You can run but you can’t hide nothin’: starting this year, the TSA will start testing so-called backscatter body scanners that can quite literally see through your clothes.
See below for details on another invasive privacy-threatening technology. Update [2005-5-24 5:44:16 by Dvx]: Now with image, plus: test deployment at Heathrow.
From this morning’s Gray Lady:
Airport Screeners Could Get X-Rated X-Ray Views
(Deleted cutsey intro about “x-ray specs”)
Stand by, air travelers, because the Homeland Security Department is preparing to install and test high-tech machines at airport checkpoints that will, as the comic-book ads promised, “See Thru Clothing!”
Get ready for electronic portals known as backscatters, expected to be tested at a handful of airports this year, that use X-ray imaging technology to allow a screener to scan a body. And yes, the body image is detailed.
How does it work? (sources: this, this , and my well-thumbed Penguin Dictionary of Physics)
The subject stands in front of something that looks like a large crate. A narrow, low-powered beam of x-rays is scanned across her (or your) body. A portion of this radiation is reflected back at a longer wavelength (“backscatter”) and picked up using detectors. The detector signals are then image-processed to produce highly revealing images:
Let’s not be coy here, ladies and gentlemen:
“Well, you’ll see basically everything,” said Bill Scannell, a privacy advocate and technology consultant. “It shows nipples. It shows the clear outline of genitals.”
Like this:
Doesn’t leave much to the imagination, does it.
Update [2005-5-24 5:44:16 by Dvx]:Meanwhile, it appears that this system was tested at London’s gigantic Heathrow Airport last fall:
A security scanner that sees through clothes and produces a nude image of passengers has made its debut in a trial at Heathrow Terminal 4, according to a report in the Sunday Times. link
Is this just a perc for underpaid TSA types or why are they doing this?
The Homeland Security Department’s justification for the electronic strip searches has a certain logic. In field test after field test, it found that federal airport screeners using metal-detecting magnetometers did a miserable job identifying weapons concealed in carry-on bags or on the bodies of undercover agents.
In a clumsy response late last year, the department instituted intrusive pat-downs at checkpoints after two planes in Russia blew up from nonmetallic explosives that had apparently been smuggled into the aircraft by female Chechen terrorists. But it reduced the pat-downs after passengers erupted in outrage at the groping last December.
“The use of these more thorough examination procedures has been protested by passengers and interest groups, and have already been refined” by the Transportation Security Administration, Richard L. Skinner, the acting inspector general of the Homeland Security Department, told a Senate committee in January. Mr. Skinner said then that the T.S.A. was ramping up tests of new technologies like backscatter imaging.
Last month, Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, told a Senate subcommittee that “technology is really what we ultimately have to use in order to get to the next level” in security.
The security that they have doesn’t work. The security that would work is too offensive to fly, even in today’s paranoid climate. And they think a tech solution might make it easier to preserve a pretence of dignity.
Chertoff adds, “We haven’t put it out yet because people are still hand-wringing about it.”
In other words, this technology would already be out there if it wasn’t for us crybabies.
Steve Elson, a former FAA investigator and skeptic of the program, states the obvious:
“Backscatting (sic!) has been around for years,” he said. “They started talking about this stuff back during the protests when they were grabbing women. Under the right circumstances, the technology has some efficacy and can work. That is, provided we’re willing to pay the price in a further loss of personal privacy.“
Is he willing? Like hell he is:
“I have a beautiful 29-year-old daughter and a beautiful wife, and I don’t want some screeners to be looking at them through their clothes, plain and simple,” he said.
Bill Scannell the privacy advocate brings in the money quote:
He does see one virtue, though, for some airport screeners if backscatting technology becomes the norm. “They’ll be paid to go to a peep show,” he said. “They won’t even need to bring any change.”
Noteworthy here is the government’s shift from assaulting our personal dignity and taking away our vestiges of privacy toward making these a matter of routine attendant in going about our daily lives.