Thursday, September 30, 2010

More Body Scanners Being Rolled Out...

PBIA Debuts Controversial Full-Body Scanners
Technology Uses Electromagnetic Waves To Reveal What's Beneath Clothing

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Palm Beach International Airport has a controversial new tool in airport security -- a full-body scanner, which made its debut Thursday...

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Smile! Full-Body Scanners Arrive at Bradley

Full-body scanners are coming to Bradley International Airport.

The scanner, known as “backscatter” imaging creates what looks like a chalk etching of you, au natural.

The scanners are meant to “unobtrusively screens passengers for metallic and non-metallic threats,” according to the Transportation Security Administration.

The scanners are just being deployed, so it’s too early to know how local travelers feel about screening technology that creates revealing images to ensure that you’re not carrying any threats on an aircraft.

Across the country, however, full-body scanners have been controversial...

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Nigerian Airport Screeners Use Full-body Scanners’ Capabilities

Those full-body scanners the Transportation Security Administration has deployed in airports across the country have raised numerous privacy concerns. They can, after all, see right through clothing and provide a very detailed view of a person’s most intimate anatomical features — so detailed, in fact, that when a TSA screener’s genitalia were spotted by his coworkers during a training session and became an object of ridicule, the screener assaulted one of those making fun of his puny manhood. They’re also detailed enough that Nigerian aviation security officials have been getting their jollies from the images the Lagos airport’s scanners are producing, according to a report from the Nigerian newspaper ThisDay.

The scanners were installed in Nigerian airports after “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was from Lagos, attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner last Christmas. The scanners are only intended for use on U.S.-bound passengers, but ThisDay found that other passengers were being subjected to them as well, through such underhanded tactics as turning off one of the conventional scanners, leaving passengers with the unenviable choice of standing in a long line for the remaining conventional scanners or submitting to the full-body scanner.

In addition, the newspaper observed that “during off-peak periods, the aviation security officials … usually stroll from the cubicle located in a hidden corner on the right side of the screening area … to catch a glimpse of some of the passengers entering the machine and immediately go back to view the naked images, in order to match the faces with the images.”...

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