15 Officers, One Mailroom, and the Case for Detecting at a Distance

If you have flown in the last twenty years you will have most likely have seen it… A security officer wipes a small pad across a bag handle or the palms of your hands. The pad goes into a machine. A few seconds later, a light tells everyone you are fine.

It’s a good system, it’s reliable and it works. But it also depends on one thing most of us never think about. Before the test can happen, a person has to stand close to the thing being tested and touch it.

At an airport, that is not a big problem. The line is controlled. The bags have already been X-rayed. Nobody is surprised.

Away from the airport, that one requirement can be a totally different issue. Below are three real situations where the danger sat in the last few feet, and where getting close was the risky step. I have kept them close to the record, because the facts make the point better than I can.

Case One: The Mailroom

Where: Federal Correctional Institution Thomson, Illinois
When: April 16, 2025

Fifteen corrections officers went to the hospital after they were exposed to what was believed to be a dangerous drug in the prison mailroom. According to the local union president, it was the eighth time in 15 months that staff at the facility had been hospitalized after a drug exposure.¹

Take a moment to think about what mail screening involves. Someone opens envelopes. Someone handles paper. If there is a test kit, someone takes a sample from that paper. Every step puts a hand near the threat, and here the threat is designed to stay hidden. It’s not a bag of powder. It’s just a letter that looks like a letter.

What contact asks for: a person handling every item before anyone knows what is inside it.

What distance could change: a sensor reading the air above a sorting tray could flag a batch of mail before a single envelope is opened. Staff would only get close to the items that need a closer look, and they would know to put on protection first.

Case Two: The Powder on the Car Seat

Where: anywhere in the United States
When: any shift

This one is not a single event. It’s a routine. A police officer on a traffic stop, or a paramedic on an overdose call, finds an unknown white powder.

Federal safety guidance for this moment is clear. The CDC's advice to first responders says not to touch or disturb white powder or liquid, and to let only properly trained personnel in the right protective equipment carry out field testing.²

That is sensible advice. But look at what it means in practice. The person who found the powder is told to step back. To find out what it is, someone else has to step forward: a trained person, suited up, who may still be on the way. Until then, the scene waits, and nobody knows if they are dealing with something harmless or something that needs a hazmat team.

What contact asks for: a trained person in protective gear, close enough to take a sample.

What distance could change: a first reading from a few steps back that tells the officer what kind of problem is in front of them. It would not replace a lab result for a court case. It would help decide who needs to come, and how carefully.

Case Three: The Border Lane

Where: land ports of entry, US southern border
When: Fiscal Year 2024

Every day, long lines of cars and trucks wait to cross into the United States. Hidden somewhere in that traffic are drugs, including fentanyl, packed into spaces built into the vehicles themselves.

Congress has required Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to scan every commercial and passenger vehicle with non-intrusive inspection, the large X-ray style systems that can see inside a vehicle without taking it apart. In 2024, CBP used that technology on only about 8 percent of passenger vehicles and 27 percent of commercial vehicles. At a House hearing in January 2026, the Government Accountability Office pointed to planning gaps and deployment delays as reasons the goal has not been met.³

That leaves a big gap. For most cars, the check is a short conversation at the booth. For the ones sent to secondary inspection, it can mean officers opening panels and searching by hand, one vehicle at a time, while the line keeps growing.

X-ray systems are a form of distance detection, and they clearly help. But they are large, expensive and hard to fit into crowded ports. They also look for shapes and density, not chemistry.

What contact asks for: an officer's hands inside a vehicle, and time the line does not have.

What distance could change: a sensor reading the air around vehicles as they wait could help decide which cars go to a full scan or a search. It would not replace X-ray or trained officers. It could help point both at the right cars sooner.

The same question, elsewhere

So what does standoff detection actually mean?

In plain terms, it means finding a threat without touching it, and ideally without standing next to it.

NanoAi, which Intellistake has signed a definitive agreement to acquire, has built its detection process around that idea. It’s a platform designed to detect threats including explosives, fentanyl and pathogens at standoff distance. The process has been peer-reviewed and published in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature Portfolio. The sensors are designed to be stacked, so one device could screen for several threat categories at the same time.⁴

I want to be precise here. The published study tested one application. Each new use, whether that is explosives, pathogens or something else, may need its own testing before deployment.⁴ How far away a sensor can work in a real mailroom or a real foyer is exactly the kind of thing that has to be proven, not assumed.

Why distance is worth paying for

Bomb disposal teams use robots so a technician does not have to walk up to a suspicious package. Utilities use drones so a lineworker does not have to climb every tower. Nobody thinks of those tools as extras anymore. They became standard because the other option was sending a human being into the last few feet.

I believe detection is heading the same way. The prison officer, the patrol officer and the event steward all do jobs that currently ask them to get close to something they cannot see. Each of those jobs comes with a budget, a union, an insurer and a legal team, and all of them would prefer that nobody gets hurt.

When I look at NanoAi, accuracy is the first question. The second is how far away a person can stand when the reading comes in. I expect the answer to that second question to decide where this technology is used first, and it is the number I will be watching most closely. Looking back at these events makes clear how real the threats are, and how urgent the need to detect them sooner