AS&E gets TSA go-ahead for a modified Z Backscatter screening system

Published 5 December 2006

Privacy issues delayed roll-out; an algorithm brushes away passengers’ most intimate secrets, and the video is immediately erased after processing; to ease embarassment concerns, monitoring will be done out of sight of the passengers

Billerica, Massachusetts’s hometown favorite, American Science and Engineering, will finally get a chance to bare its Z Backscatter technology in America’s airports. Roll-out of the the SmartCheck Personnel Screening System had been delayed because — and we know this sounds funny — it was just too good at examining passengers. The SmartCheck, critics said, was a real-life version of the X-ray glasses that teenage boys used to buy hopefully from the back of comic books: guns, knives, circumcisions, all were equally detectable, and so AS&E was sent back to the drawing board to sort out the privacy issues.

Now it seems the company has succeeded, and the Transportation Security Administration has chosen Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona to test AS&E’s claims. The revised SmartCheck system, AS&E has explained, employs a software algorithm to generate a privacy-filtered image — that is to say, breasts and genital areas are automatically shaded so as to leave something to the imagination. To ease passenger embarassment, the security officer viewing the image will sit in a remote area, making it impossible for him to connect an indiscreet image with any particular person; and for added privacy, the system is not capable of storing, exporting, or transmitting images. All images are automatically deleted from the system immediately after they are reviewed.

-read more in this news release; and see TSA Office of Privacy and Compliance’s Web site