Get Ready to Strip at Reagan National (and other large airports)

Calling all passengers flying out of Reagan National (and other large airports), you will now be referred to as virtual strippers (like it or not). The TSA is introducing millimeter wave scanners at its checkpoints there and other airports nationwide.

Millimeter waves bring X-ray vision from the supernatural world and into airports. Passengers step into a booth whose cameras see through their clothes to photograph the body underneath. The photo process takes about 3 seconds. Then the photo is analyzed on a "remotely located" (TSA lingo) monitor by a trained screener, which takes another 45 seconds or so. The TSA assures that the screener watching the monitor will not see the passenger in person -- so as to make it okay to see someone virtually naked if they are not standing in your eyesight.

As you would expect, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) are all over this as. The ACLU claims the image resolution is high so the picture of the body presented to screeners is detailed enough to show genitalia.

Currently, only passengers the agency selects for the infamous "secondary screening" are scanned, and they can "choose" a pat-down instead. But the TSA seems to indicate this is what is coming, not as a choice, but as a requirement to pass through the checkpoint in the future.

TSA maintains that millimeter wave technology is safe because the scanning machines emit 10,000 times less energy than a cell phone. It plans to purchase and deploy 30 more millimeter wave machines this year.

I am not sure how I feel about this. Seems the risk of terrorism is pretty low for such a high and mighty agency to be yielding such power. Maybe this new machine, which seems more foolproof for the TSA screeners to use, will actually be useful since the TSA cannot seem to catch anything now anyway.

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