House curbs 'virtual strip searches' at airports
WASHINGTON--The Transportation Security Agency's plans to use X-rays to peek under air travelers' clothes may soon be shelved.
In a 310-118 vote on Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation that curbs the growing use of what critics call "virtual strip searches" at airport checkpoints.
Privacy groups say that the low-energy backscatter X-rays allow "a highly realistic image to be reconstructed... of the traveler's nude form" that's "detailed enough to show genitalia." The TSA, on the other hand, says it has made improvements to its scanning technology including a "privacy algorithm" that will provide the operator with vaguer outlines of body parts. (See related CBS News video.)
The House vote attached an amendment drafted by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, to a broader TSA bill.
TSA's X-ray backscatter scanning with "privacy filter," front view
(Credit: TSA.gov)Chaffetz's amendment says that whole body imaging "may not be used" as the primary method of passenger screening, and that passengers have the right to refuse it and "shall be offered a pat-down search" as an alternative. It also prohibits the storage or transmission of the whole-body images after they're no longer necessary for screening.
"Whole-body imaging is exactly what it says; it allows TSA employees to conduct the equivalent of a strip search," Chaffetz said in a statement after the vote. "Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane."
Chaffetz had first introduced the measure as a standalone bill in April. His original bill made it a federal crime for a TSA screener to share or copy a passenger image; that penalty vanished in the final version attached as an amendment.
Backscatter X-rays are relatively low-power and are believed to be safe even for frequent flyers. One manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, boasts that its equipment can detect "explosives, narcotics, ceramic weapons" such as ceramic knives that traditional metal detectors can't. (A competing technology is called millimeter wave.)
On May 31, a coalition of advocacy groups including the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Gun Owners of America, and the Consumer Federation of America sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asking her to "suspend the program until the privacy and security risks are fully evaluated."
TSA's "millimeter wave" technology
(Credit: TSA.gov)TSA says that it's currently using millimeter wave technology at 19 U.S. airports, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington Reagan National.
During the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., Peter Pietra, the TSA's director for privacy policy and compliance, defended full-body scanning technology. (See CNET's 2006 interview with Pietra.)
"It's much better for me than going through a magnetometer," Pietra said. There's "an awful lot of work that's gone into it." Any suggestions on how to improve the privacy of the screening process, he said, could be sent to tsaprivacy@dhs.gov.
On Thursday, the full House approved the Transportation Security Administration Authorization Act by a vote of 397 to 25. Now the bill heads to the Senate, which could choose to preserve or strip out the privacy amendments.
Declan McCullagh is a contributor to CNET News and a correspondent for CBSNews.com who has covered the intersection of politics and technology for over a decade. Declan writes a regular feature called Taking Liberties, focused on individual and economic rights; you can bookmark his CBS News Taking Liberties site, or subscribe to the RSS feed. You can e-mail Declan at declan@cbsnews.com. 
I like my privacy, but the nuts wanting to get on airplanes here in the US and wanting privacy and fast searches need to get a grip. The 1950s are long gone and the prudes, bleeding hearts, and body-conscious need to get real and be prepared for body-cavity searches or learn to take the train or buy tickets on an airline that allows for prudish people that want to take the risk of taking the 35k nosedive along with 200 other people and a willing crew and an airline willing to blow $200M on prudish people. Sheesh, the prudes and privacy nuts need to get with the program or buy their own airline.
If you care so little for privacy, get in line and prepare for your anal RFID implant. Bow to the masters who protect you from the boogeymen.
If people refuse to submit to these scans, they should not be allowed to board the plane. They have a choice. They can drive.
We're outlawing smoking in almost all public places because smoking infringes on other's rights to a healthy environment. We need to ban these prudish idiots from public transportation because their beliefs compromise public safety!
1. Metal weapons, like guns and "real" knives
2. Explosives
Metal weapons are already covered by the metal detector and explosives can be handled through the TSA's bomb sniffing machine (which could easily incorporate a metal detector if it doesn't already). This would provide a quick, unobtrusive and targeted search. When you get in the category of knives, just about anything can be made into a "shank". We can't even keep shanks out of prisons, so there's no way we're going to keep them off of planes. So what exactly is this thing supposed to find? If it's not weapons, and clearly it's not because there are much better and cheaper ways to do that, then it has no place in airport security. Airport security is not immigrations and they have no right to search people for "contraband". If you think these machines are necessary, then I challenge you to come up with even one example of something this machine would find that I haven't covered. Keep in mind you can very easily kill someone with a "shank" made out of a toothbrush and not even a machete would get through the reinforced cockpit door.
Basically, they're assuming that everyone who flies is guilty and require them to get strip searches. Stupid. Instead, we should remove all security, just like it was 1950, and spend the wasted TSA money on developing real intelligence networks that can profile and stop the terrorists, instead of removing freedom from law abiding citizens.
Go do the research. Even with the technology and new procedures, TSA's own studies have shown that most contraband makes it through. One reporter even tried to get caught and couldn't. Airport security is a hassle and a joke.
