Bye Bye to Near Naked Body Images from TSA Full Body Scanners!

If you had privacy concerns about being scanned by the TSA full body scanners at airports across the country producing near-naked body images of travelers, you will be happy to know that by June 1, 2013, they will be removed from airports across the country and “stockpiled” in a TSA warehouse.

The scanned images these “backscatter” type scanners produced was so “anatomically correct” that TSA required the viewing officer to screen the images from a separate room and radio the results to the agent at the scanner, never seeing the person’s face who was being scanned.

TSA originally planned to warehouse these machines, produced by Rapiscan Systems, until Rapiscan developed replacement software for them so the images would resemble stick figures, alleviating privacy concerns and public outcry. But Rapiscan failed to produce, so as of early January, TSA terminated their contract with Rapiscan.

This decision means the permanent removal of 174 of these body scanners, in use in 30 airports across the country, which the TSA says will all be removed by June 1 of this year.

This does NOT mean that you will not have to go through full body scanners in airports in the future. The “pulled scanners” will be replaced with “millimeter wave” scanners which produce stick figure like images. The majority of full body scanners in airports across the country today are of this type, so these will not be affected.