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Government replaces physique scanners during some airports

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By JASON KEYSER
Associated Press

CHICAGO (AP) – The sovereign supervision is sensitively stealing full-body X-ray scanners from 7 vital airports and replacing them with a opposite form of appurtenance that produces a cartoon-like outline instead of a exposed images that have been compared to a practical frame search.

The Transportation Security Administration says it is creation a switch in record to speed adult lines during swarming airports, not to palliate newcomer remoteness concerns. But polite liberties groups wish a change signals that a apparatus will eventually go to a throw heap.

“Hopefully this represents a commencement of a phase-out of a X-ray-type scanners, that are some-more remoteness forward and continue to be surrounded by health questions,” pronounced Jay Stanley, a remoteness consultant during a American Civil Liberties Union.

The machines will not be retired. They are being changed to smaller airports while Congress presses a TSA to adopt stronger remoteness safeguards on all of a imaging equipment.

In a dual years given they initial seemed during a nation’s busiest airports, a “backscatter” indication of scanner has been a concentration of protests and lawsuits since it uses X-rays to counterpart underneath travelers’ clothing.

The machines are being pulled out of New York’s LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, Chicago’s O’Hare, Los Angeles International and Boston Logan, as good as airports in Charlotte, N.C., and Orlando, Fla.

The TSA would not criticism on either it designed to mislay machines from any other locations.

Some of a backscatter scanners have left to airports in Mesa, Ariz., Key West, Fla., and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The TSA is still determining where to send others.

The switch is being finished as a TSA is underneath domestic pressure. Legislation authorized in Feb gave a group until Jun to get absolved of a X-ray scanners or ascent them with program that produces usually a general outline of a tellurian form, not a becloud exposed image. The agency, however, has a management to extend itself extensions, and a stream deadline is now May 31.

So far, a upgrades have been finished usually to a TSA’s other form of scanner. Called millimeter-wave scanners, they resemble a vast potion phone counter and use radio frequencies instead of X-rays to detect objects secluded underneath clothing.

The indicate is processed by program instead of an airfield confidence worker. If a program identifies a intensity threat, a mannequin-like picture is presented to a user display yellow boxes over areas requiring serve inspection, by a pat-down for example.

Besides expelling remoteness concerns, a appurtenance requires fewer people to operate, takes adult reduction space in swarming confidence zones and completes a indicate in reduction than dual seconds, permitting screening lines to pierce faster.

“It’s all finished automatically to demeanour for threats, so we don’t have anybody in a behind room that has to demeanour during a imaging,” pronounced Doug McMakin, who led a group that grown a millimeter-wave record during a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

In a statement, officials pronounced speed was a reason for a switch to a millimeter-wave machines.

In further to speed and space advantages, a millimeter-wave record does not furnish a ionizing deviation that has led to reserve concerns with a X-ray machines, that compulsory passengers to mount between dual refrigerator-sized boxes.

The TSA and other experts have pronounced a volume of deviation is reduction than what passengers get on a moody itself.

A TSA orator would not contend either a change was a commencement of a phase-out for a X-ray scanners. The group pronounced in a matter that it was assured both forms of appurtenance could safeguard newcomer safety.

The supervision began deploying both forms to airports in 2010 after a foiled al-Qaida tract to explosve a U.S.-bound jet regulating explosives that can be missed by normal steel detectors.

The scanners can cost as most as $170,000 each. There are now about 800 of them during 200 U.S. airports. About two-thirds of them are a millimeter-wave machines.

The TSA has spent scarcely $8 million building a upgraded remoteness program and skeleton to spend some-more as it works to rise program for a backscatter machines, according to a Sep news by a House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation Security.

The committee’s Republican chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, pronounced a TSA needs to be some-more stirring about when it will have that ascent “rather than simply shuffling” a machines from one airfield to another.

“Travelers merit to see a petrify timeline for implementing remoteness program on all (scanning) machines and a joining from TSA to unite an eccentric research of their intensity health impact,” he said.

Aviation consultant Robert Poole of a Reason Foundation pronounced it finished clarity to switch to a millimeter-wave scanners during busier airports, observant that “the faster estimate time is a outrageous advantage.”

“But it still seems like a really bad preference to still be foisting those injured machines – or positively reduction good machines – on people in a smaller airports,” he said.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This element might not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Article source: http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/19922907/government-replaces-body-scanners-at-some-airports


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