Originally Posted by WillCAD

Well, those who want the AIT scanners will reply with something like this:
But, but, but, if they did that there'd be 9/11's every day! Planes would be diving out of the sky at every Prime Target in the country, including all the Super Targets and Walmart SuperCenters! There are fourteen billion terrorists in the world and every single one of them is actively planning a major attack on the US aviation industry! Think of the children! I'd rather have my teenage daughter viewed nude and strip-searched and groped than explode in mid-air!If it saves even ONE life, isn't it worth ANY price, no matter how heinous!?

Or, you know, words to that effect.

My problems with the AIT have always been three-fold:
1) The original versions of the AIT scanners created an actual image of the body, sans-clothing, to be viewed by a live human TSO in a remote location, out of sight of the human being they were ogling (in what we cynically referred to as the "perv box").
2) The original version of the AIT scanners came in two flavors - millimeter wave (MMW), which uses non-ionizing microwaves as a scanning medium, and backscatter x-ray (BSX), which uses carcinogenic ionizing x-ray radiation as a scanning medium.
3) More recent versions of the AIT scanners falsely alarm at a rate that seems to me to be many times higher than they genuinely alarm on prohibited items.

* Issue 1 has been eliminated by updated Automated Target Recognition (ATR) software.
* Issue 2 has been eliminated by removing and banning use of the BSX scanners.
* Issue 3 continues to be a problem, and probably will for many years, until the software becomes sophisticated enough to differentiate between sweat, thick clothing, forgotten IDs in pockets, folds of flesh, and actual threat items.

This change is related to Issue 3, because the ATR software wasn't, until now, sophisticated enough to accommodate different physical configurations on the suspect, er, travelers being scanned without manual input from the operating TSO. This change shows that the software continues to be improved. Hopefully this will mean fewer false alarms across the board, and not just for travelers whose appearance is misinterpreted by TSOs at the checkpoint.