The following is a statement from Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program.
WASHINGTON — The Active Millimeter Wave body scanners that Homeland Security has announced raise troubling questions about passenger privacy and ultimately their utility as a security measure.
We very much appreciate the fact that Transportation Security Administration Administrator Kip Hawley met with us yesterday and briefed us about the agency’s plans. But we are not convinced that it is the right thing for America.
First, this technology produces strikingly graphic images of passengers’ bodies. 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.
Second, we question the supposed voluntary nature of this scan – TSA’s assumption that the people who "consent" to this body scan really understand what they’re consenting to, and that it will long remain something over which passengers will be allowed to exercise any choice at all.
Third, we are skeptical of the privacy safeguards that the TSA is touting. They say that they are obscuring faces, but that is just a software fix that can be undone as easily as it is applied. And obscuring faces does not hide the fact that rest of the body will be vividly displayed.
They also say they are not keeping the images. That protection would certainly be a vital step for such a potentially invasive system, but given the irresistible pull that images created by this system will create on some employees (for example when a celebrity like George Clooney or someone with an unusual or "freakish" body goes through the system), our attitude is one of ‘trust but verify.’ We would like to see strong independent and legally binding assurance that the policy will be enforced and unchanged.
We question whether TSA, which has still not addressed many very basic problems with transportation security such as cargo screening, should be spending large sums of money on these very expensive devices.
Finally, we wonder how many of the people who submit to this bodyscan will end up having to do a pat-down search anyway because of limits in the technology’s ability to definitively identify suspected threats. Our impression is that a very high percentage of the passengers who opt for a scan will still wind up being physically searched because TSA officials will have trouble distinguishing threatening objects from ordinary ones like a wallet.
We urge TSA to reconsider using this detection system and to consider others that are less invasive, less costly and less damaging to privacy.
source: 17oct2007
photo source: 17oct2007
photo source: 17oct2007
The airline passengers who prefer not to submit to the physical pat-down during secondary screening at airports will be able to opt for a new scanning method.
The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) began testing a new type of walk-through security machine, which uses a technology called active millimeter wave, at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (PHX).
According to TSA, the new technology, which is also less invasive than X-ray technology used in TSA’s first pilot program, can detect weapons, explosives and other threat items concealed under layers of clothing without physical contact.
The airline passenger should step into the scanner and should remains still for few seconds, in two different positions. Two antennas will rotate around the passenger body in order to generate a three-dimensional image that looks much like a fuzzy photo negative.
Once the scan is completed the passenger will step through the opposite side of the millimeter wave portal.
TSA explained that active millimeter wave technology passes harmless electromagnetic waves and the energy emitted during this process is 10,000 times less than a cell phone.
To further protect the privacy of the passenger, the image is viewed only by security officers from a remote location from they cannot ascertain the identity of the checked person. Still they can communicate with the officer at the checkpoint, who initiated the scan procedure. Also a security algorithm is used to mask the face of each passenger.
In the coming months the new scanners will be tested at New York's JFK and LAX in Los Angeles and TSA plans to purchase eight millimeter wave units at a cost of $1.7 million to be used in additional pilots.
If you wish to better understand how the new technology works TSA has posted two short movies on its website.
source: 17oct2007
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