New questions raised about full-body scanners

no better than it was on 9/11 — that’s the scary thing,” he said.

Two of the $170,000 body imaging machines are in place at Los Angeles International Airport, nineteen at Chicago’s O’Hare, and four at Baltimore Washington International Airport, the TSA says. The extra staff needed to operate them eventually will cost several billion dollars, the GAO says.

The technology, although effective against certain threats, is too easily beatable, said several aviation security experts, some with ties to competing products.

“I think it is a mistake to use this as a primary screening tool,” said Rich Roth, a former Secret Service official now with Maryland-based CTI Consulting. “The things it can miss are more likely to be used as a weapon than the things it can catch.”

Art Kosatka, chief executive of Transecure, a Leesburg, Virginia, airport security consulting firm, said the machines will not detect material concealed in the groin and in body cavities. “You can get metallic items by that screening technology that you can’t get by metal detectors,” said Douglas Laird, former head of security for Northwest Airlines.

Dilanian notes that many security experts have a financial stake in the debate: Laird is now a consultant whose clients include CEIA, a metal-detector maker; and Sela consults for clients that market different security measures.

A consulting firm run by Michael Chertoff, the former DHS secretary and an advocate for the imagers, has represented vendors trying to market the technology, though it no longer does, said J. Bennet Waters, a firm member and former TSA official.

Kane, who spent twenty years in the Coast Guard before joining the TSA in 2005, says the imagers have “met our requirements,” and can detect small items hidden on the body.

In a testing center at Washington’s Reagan National Airport, he showed a reporter photos of small items that had been detected on passengers, including a one-inch-square packet of cocaine. “Not all of these were in easy-to-find places — they were artfully concealed to get past security,” he said.

The critics do not dispute that the imaging technology is superior to metal detectors at finding hidden nonmetallic objects. Some say, though, that it should be used only in conjunction with metal detectors and other technologies. “Every machine can be beaten to one degree or another,” said John Huey, who in a widely circulated blog post blasted the TSA’s decision to deploy imagers. “What you need is layers of machines.” Huey has a patent for such a multitiered security system.