Boggie Dog

Does the manufacturer of your pacemaker list any type of screening devices to avoid?

FliesWay2Much

No, actually. They even say that it's "MRI friendly". Film at 11....

Boggie Dog

Good, leaves all options open.

gsoltso

I am glad you are getting to travel however you do it. The world is an interesting place, and I hope people get the chance to see the cool things that are out there.

The MMW AIT can detect anomalies on the body, lending us the chance to find the largest threat challenge we face, IEDs. Guns on a plane (from TSAs perspective) = bad. Knives on a plane (again, from TSAs perspective) = bad. IEDs = Holy crap bad. Guns have the ability to damage or hurt numerous passengers at a time. Knives have a lesser ability to hurt passengers. IEDs have the ability to create a catastophic failure of the airframe, meaning the plane is downed, and the debris from it can do damage on the ground, resulting on hundreds, to possibly thousands (that is stretching, but it is in the realm of possibility) dead. Making IEDs the most important type of alarm we are interested in finding. The AIT does the best job of finding things like that on the person.

I understand the frustration with the alarms that are not on a "threat" item.

Boggie Dog

I would agree that an airborne IED would make for a very bad day. The problem, to the best of my knowledge, is that TSA has never found one. With roughly 2.5 million air travelers per day ( U.S. Airport Traffic Returns to Pre-Pandemic Levels ) that suggests the number of IED's, at least in the U.S., in the wild are near nil. That further suggests that the public, through taxes and fees, are footing the bill for a "security service" run amok.

The functionality of Whole Body scanners is a seperate issue but one that needs more attention. While I realize that there is disagreement I maintain that an alarm on anything that is not prohibited is a False Alarm. False alarms shift attention away from identifying threat items. The number of screeners at a checkpoint can only pat down so many people per day. Pat downs, full or partial, on bare skin or other non-threat items waste available resources increasing the number of people needed to operate a checkpoint which increases cost.

WillCAD

AIT does not do "the best job of finding things like that on a person." In fact, it does the worst job, because it almost never detects those things.

Nearly every alarm from the AIT is a non-threat item. The frustration with current AIT tech is not that it sometimes false alarms, it's that it almost always false alarms. If one out of every one hundred alarms was false, we'd be happy. If even one out of every ten alarms was false, we'd probably be a lot less unhappy than we are. But if 99 out of 100 alarms are false, meaning that 99 people out of every 100 who are alarmed get felt up, violated, and humiliated needlessly, nobody is going to be happy except the people who want as many needless, invasive pat-downs as they can get to keep up the security theater that justifies the agency's bloated budget in the eyes of the frightened "anything for security" portion of the American public.

AIT does not detect guns, knives, or IEDs. It detects what you, and the machine's now-rich manufacturers, term "anomalies", which in simpler terms are things that do not conform to the machine's pre-programmed parameters of what is "nominal" on a human body.

Those parameters of what constitute "nominal" are flawed and far too narrow, causing the machine to alarm almost entirely on wholly innocuous, non-threatening things - folds of flesh on overweight people, extra-thick clothing items, and sweat. The fact that guns, knives, and IED can also cause alarms is irrelevant, because they almost never do so. Non-threats cause most of the alarms. And as others have said above, an alarm caused by a non-threat is, by definition, a false alarm. Meaning that the overwhelming majority of AIT alarms are false alarms.

Not some. Not many. Not even a lot. ALMOST ALL.

Prove me wrong. Tell me two simple numbers: The average number of AIT alarms per day nationwide, and the average number of legitimate threat items (guns, knives, or IEDs) detected by these alarms.

You can't, because TSA not only considers that metric classified, but they literally don't even monitor that metric (which is typical of TSA's paranoid and contradictory nature). "We don't monitor that, but if we did, it would be a secret, because of secret reasons." OIG conducted a study in 2020 that determined that TSA does not monitor the performance of deployed AIT equipment at all. They monitor its utikliation, i.e. how many pax are screened vs. how many transit the c/p, but they don't monitor its effectiveness, i.e. how many threat items are detected vs. how many alarms are sounded.
https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/defaul...0-33-May20.pdf

Why wouldn't TSA monitor the effectiveness of one of its most expensive pieces of equipment? Simple - they know that the stats would embarrass the agency with proof that this equipment in its current implementation is worse than useless, it's actually detrimental to the agency's overall performance, sucking away valuable person-hours on millions of fruitless and unnecessary pat downs every year.

OP's experience - two false alarms in one week - bears that out, as does my own personal experience, with every AIT alarm and pat-down I've ever experienced since the machines were deployed being completely false, and as does the experience of pretty much everyone on FlyerTalk. I say 'pretty much' because I don't recall ever hearing an FTer post about causing an AIT alarm and realizing that they're carrying an actual threat item on their person, but I can't say with one hundred percent certainty that it's never happened, since people do so often forget about things like sharps and firearms until they're discovered at the c/p.

I have no 4th Amendment objection to the current AIT concept as part of a warrantless, suspicionless administrative screening. It's a scanner that does not produce a nude image of a person, thus is not more invasive or intrusive than necessary to detect threat items. However, its current configuration is so incredibly flawed that it is triggering millions of needlessly intrusive and invasive hand searches on innocent travelers per year, and that I do object to. The scanners just aren't smart enough to detect a threat item, they're a blunt tool that almost exclusively detects non-threat items, causing needless violations of millions of people.

Loren Pechtel

Except it's already been shown that it shouldn't be able to detect a bomb that is sufficiently feathered against the body. And it's been demonstrated that it can't detect metal beside the body.