Originally Posted by janetdoe

Most of us here will thank you for taking a stand against the TSA's ridiculous 'security' practices if you do choose to opt out.

The 'edges' or 'anomalies' or 'patterns' they are looking for will be larger than one pixel. The pixels MUST be analyzed as a 2-D array, where each pixel is examined in the context of the eight surrounding pixels. And a 2-D array of pixels IS a digital image. By definition.

C) I understand you want to believe that the government is somehow trying to stick with the letter of the law through careful obfuscations, and your theory about raw data would mean that they are technically not lying. But as someone who has been on technical engineering and software projects, I think you're way off base.

There is no engineering contractor in the world, who, when faced with the problem of adding ATR to current MMW systems, would choose to redesign the fundamentals of the system, rather than slap a standard image analysis package on the current system, then add a step at the end to project the results onto a stick figure.

Further, the TSA would never even think to ask for a design that would cost 10 - 100x more, simply because they were worried about whether analysis was performed on a digital image versus raw data. Why go to all that trouble, when they regularly lie / obscure much less pedantic distinctions?