Originally Posted by
Bart
First of all, the thread title is misleading. These are expensive machines and will not replace WTMDs across the board. Even at airports where they're used, everything I've read says that passengers will have a choice to pass through one of these body scanners or a regular WTMD. And the multiple-pass policy for the WTMD will still remain: you can try again if you continue to alarm the WTMD, which reduces the likelihood of being patted down as the result of a metal detector alarm.
Bart, I know you have posted many thoughtful and helpful items in this forum in the past, and I appreciate that you are trying to help clarify the issues here. This is not an attack on you, simply a statement of why some of us are concerned about the use of the mmw scanner. I welcome your participation.
Please read the article posted in the first post of this thread. Among other things, it says,
... Robin Kane, the [TSA]'s acting chief technology officer, said the initial results from tests at some checkpoints at 19 airports in the United States had been so good that the idea of using the machines as the standard checkpoint detectors made sense.
The plan now is that all passengers will "go through the whole-body imager instead of the walk-through metal detector," he said.
Assuming tests continue to be positive, the machines will eventually be used at most domestic airports.
The discussion on this thread is not based on some paranoid delusion; it is based on a statement from the TSA that the mmw scanner will be used
instead of the WTMD. While the
current policy is that the mmw scanner is optional, your own agency is discussing making it mandatory at
most airports.
If Robin Kane is not with the TSA, if he has been cruelly mis-quoted (it happens), or if this is just a giant media beat-up, we'd love to hear from TSA that this is all wrong. Until then, we can only assume that this is TSA's official word.
On the issue of this technology being developed in response to customer feedback about pat-downs, that may be the official TSA line but it's just not true. I know people who know people in this area. Researchers were working on this technology before 9/11, based on concerns about someone bringing a ceramic knife or gun through a checkpoint where it wouldn't alarm the WTMD. After 9/11, these researchers approached governments for funding, and the work was fast-tracked, even before the early protests about the initial pat-down process.