TSA to deploy remote detection machines at airports

Published 8 October 2008

Terrorists may not only blow up a plane, but also explode a bomb in an airport lounge or near a crowded ticket counter; TSA tests machines that can detect explosives at a distance

We should assume that terrorists are going to change their methods as they adopt to security measures taken in response to earlier attacks. This is the assumption of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) which will soon begin to check passengers for bombs at the airport entrance. USA Today’s Thomas Frank writes that the agency fears that terrorists would blow themselves up in crowded lounges or near ticket counters, so it has decided to test a way to scan people as they walk through terminals. Detection devices recently tested at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and Denver International Airport could lead to more airports to get the technology.

It works this way: A scanner is mounted on a tripod at a busy part of an airport terminal, pointing at people thirty feet away. The $210,000 machine, which looks like a spotlight, reads the energy emitted from a human body. It looks for “cold” spots where dense objects — such as bombs — block energy. When the scanner sounds an alarm, a screener can call police to handle anyone who seems dangerous.

Frank writes that the TSA effort comes amid concern about terrorists targeting airports. Two weeks ago Pakistan there was a bomb threat to the airport at Pakistan’s capital, and in July 2007 terrorists drove an SUV into the Glasgow Airport in Scotland, igniting a blaze that killed no one. “As you close up holes (on airplanes), terrorists have to find other ways to set something off,” aviation-security consultant Rich Roth said. An airport attack “is what everybody’s afraid of, and it’s a valid fear.”

Virginia-based QinetiQ North America, which manufactures the scanner, says it  does not produce still images of passengers and poses no health risk because it does not emit energy such as X-rays.

Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) told Frank that the machines will subject innocent people to extra scrutiny by generating false alarms for things such as back braces. Meanwhile, he said, terrorists will evade scrutiny by simply avoiding the scanners, which sit openly in terminals. “These only create the illusion of security,” Steinhardt said. Wally Miller, QinetiQ’s head of transportation security, admitted that a passenger wearing a body brace under a shirt might set off the alarm.