Airport Body Scanners Can Store Your Naked Image, After All

[Better Believe It]

Airport Body Scanners Can Store Your Naked Image, After All
By Tom Scocca
August 5, 2010

When the Transportation Security Administration started using body scanners that could see through people's clothes, it assured the public that—unlike nearly every other kind of electronic-image capturing device ever invented—the machines were incapable of storing or transmitting the images they captured. The scanners would inspect your naked body image for security purposes, then forget they ever saw you.

Shockingly, that turns out to have been false:

The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

This follows an earlier disclosure by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for "testing, training, and evaluation purposes."

But for the airport machines, those image-handling capabilities—"test mode"—are never, ever activated. According to the TSA.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/scocca/archive/2010/08/05/airport-body-scanners-can-store-your-naked-image-after-all.aspx

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Somehow, I'm not surprised.

Although if anybody wants to keep an image of me in my birthday suit, I would seriously question their aesthetic sensibilities, if not their sanity.

[rustydog]

26. Come on..If they actually caught explosives on someone,

they would have to keep the x-ray as evidence for the trial. In order to do that, they had to have storage capacity at the very beginning!

[katandmoon]

2. Fucking liars

[seabeyond]

3. that bottom lines it. fucking liars. yup. and some of us even knew they were fucking lying

and continually got our ass jumped.

fucking liars

[katandmoon]

9. Exactly. No way they weren't and aren't storing images with names on them.

And no way are they storing them securely.

[gratuitous]

4. "Shockingly"

I must assume that the writer of this story was either (a) being sarcastic; or (2) four years old. Because everyone over the age of four, and even some of the brighter four-year-olds of my acquaintance knew for a fact that these images were going to be savable, or storable, and provide an ever-expanding gallery of wank material for the TSA operator.

[liberal N proud]

5. Anyone who believed they couldn't was gullible

[HipChick]

6. So what? Can they use it to identify me?

No..

I see more scantily dressed people at the airport everyday

[customerserviceguy]

7. I'd rather just strip down naked and walk through their phony 'security'

than to be treated like a terrorist in my own country. The last time I flew out of Portland, OR, a month ago, my Snoqualmie Falls Pancake and Waffle Mix package got treated like it was full of anthrax. And some jerkoff in the TSA baggage-checking area unwrapped and rewrapped each of the five plastic grocery bags I put around all eleven bottles of Northwest ales that I shipped back home in the check in luggage.

I guess these Keystone Kops can't catch any real terrorists, so they get their jollies by treating the rest of us like we were Osama bin Laden.

[katandmoon]

8. My guess is they most certainly can.

[Better Believe It]

11. Yes. They can with a complete body scan.

[HipChick]

21. Pray tell how? Unless they add a RFID chip to the scanner to read your DL or passport

as you go through?..I fly weekly, and I'd bet the people making the most noise hardly fly at all..

[stevedeshazer]

10. Well, they're going to be disappointed.

My nakedness ain't gonna be all that titillating.

[notesdev]

12. At least we can rely on the radiation being harmless

... right?

[JCMach1]

13. They were testing these in the Tampa Aiport and I had to go through one this week...

[iris27]

14. Almost walked into one of these in McCarran (Vegas) without even realizing that's

what it was. They had it set up on the direct-forward path from the x-ray conveyor belt, with the normal metal detector off to the side, and were alternately waving people through both like it was no big thing. I stepped back one place in line to make sure I'd go through the metal detector.

Weren't these originally supposed to be used on secondary screenings only - with the choice to opt-out in favor of a pat-down or strip search if you wanted? Hooray for unnecessary radiation exposure!

I don't even want to think of the implications that widespread use of these scanners will have for transgender people who are traveling...anyone order a bonus side of harrassment?

[Alameda]

16. how about intersex people?

[Q3JR4]

15. While I realize this post has privacy concerns that I myself

have voiced on more than one occasion I can't help but think that whomever saves a picture of my nude body deserves what they get.

Q3JR4.

[hobbit709]

17. "test mode"—are never, ever activated."

I got a bridge for you and I'll even throw in a couple of monuments.

[MineralMan]

18. I'm just incensed about this. I don't want anyone looking for years

at my man boobs and sagging buttocks. I just know that they'll post the nude photos of me all over the internets and people will be leering at me. Why didn't they have these things when I was in my 30s? That's what I want to know.

Incensed, I tell you!

[pipi_k]

19. It'll never happen...

because I don't fly (and never will), but if I did, I would probably have some fun with them and their scanners by supergluing a bunch of little button batteries on my ass in the shape of a happy face or something.


I mean, if they'd be saving the image anyway, I might as well give them something worthy of framing and displaying over the fireplace.

[treestar]

20. I feel sorry for whoever has to look at the images.

:rofl:

[maryf]

22. well I hope they provide barf bags with any saved images of me...

good(?) to know, thanks! on edit: k&r

[RB TexLa]

23. And I'm supposed to care why?

[dem mba]

25. i've got a 3 year old nephew

i'd prefer it if a scanned image of his naked body isn't passed around to kidde porn sites because some TSA hack wanted to make a few extra bucks on the side. I'd prefer it if a pic of my girlfriend isn't passed around either.

Are those good reasons to care?

[dem mba]

24. they underestimated the power of the penis

where there is a will, the willie finds a way. It's like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.

A man's desire to check out naked chicks, even in crappy low res magneto vision, will overpower any safeguards for a passengers' privacy or even anonymity. This process was utterly doomed to be corrupted and should not shock anyone that it was. It is JUST like that case where the school district's laptops snapped pics of unsuspecting teenagers.

Where there is temptation to exploit, you need not wait long to find the exploitation. Perhaps these saved images have not made it to the Internet, yet, but believe me, they will. If this program continues, it is an inevitability that all of us, minors too, could find that images of their naked bodies are being passed around the internet and being used on sex sites.