TSA body scans with controversial 'naked body scanners' won't be taking place at airports any longer. The Transportation Security Administration announced that is has officially removed all of the controversial X-ray technology machines that produced in depth images od passenger's bodies as they went through screening checkpoints.
According to NBC, TSA administrator John Pistole wrote a letter to the House Homeland Security committee this week and said that every US airport scanner that had the ability to produce the penetrating images are no longer being used as of May 16. Instead, the machines will only show a generic outline of a passenger to the TSA agent conducting the screening. The agent will be shown a colored box if the machine detects that a person possibly has a banned item.
The TSA had a May 31, deadline of modifying the machines and they beat it by two weeks. However the machines were originally supposed to be removed even earlier. Under the Federal Aviation Administration's Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, the machines were supposed to be removed by June 2012, but the TSA was given an extension to May 31, 2013.
The TSA had to remove or modify 250 Rapiscan backscatter machines. There are currently 700 body scanners at 165 airport that now use with Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) software and display the generic body outline.
The TSA first started using the controversial backscatter machines in 2008 and they received a lot of backlash from the public as the machines seemed to show nude images of people's bodies. The machines were better able to detect hidden items than traditional X-rays, but Congress voted to require all body scanners to have privacy-protecting software, forcing the TSA to get rid of or change the machines. Some believed that the machines were an invasion of privacy and they doubted that agents wouldn't be able to save the images for later use.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
