[Infowarrior] - Documents Send Mixed Signal on Airport Scanners

[Richard Forno]

  Documents Send Mixed Signal on Airport Scanners

By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: January 12, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/us/13scanners.html?hp

WASHINGTON — The Transportation Security Administration has promised  
not to store or transmit nude images of airline passengers made by  
whole-body scanners, but when it asked manufacturers to submit bids  
for such machines, it required that the scanners have exactly those  
capabilities, according to agency documents obtained in a lawsuit.

The bid specifications, obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information  
Center, also show that companies wanting to sell such machines to the  
government were required to equip them with “10 selectable levels of  
privacy,” although the document, which was partly censored before its  
release, does not specify what those are. Some of the machines provide  
blurring, or the electronic equivalent of a G-string over the genitals.
The government required that the machines have a testing mode that  
would allow the “exporting of image data” and provide “a secure means  
for high-speed transfer of image data,” according to the documents.

The images to be stored and transmitted are supposed to be of test  
subjects, not passengers, for training purposes.

The agency has said that images of passengers will not be transmitted  
or stored. The documents make clear that as the images are made, they  
will be sent to a display screen in a remote room to an operator who  
cannot see the actual passenger, and that the operator will delete the  
image after examining it.

The machines are supposed to provide “image filters to protect the  
identity, modesty and privacy of the passenger,” the companies were  
told, but the filters have to be modifiable by users with higher-level  
passwords.

The documents were initially marked as “security sensitive  
information,” which is a level of secrecy lower than “classified.”

Two T.S.A. officials, speaking on the condition that they not be  
identified by name, said that the scanners are delivered with the  
ability to store and transmit images, but that these capabilities are  
disabled by the agency before the machines are installed at an airport  
and that officers at the airport cannot re-enable them. The operator,  
who is forbidden to take a camera into the remote room, must clear one  
image before the next passenger image can be seen, they said.

Critics call the machines the digital equivalent of a strip search and  
say the machines’ ability to record images could be abused by operators.

“This is in direct contradiction to multiple assurances, that they  
could not capture nor would they store these images,” said  
Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah. “Obviously, they  
have a capability of doing both, and the intention of doing both.”

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy  
Information Center, a research center in Washington that supports  
greater privacy protection, said that in addition to violating the  
privacy of travelers, the machines might not achieve their intended  
purpose, because the documents make no mention of one form of  
explosives: powders.

The machines provide a clear image of passengers under their clothes  
and are meant to find threats that existing metal detectors cannot,  
like ceramic knives and bomb components. The T.S.A. initially said the  
machines would be used only for secondary screening — that is, when  
screeners had a special reason to believe that a passenger required  
closer scrutiny — but the government now plans to have 450 of them by  
the end of September and use them as a first-line tool.