The TSA Knows You're Naked Underneath Your Clothes

Another reason not to fly?

Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation's busiest airports in one of the biggest public uses of security devices that reveal intimate body parts.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently started using body scans on randomly chosen passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, Albuquerque and at New York's Kennedy airport. Airports in Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas and Miami will be added this month. Reagan National Airport in Washington starts using a body scanner today. A total of 38 machines will be in use within weeks. "It's the wave of the future," said James Schear, the TSA security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where two body scanners are in use at one checkpoint.

Schear said the scanners could eventually replace metal detectors at the nation's 2,000 airport checkpoints and the pat-downs done on passengers who need extra screening. "We're just scratching the surface of what we can do with whole-body imaging," Schear said.

That’s what scares me.

The scanners bounce harmless "millimeter waves" off passengers who are selected to stand inside a portal with arms raised after clearing the metal detector. A TSA screener in a nearby room views the black-and-white image and looks for objects on a screen that are shaded differently from the body. Finding a suspicious object, a screener radios a colleague at the checkpoint to search the passenger.

The TSA says it protects privacy by blurring passengers' faces and deleting images right after viewing. Yet the images are detailed, clearly showing a person's gender. "You can actually see the sweat on someone's back," Schear said.

It also basically gives the screener essentially a view of your naked body. I can’t imagine too many people being comfortable with this – particularly Muslims and other conservative religious and cultural groups. At a minimum it seems like there should be a mandate for screeners to only be able to screen members of their own gender. (It shouldn't be any different from pat downs in this regard.)

"I'm delighted by this development," said Clark Kent Ervin, the former Homeland Security inspector general whose reports urged the use of body scanners. "This really is the ultimate answer to increasing screeners' ability to spot concealed weapons."

What’s important is what it does for the government and not the impact on the dignity of the individual?

Passengers who went through a scanner at the Baltimore airport last week were intrigued, reassured and occasionally wary. The process took about 30 seconds on average.

Bottlenecking an already tedious process?

Stepping into the 9-foot-tall glass booth, Eileen Reardon of Baltimore looked startled when an electronic glass door slid around the outside of the machine to create the image of her body. "Some of this stuff seems a little crazy," Reardon said, "but in this day and age, you have to go along with it."

Steinhardt of the ACLU said passengers would be alarmed if they saw the image of their body. "It all seems very clinical and non-threatening — you go through this portal and don't have any idea what's at the other end," he said.

Passengers scanned in Baltimore said they did not know what the scanner did and were not told why they were directed into the booth.

Passengers can decline to go through a scanner, but they will face a pat-down. Schear, the Baltimore security director, said only 4% of passengers decline. In Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, where scanners have been tested since last year as an alternative to pat-downs, 90% of passengers choose to be scanned, the TSA says.

Only 4% decline but 90% choose to get scanned. I wonder what happens to the other 6%?

While I am very impressed with the technology behind these scanners, I am also alarmed about the invasion of privacy and lack of information given to scanned passengers. The software currently blurs images and deletes them after scanning, but this could easily be changed by a minor tweak in software. This may be increasingly tempting for the government as the technology improves and new uses for this technology emerge for law enforcement purposes. One area I see particularly tempting is combining this with facial recognition software. With this technology, there's no reason the government couldn't eventually create body recognition software, including scanning for any identifying scars or other body markers as a way of identifying people.

Similar trends have already happened for DNA collection, which has expanded far beyond the original statutory intent as new uses and better accuracy for testing have emerged. The government now keeps a permanent DNA record of all military personnel and convicted criminals. The scope of their DNA collection has been increasing over the years, raising a host of constitutional issues. Eventually, this body scanning technology could allow the government to get a permanent "bodyprint" of anyone who flies.

If there's ever another terrorist attack on American airplanes, the temptation to start using this technology in these ways may be too strong to resist. Even if this doesn't happen in the United States, I can certainly see similar technology being adopted by the governments of other nations to give them greater control over their citizenry.

(HT Gadling)