The TSA’s New Scanners Spot Bombs, Not Dongs [Tsa]

In the present day, you look something like this or this to the TSA’s naked body scanners. But soon, you’ll look more like a chalk outline, potential threats pinpointed on a generic sketch of a human form. No buns, just guns.

Starting today at Atlanta’s Hartsfield, Las Vegas’s McCarran and DC’s Ronald Reagan airports, the TSA is testing new software for the body scanners that’ll show a ” generic outline” of the person being scanned-one who looks an identical for every single passenger. While you’re all kosher, a tremendous OK will appear on the monitor. If a ” threat” is detected, it’ll appear wherever it’s located on the outline. As we speak, the TSA is testing the recent software on millimeter wave scanners, with plans to expand them to backscatter machines later. ( Easy solution to tell the variation : The hulking machines marked ” Pro Vision” are millimeter wave scanners.)

While the TSA is pitching the brand new software as privacy-enhancing-doubtless, it now not displays dongs-it’s also less expensive. Because the photographs now not display passengers’ individual naked bodies, there’s now not a separate screening room where a TSA agent evaluates the photographs. Because of this they may be able to put more people in the course of the expedited scanning process. (I believe this incentive is sort of as strong as the response to the public outcry about feeling exposed, since I’ve personally seen a TSA manager shut down a scanner line because it was taking too long to shove people through.)

And while we’re focused on more security and not more dong, is there a potential tradeoff here? Once I talked to RAND Corporation Senior Advisor and security expert Brian Jenkins a number of months ago, right when the body scanner hysteria started, he said he was opposed to the deployment of body scanners as a reaction the ” underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, because he did ” not think a body scanner would have necessary picked up [the] bomb given the amount, and how it was concealed.” And ” especially not with the scanners deployed that blur the genital area.” Is effectively blurring the total body still an efficient security measure then? We’ll see.

Maybe the brand new software is actually incredible and totally detects all threats while it renders every passenger into the same outline. But besides the fact that it doesn’t, there has been real progress in aviation security, Jenkins said. ” We’ve got obliged terrorists to build smaller devices, use kinds of detonating systems, other than commercial detonating caps, that are detectable. We have got increased their operational difficulties. Their devices have a more robust probability of not working and the quantities are so small, they’d not likely result in a catastrophic hull loss.”

So! Enjoy your unexposed privates a better you stroll through a body scanner. You’re not really any less safe than you were before.

Mockup modified from TSA Pictures

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This post is tagged: brian jenkins, generic outline, millimeter wave, rand corporation, screening room, security expert