Contrary to reports last week that the TSA is eliminating its expensive fleet of x-ray body scanners from airports, the federal agency signed a contract months ago with a separate company to provide the very same machines.
U.S. airport full-body scanners that show a generic figure rather than actual images of passenger body parts may be deployed to some airports for tests this year, the transportation security chief said today.
A Washington federal judge allowed on Wednesday the Department of Homeland Security to keep from public view the naked body images of air passengers who were screened at airport checkpoints.
Somebody figured out how to cobble together a centimeter wave scanner using a hacked set of feed horns to create the image.
William Fox of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and John Vesecky, his colleague at UC Santa Cruz, are working on a modified radar gun that can identify suicide bombs worn under the clothing.
One of the scientists who helped develop full-body airport scanners says a simple software fix could mollify objections to the so-called “virtual strip-search.” But he’s wrong.
Scientists with the University of California at San Francisco were so worried that they wrote a letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology in April, 2010 raising “a number of red flags” on the scanners’ safety.
Airport Body Scanner Truth