TSA will expand testing of “see-through” passenger scanners

The Transportation Security Administration said it intends to expand to more airports the testing of new technology that can “see” through passengers’ clothes – the kind of thing that it has been trying out at Phoenix Sky Harbor for several months now. The Phoenix technology, known as backscatter, uses a low-intensity x-ray beam to scan passengers for metallic and non-metallic threats like weapons and explosives, without using any physical contact. Additional backscatter scanners will be tested at Los Angeles International, TSA said. A new “millimeter wave” technology, which uses electromagnetic waves reflected off the body, will start testing at New York’s JFK Airport “in the coming months,” TSA said. “A millimeter wave image looks like a fuzzy photo negative of a person,” a spokesman explained. Although some privacy advocates have criticized the “see-through-clothes” aspect of the new technology as overly invasive, a TSA spokesman said that in the Phoenix tests, “passengers have been choosing backscatter screening over a physical pat-down by a wide margin.” TSA said it has procedures in place to protect individuals’ privacy, e.g., the TSA agent who is with the passenger is not the one who sees the scan; the officer operating the scanner monitor will be “remotely located and unable to associate the image with the passenger being screened;” and the scanned images “will not be stored, transmitted or printed.”