Recently, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced a plan to purchase and deploy “Whole Body Imaging” X-ray machines to search air travelers at all airports. This proposal from the TSA directly conflict with public privacy issue. The end results from the machines are detailed images of a person’s naked body. For the use of these machines, the TSA states that “we are not going to store the images of passengers screened by the system.” Although they limited the rules of the system’s use, the images are not really temporary – an agent can save the images to the system’s hard disk or USB storage for subsequent viewing with color graphics. Additionally, the issues from this system are not just matter of saving or not saving images. Taking the photograph itself is a problem because TSA agent will take the naked photographs of millions of air travelers suspected of non-criminal, and the people who are photographed feel that their personal dignity is being violated from the TSA. In order to stop this violation, many people are invited to sign on the letter urging the organization to delay this program until the privacy and security risks are fully evaluated.
Personally, I disagree with the TSA system. I am not sure how effectively the machine can work. Currently, most airports have X-ray machines for hand-carry luggage and the use of the X-ray machines is already making privacy problem for passengers. In my experience, X-ray machine could not check everything right. Therefore, the result from that was unpacking all of my stuff in the middle of the process, and then the agent said “Your bag is clear. Do you want me to pack this?” In this type of situations, passengers are always the weak and they must conform to the agents. These can be reasons why the TSA should think of more carefully about installing the system at all of airports. If a screener finds something from body image and if it is not related with security issues at all, what would be happened?
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This is an interesting article, especially with the options that passengers have. As mentioned in one of the links provided this new system is optional and the old-fashioned pat down technique can be opted. I feel that this new technique would be much better than the old ones just because it involves no physical contact and thus causing less inconvenience to passengers. Then again there arises the question of what will the authorities do with these captured images? Though they say that they won’t be saving the images, as rightly pointed out by Joon as long as it will be temporarily on the hard-disks they can be used. This can also lead to loss of people’s privacy if it fell into the wrong hands. Thus the TSA should find a solution to caching of the images. Maybe it should have some sort of software which just over-writes an image with the next.
The image is freaking me out, even though there is no physical contact.
While I am bothered about the potential invasion of piracy, I am finding it difficult to reconcile this fear with the peace of mind I derive from the fact that we have a better system in place to track and prevent terrorists attacks. The only concern is that although the system increases the safety of domestic flights in the US and international flights from the US it does not address flights coming into the US. It will be interesting to see if other countries adopt similar systems. Many developing countries might cite lack of financial resources to support such a system. To complicate issues imagine the cultural repercussion of implementing this in conservative countries.
I would like to know more about these systems – the good and the bad. With any information system, I think it helps to have a clear and transparent description of how data will be managed, and this is no exception.
Recent polls suggested most Americans thought body scanners were a good idea. I wonder what the polls would say if they were taken at the airport where they were used for every passenger for both internal and external flights.
In addition to the personal privacy and potential mis-use of information already highlighted, the time and inconvenience factors can’t be ignored. If these scans are to live up to their potential shouldn’t EVERYONE who enters into the secure area be scanned, rather than just a “random” sample of passengers? Of course, that would take a lot of time, effort, training (by the way, just what is in the current training manual?), and machines. Also, are these booths set up to cater for people with wheelchairs or other special needs?
These booths are still fairly new and since they are only a part of the overall security system, they can’t guarantee security regardless of how good they might be in detecting objects. As things are, I think it’s unlikely that full-scale body scanning is viable (pick your reason: legal, ethical, practical, etc.) and there will always be an element of risk.