Coming to an Airport Near You: the Virtual Strip Search

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703562404575067980037187678.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

By MARK SCHOOFS

Get ready to be virtually strip-searched.

Whole-body scanners are rapidly being equipped with new privacy measures that make their use at security checkpoints very likely in airports. Already, the Transportation Security Administration has moved them out of pilot testing and into use at 19 airports around the country, and by May Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport plans to use them as primary screening for every passenger headed to the U.S., according to Ron Louwerse, the airport's director of security.

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American Science and Engineering, Inc.

Evolution of privacy in body scanners: The raw image (above left); the same men rendered less explicitly by software 'privacy algorithms' (top right); and the red-and-yellow pinpoints the potential threat (below).

L-3 Security and Detection Systems

Whole-body imaging, often called "the virtual strip search," has been available since at least 1993, but authorities didn't use the technology largely because it produced explicit images.

Now, successive generations of images that are ever less anatomically detailed show why the technology—already installed in courthouses, diamond mines, and military installations in Iraq and Afghanistan—may well become as routine as metal detectors.

But be prepared: You must take everything out of your pockets, not just metal objects like keys and coins.

The scanners in Amsterdam are made by L-3 Security and Detection Systems, a division of L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., an aerospace and defense company based in New York. If they detect nothing, they green-light the passenger through, much as metal detectors do. If the scanners detect a potential weapon, no one sees an image of that passenger. Instead, whether the passenger is male or female, fat or thin, the security officers see the same generic Gumby-like figure with the location of the potential threat indicated by a red-and-yellow square—for example, on the right thigh.

Yet there may be a tradeoff between modesty and security, says Susan Hallowell, head of the Department of Homeland Security lab that tests screening devices. "If you're hiding detailed genitalia, you may hide other things," she says, declining to discuss any particular system for security reasons. She says that all systems must meet the TSA's standards before being used.

If anyone knows about that tradeoff, it's Dr. Hallowell. Back in 2002, she invited the press to her lab and used herself to demonstrate the power of an early generation whole-body scanner. The image looked like a photographic negative, but it clearly revealed the weapons she was carrying—and her naked body.

One of the journalists photographed her image "without my permission or knowledge," she says. It hit the wires and then the Internet, sparking insulting emails. "Hussy is not the word, but something like that," she says.

The roll-out of the technology was stalled, largely due to concerns about explicit images. Then, in August 2004, two Chechen women armed with bombs on their bodies blew up separate Russian jetliners in midair, alarming the TSA and giving fresh impetus to whole-body imaging.

Thomas Blank was then overseeing screening technology deployed at American airports. He and others urged industry to develop "privacy algorithms," software that makes images less anatomically detailed. Now vice chairman of the Washington-based lobbying firm Wexler & Walker, whose clients include the body-scanner manufacturer American Science & Engineering Inc., Mr. Blank says the explicit nature of the early images would have made it difficult to get all the necessary approvals from federal bureaucracies.

Today, when those algorithms are activated, some machines show a body outline that looks like a charcoal sketch, while others show an image that looks like an android. Both of those are seen by a remote operator who cannot see the actual passenger.

The L-3 machines, by contrast, show an entirely generic figure. The cost of developing such software has run "well into the seven figures," says Joe Reiss, vice president of marketing at American Science and Engineering.

Write to Mark Schoofs at mark.schoofs@wsj.com

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