In the Netherlands today, interior minister Guusje Ter Horst announced that the country's airports will begin using full-body scanners to screen passengers flying to the United States. It was at Schiphol airport, where the 23-year-old Nigerian man Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight wearing explosives.
The TSA has already released some new security measures in response to the terrorist attempt, which our own Ian O'Neill thinks are pointless. Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and Boston's Logan International Airport have both announced that they'll be installing the scanners within the next year. To date, nearly 20 airports around the United States currently use the full-body scanners.
The scanners see through clothes and, so as expected, many folks are up in arms about it. Jay Stanley, public education director for the American Civil Liberties
Union's Technology and Liberty Program, is quoted here saying that the machines perform "virtual strip searches that see through your clothing and
reveal the size and shape of your body."
I went to the TSA web site to learn more and found that
there are two kinds of full-body scanners: millimeter wave (top image) and backscatter (middle image). In this blog post, I put images from both to show you what TSA agents will see on their computer monitors after a passenger has been scanned. My question for you is, Do you think these images are an invasion of privacy? I was actually surprised to see that the images don't actually show a naked person. The millimeter-wave technology provides a lot of detail but not more than one might expect to see on the beach during summer.
I've also included an image that reveals the technology's capability (bottom) but, according to the TSA web site, is not the kind of image that screeners would see.
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