Airport ‘Naked’ Scanners May Get Privacy Upgrades
Holli Powell, a Phoenix medical- software consultant who flies every week, says she avoids getting into airport security lines that end at what she calls a humiliating full-body scanner.
“Those scanners, I feel, are above and beyond,” Powell, 35, said in an interview with Bloomberg. They generate “nearly naked images.”
The concerns of travelers such as Powell, which led privacy advocates to sue the government, may soon be eased. L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. and OSI Systems Inc.’s Rapiscan, makers of the scanners for U.S. airports, are delivering software upgrades that show a generic figure rather than an actual image of a passenger’s body parts. The new display would mark sections of a person’s body that need to be checked.
The revisions “certainly address most of the privacy concerns,” Peter Kant, a Rapiscan executive vice president, said in an interview. Every passenger will generate an avatar that “looks like a guy wearing a baseball cap,” he said.
The Transportation Security Administration aims to add the software to the machines, which sparked complaints, as more airports get the scanners. As of Aug. 27, 194 of the devices were in use at 51 U.S. airports, an almost fivefold increase from six months ago,
“TSA continues to explore additional privacy protections for imaging technology,” Greg Soule, a spokesman for the security agency, said in an e-mail. “Testing is currently under way.”
The agency is accelerating use of the scanners after the U.S. said Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on approach to Detroit Dec. 25 by igniting explosives in his underpants. The 1,000 scanners due at airports by the end of next year will put the devices at more than half the security lanes at major U.S. airports.
The 28 airports getting scanners in the second half of this year include New York’s Kennedy and Philadelphia, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Houston, Miami, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Seattle, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in July.
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