We have spent more than $2 billion installing a technology to identify “anomalies” that we cannot practically evaluate for the risk they pose. It was this inability to clear many of the false positives identified by AITs that led to the TSA’s disastrous policy begun last October of intimate, intrusive searches. The problem is that despite their intimacy, the searches did nothing to help the agent determine whether the “anomaly” was a real risk or just another false positive.

This is especially clear in the case of people with medical devices or prosthetics. As a diabetic on an insulin pump—a device the size of a pager strapped to my waist that provides life-sustaining insulin—under the TSA’s October policy, an agent would search me head to toe, including a careful pat-down of my genitals—as if somehow my genitals have become suspicious because I use an insulin pump. At the end of the search, however, the agent has no better idea than he did at the beginning whether the pump is loaded with insulin or high-tech explosives.

After two months of this policy, the TSA shifted ground and determined that insulin pumps would not require a full body search, but instead would be swabbed and the swab tested for explosive residue. A colleague of mine who works for the federal government and is also a diabetic described the indignity of recently having a TSA agent at Dulles International Airport reach inside her underwear with the swab. To what end? Are insulin pump users more likely than other travelers to secret explosives on their bodies? And what happened to the much-vaunted AIT machines that were supposed to detect the presence of such explosives? Why are we now swabbing inside travelers’ underwear as well as using AITs to peer inside, especially when there is no sign of any “anomaly” from either technique?

I have found it easier and far less intrusive to simply remove my insulin pump before being required to undergo AIT screening. (I don’t remove it before passing through a metal detector because it doesn’t trigger any alarm.) I am fortunate to have this option; most travelers with medical devices or prosthetics aren’t so lucky. But I am still left with the tiny plastic cannula in my abdomen to which the pump connects. The AIT sometimes—interestingly, not consistently—identifies this as an “anomaly.” When it does, a TSA agent pats me down, feels the sensor, and says “what is this?” I say “an insulin cannula” and the agent invariably politely waives me through. The agent has no idea, no verification, and no certainty what is actually taped to my stomach. I am “cleared” not because the agent has determined that the plastic tube poses no danger, but because there is no way a TSA agent can make any further determination.

Many travelers suffer far greater indignities due to physical searches, triggered by AIT “anomaly” detection, that reveal nothing about whether the “anomaly” poses a threat. For example, after agents finish inspecting the breasts of a woman with an implant, they have no better idea whether the implant is filled with liquid explosives or silicone. The same is true with prosthetic limbs, urostomy bags, and most other medical appliances.

This type of response to having the AIT identify something as an “anomaly” is the very definition of “security theater”—it looks like the agency is doing something, but it accomplishes nothing. The same is true with many, perhaps most, of the searches that are triggered by AIT “anomalies.” A rational person might question whether it is worth the money we are spending to identify “anomalies” if the vast majority of them (indeed, perhaps all of them) are false positives, and we lack the practical ability to follow up on many of them in any event. This is the height of ineffectiveness.