Just allow the random civil servant the right to see your web browsing whenever you get online on the off chance someone somewhere might exploit the innocents....
I'm sure you have no problem with their listening in to every phone call you make too. You know, to catch someone making plans against the government.
Also make sure you have to report your movements any time you travel interstate.
All of those ideas are FAR LESS intrusive than this body scan, so I'm sure you'd be all for those ideas.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/131103.html
Also, chemical scanners and other 'bomb-sniffers' would make us much safer than we currently are, while keeping illegitimate infractions on people's human rights to a minimum.
Most of the things that the TSA and others have gotten us so up in arms about (bomb-shoes, people mixing bombs in airline toilet stalls, etc.) are NOT POSSIBLE to do in reality. Any people mixing bombs in toilet stalls would need a source of heat, and these chemicals give off ACRID scents as they are doing their things. Any people with 'bomb-shoes' on would be caught by the chemical sniffers. I could keep going on about things that the TSA had said that we have to worry about that just are NOT POSSIBLE in the slightest.
The problems with the machine:
1. it takes longer (as does SSSS)
2. there aren't many, so they look for people traveling alone as doing a whole group would take a long time
3. it takes naked pictures of you and then asks you to trust they are "filtering" and erasing them
I said thanks but no thanks. I think that many who say it's no big deal, when actually asked to go through one, might have second thoughts. Or when they ask your wife, or your 17 year old daughter to go through? (see Airplane, or was it Airplane 2). Or your 12 year old for that matter?
Who would voluntarily submit themselves or a member of their family to a strip search without cause in other situations? You know you've done nothing wrong, have not been arrested, etc., so why should you allow yourself to be violated in such a way simply so the TSA can pretend they are doing something useful while not profiling.
It's not fair to be strip-searched without cause.
It's a huge privacy violation at best.
AND allow them to carry weapons?
Problem 100% solved. If the best weapon that someone can come up with on a plane (now) is some knife of plastic, they have no chance against a trained officer with a handgun. (and proper armor, of course)
Why hasn't anyone there came up with this very simple idea yet?
And if they have, then how in hell did they fail so badly?
It hasn't failed.
A government agency just always wants to do what it does even better and spend more money doing it. Thus, we ought to have air marshals and naked picture taking devices. the only point of this machine is to catch people carrying a little weed from la to vegas. pointless.
But with RFID I could have my ID passport, medical an financial info all with me and easy to access...
Just walk in a store be scanned and walk out , same for the airport or borders...
life would be a lot better
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
~Benjamin Franklin
RFID chips do not have the capacity to store all the information you say they would contain. Perhaps, along with your RFID chip, you wouldn't mind the simultaneous implantation of couple hundred gigabytes of flash memory to hold this information. No person in their right mind would allow this.
The amazing thing, and what is extremely scary, is that anyone in America is so willing to give up all their personal liberties in order to cut down on the time it takes to go through airport security.
Anyone willing to put so much personally identifiable information in a RFID chip invites identity theft and/or data theft. I imagine the insurance companies would love this. They wouldn't even has to ask about pre-existing conditions, you would be forced to give all your medical information just by walking by a scanner. If I want to spend money from your bank accounts, I wouldn't even have to hack into a computer, I could get your account numbers by scanning you while you walk down the street.
RFID chips are not difficult to read and they aren't difficult to counterfeit. As far as encryption securing your date, don't count on it. So far, every data encryption scheme tried on RFID has been broken.
*Twenty-five years in emergency medicine tells me that immediate access to a patient's medical records in a life or death situation is totally unnecessary. Treatment that is performed to save a life is pretty standard, regardless of the history of the patient. Once the emergency has passed, so has the need for immediate access to their medical records. The current methods of accessing medical records are all that is necessary.
If this reduces the chance of someone carrying a weapon through by 0.0001%, I will take it.
Foreign terrorists have been able to kill a grand total of 6K people in this country in the past 109 years in this country..... that's less than 1/20th the amount of people who are killed in CAR ACCIDENTS each year in the United States.... not a big worry and not something that I personally worry about when I leave my home to go to the store or mall or even when I fly on a plane.
Fact is, if someone tried to take over a plane I was on...... regardless of whether they were armed with plastic box-cutters, knives, or guns.... I would damned well put them DOWN or do my damndest to.... if the people on those planes on 9/11 would have done that immediately, there might not have BEEN a 9/11 in the first place.
I object to the government's position that virtually strip-searching my wife and I every time we go to work is both necessary and makes my workplace safer.
Employees in the industry KNOW where the weaknesses in the system are. This technology will just be the opiate of the masses so they feel safer. You don't think terrorists know they can just get a job at SkyChef to get access to airplanes?
