Originally Posted by
LarryJ
You might remember that the MMW AIT scanners were originally read by an operator in a remote room instead of by the automated software. At the time, one European country (Denmark?)...
Netherlands (AMS). I saw it in use in ~Feb 2010.
... was already using the automated software and there was a good bit of criticism of the TSA for not using it as well. The software available at that time had a false-positive rate higher than the TSA would accept so they set them up with operators. Eventually, improved software lowered the false-positive rate and all MMW scanners have now been upgraded and the remote operators removed. I don't know which software was in use in the tests references by the article.
In all likelihood neither you nor I will ever know, but I would bet $4700 that the software being used by TSA today is
exactly the same software being used in AMS a few years ago when TSA claimed that the false-positive rate was too high. The hardware for detection (MMW) hasn't changed in that time, and there's only so much that software can do with the output of the hardware. It wasn't that the software improved to meet TSA's standards for false-positive (look at the reports of false-positives using ATR even now), but they were catching so much grief about the pervy booths that they had to do something.
As I say, we will probably never know, but that's my (informed) guess.