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October 15, 2007

Airport millimeter wave scanning systems

An update to an older story on SmartCheck Airport X-Ray Machines:
TSA is now testing the system as an alternative to pat-downs. This story ran in InformationWeek:

"Privacy is ensured through the anonymity of the image: It will never be stored, transmitted, or printed, and it will be deleted immediately once viewed." Ensuring privacy, as the TSA describes it, involves having security officers view images from remote locations. Thus, the security officer cannot identify the passenger, visually or by some other means, but can send word to fellow officers if a threat is detected.

According to the TSA, the scanning system applies a security algorithm to further protect passenger privacy by obscuring the passenger's face.
. . .

"First, this technology produces strikingly graphic images of passengers' bodies," Steinhardt said. "Those images reveal not only our private body parts, but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags. That degree of examination amounts to a significant -- and for some people humiliating -- assault on the essential dignity of passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate."

The TSA says that since February, when it began testing backscatter scanning -- a similar technology -- in Phoenix, some 79% of those selected for secondary screening opted to submit to a backscatter scan rather than a pat-down.

The TSA plans to perform further testing of these systems at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport and at Los Angeles International Airport. The security agency plans to purchase eight millimeter wave units for a total of $1.7 million. Millimeter wave scanners trials are currently being conducted at airports in Japan, the Netherlands, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

Posted by rshah at October 15, 2007 09:54 PM

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