If the government feels it is necessary to virtually strip-search everyone who wants to fly, why not safeguard everywhere the same way? We just had an abortion doctor killed in a church...let's strip search the congregation. We've had wackos kill students in high school and college...let's strip search all students and faculty. Hey...how many crimes against humanity have been committed in our own government? Let's strip-search every policy- and law-maker every time they go to work? Let's strip-search everyone who goes to a public venue (Superbowl, concerts, auto races, etc.)...will you feel safer? Or will you feel like the government, who is "here to help you," is interfering with your right to have a private life? Where will it end?
We HAVE to profile at airports to catch bad guys...period. Just like the Israelis do. No more patting down 80 year-old ladies and children. No more looking the other way when twenty-something middle-easterners have to fly. It's not racism...it's national friggin' security!!!
LOL. What has President Obama done so far that's different from Bush? Gitmo? Not going to close. He still uses Bush's authority for wire tapping. Nothing's changed except he's going to destroy our country by bankrupting us.
Yes, I know, that's a bad joke. But to the topic of virtual searches. These are done to give the masses a sense of ease, correct? So why keep them private? The images should be displayed on a large lcd so that we all have the opportunity to verify that our fellow potential passengers are indeed weapon free.
The TSA already ranks at the bottom of government agencies in terms of employee morale and job satisfaction. I pity the screeners that have to look at those images all day. Imagine the nightmares they must have.
No matter what, there will be risks with travel, just as there always has been.
Let's take walking - you can get blisters, twist your ankle, fall off a cliff, get mugged, beaten up, robbed, murdered, raped and thrown into a ditch. Yet with all of these risks, people go for walks every day - in fact, they have been for thousands of years with no one but worried mothers ever really raising much concern.
You could ride a horse - but you might get bucked off, break a leg, and crush your skull against a rock, not to mention all of the other dangers that go along with simple walking. Wow, that doesn't sound too safe either. Plus there's all those outlaws riding around out there, holding up stage coaches and all! Oh no!
How about a train? Well, that's no good - you could get derailed and die in all sorts of gruesome ways, or a head on collision. And the subway - forget it! Public transit is dirty and gross, after all, the public is there. You could get mugged, or thrown in front of an oncoming train, or slip down and step on that pesky third rail. Hmmmm... getting around is starting to sound kind of tough.
I know! We'll take a car and drive there! After all, we're Americans! We love our cars! We prove it by washing them in our driveways every Saturday and polluting our valuable drinking water with delicious toxic chemicals, and if that's not love then I defy you to tell me what is. Cars are the best and they are not dangerous at all. I mean sure, there's drunk drivers, poorly maintained roads and other cars, road rage, cell phones and texting, radio, heck there's television in a lot of them now, screaming children, and just plain old distraction and accidents - but are we going to let a few little risks stop us from enjoying the cars we love? No way!
The plain truth is, you're more likely to die in any of the above ways (well, not horseback riding...) then you are in an airplane or plane related death - be it terrorism, mechanical failure, pilot error or other catastrophic event. That's just regular old statistical fact that you could easily see is true just by looking at the death counts for any of the above versus air travel (however they probably don't keep track of the folks walking, but you know there's a ton of people that die walking every day.)
Life is risk, no matter what you're doing, no matter where you are, the unexpected can happen. So, rather then prattling on worrying about all the different ways it can happen, you can behave the way you do in your car - relax and enjoy the ride. Remember, that it's the ride and not the destination that count. Live a good life, be good to yourself and others, and know that even if you were to leave this world at any given moment you did the very best you could. It truly makes life much more enjoyable.
Now, if after considering all the above you'd still rather give up your liberties because you're afraid of the scary men with bombs and drugs, just let me know and I'll be sure to tell your mommies and daddies to check under the bed for the Boogeyman when they tuck you in.
Some glamour model saying to the airport security bloke year you'll have to pay for that sort of x-rated stuff now and that pervy teenage boy behind her with his compu specs on thinking year you just keep thinking that doll with a quick look at the other lady wal;king away via his hidden rear view mirror.
You cannot tell a nut from a regular person by a body scan. Maybe if you were telepathic, you could do that, but NOT by using a body scanner, period and done with, argument over, shut up!
- by phil3566 June 7, 2009 9:43 AM PDT
- I was at SFO airport traveling to France last March. There was a long line of people going through customs. As I was taking off my shoes and emptying my pockets I noted that they asked a very attractive young woman to be scanned. In my opinion there were better choices.
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- by Lerianis3 June 7, 2009 10:06 PM PDT
- That is what I am worried about: that these 'strip-searches' will be used to satisfy the personal 'kinks' of the people doing the scans, by letting them get a woody from looking at a 2 year old in the body scanner or a 18 year old woman or.... whatever you want to put here!
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- by sharmajunior June 17, 2009 7:29 PM PDT
- The funny thing I saw when I was coming back from a trip to the Caribbean was that the TSA strip searched 2 White Americans while letting the foreigner in front of them and behind them go. I think it has to do with their random number selection check system. If you are the lucky customer, you get to go in the strip search scanner...LOL
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