US to remove naked X-ray scanners
Airport scanners with their all-too revealing body images are to be scrapped, America’s transport authority says.
The Transportation Security Administration said the controversial scanners that used a low-dose X-ray would be gone by June because the company that makes them cannot resolve the privacy issues.
Other airport body scanners, which produce a generic outline instead of a naked image, are staying.
The US government rapidly stepped up its use of body scanners after a man sneaked explosives on to a flight bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.
At first, both types of scanners showed travellers naked. The idea was that security workers could spot both metallic objects like guns as well as non-metallic items such as plastic explosives. But the scanners also showed every other detail of the passenger’s body.
The TSA defended the scanners, saying the images could not be stored and were seen only by a security worker who did not interact with the passenger. But the scans still raised privacy concerns and Congress ordered that they either produce a more generic image or be removed by June.
On Thursday Rapiscan, the maker of the X-ray, or backscatter, scanner, admitted that it would not be able to meet the June deadline. The TSA said yesterday that it had ended its contract for the software with Rapiscan.
The agency’s statement also said the remaining scanners would move travellers through more quickly, meaning faster lanes at the airport. Those scanners, made by L-3 Communications, used millimetre waves to make an image. The company was able to come up with software that no longer produced a naked image of a traveller’s body.
The TSA will remove all 174 backscatter scanners from the 30 airports they are used in now. Another 76 are in storage. It has 669 of the millimetre wave machines it is keeping, plus options for 60 more, TSA spokesman David Castelveter said.
Not all of the machines will be replaced. Mr Castelveter said some airports that now have backscatter scanners will go back to having metal detectors – what most airports used before scanners were introduced.
The Rapiscan scanners have been on their way out for months, in slow motion.
The government had not bought any since 2011. It quietly removed them from seven major airports in October, including New York’s LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, Chicago’s O’Hare, and Los Angeles International. The TSA moved a handful of the X-ray scanners to very small airports. At the time, the agency said the switch was being made because millimetre-wave scanners moved passengers through faster.
Rapiscan parent company OSI Systems said it would help the TSA move the scanners to other government agencies. It has not yet been decided where they will go.
Scanners are often used in prisons or on military bases where privacy is not a concern.
“There’s quite a few agencies which will have a great deal of interest” in the scanners, Alan Edrick, OSI’s chief financial officer, said.
OSI was shouldering a one-time charge of 2.7 million dollars to cover the money spent trying to develop software to blur the image, and to move the machines out of airports, Mr Edrick said.
The contract to change the software on the scanners came under scrutiny in November when the TSA delivered a “show cause” letter to the company looking into allegations that it falsified test data, which the company denied.
On Thursday it said final resolution of that issue needed approval by the Department of Homeland Security.
The agreement with the TSA is an indication that OSI Systems will be cleared of the issues raised by the agency, Roth Capital Partners analyst Jeff Martin wrote yesterday.
Besides the scanners being dropped by TSA, Hawthorne, California-based OSI Systems makes other passenger scanners used in other countries, as well as luggage and medical scanners.
