives. “In the United States alone, the sensors generate more than a thousand radiation alarms on an average day, all of which must be investigated.” Many scientists doubt that such a system could work or is cost-effective. Yet one surprising aspect is that the system is detecting all kinds of loose radioactive material that would otherwise remain invisible, almost like a “dual-use”! Similar things have been said about syndromic surveillance: the “false-positives” are sometimes real outbreaks of disease, just outbreaks that were previously undetected and typically considered unimportant. So there is an expansion of detection, which may or may not produce an expansion of intervention.