TSA says an airport full-body scanner must add a filter to protect travelers' privacy

This image shows how the Thruvision scanner can scan multiple travelers at an airport to help speed up the security checkpoints. The Transportation Security Administration says the Thruvision scanner needs "enhanced privacy software." (Hero Images Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo)

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tsa-body-scanner-20190429-story.html

By HUGO MARTIN

A full-body scanner that the Transportation Security Administration hopes can speed up airport security checkpoints must go back to the drawing board for software to protect the privacy of travelers being scanned.

The scanner, built by British firm Thruvision, was promoted as being able to simultaneously screen multiple airport passengers from a distance of up to 25 feet away. The TSA began trying out the device last year at an Arlington, Va., testing facility before planning to use it on a trial basis at U.S. airports.

But now the federal agency is requiring the scanner to add a “privacy filter” before the TSA can test the scanner “in a live environment,” according to a TSA document.

The March 26 document was posted on a public website, but many details were redacted, including the name of the manufacturer and the cost of adding the privacy filter.

In a statement, Thruvision confirmed that the TSA document referred to the Thruvision scanner, which is currently being used at some Los Angeles subway and light-rail stations.

TSA and Thruvision said the software is being added to comply with a federal law passed in the wake of a 2013 controversy involving body scanners that may have shown too much.

The scanner doesn’t violate travelers’ privacy or show details of a person’s anatomy, Thruvision Americas Vice President Kevin Gramer said.

Images provided by Thruvision show that the scanner creates a fuzzy, green image depicting a traveler’s body with a dark outline of potential weapons or explosives that are hidden under their clothes.

“A piece of narrowly drawn legislation from several years ago created a requirement that all people-screening technologies used at U.S. airport checkpoints have a privacy filter regardless of the image displayed,” Gramer said in a statement. “Thruvision screening equipment has been deployed internationally for years because of the tremendous privacy and safety benefit of its passive terahertz technology and it is a candidate for use at U.S. airports specifically because of those benefits.”

In 2013, the TSA removed about 200 full-body scanners after protests because the scanners used low levels of radiation to create what resembles a nude image of screened passengers. Critics called the device the “nudie scanner” before the TSA ended its contract with the manufacturer.

Three years later, Congress adopted legislation requiring that all full-body scanners used at U.S. airports include privacy software filters that keep the devices from showing details of a traveler’s body on the screens monitored by the TSA.

The full-body scanners used at the nation’s airport create a generic human avatar of each traveler that appears on TSA screens. Weapons or explosives hidden under the traveler’s clothes are shown as yellow squares on the screen.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Los Angeles began using Thruvision scanners last year. An MTA spokesman said the transportation agency bought a handful of Thruvision devices but did not add privacy software because the images created by the device don’t show details of a commuter’s anatomy but instead depict each person as a “green blob.”

A full-body scanner with privacy software installed is used at Ontario International Airport. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

The Thruvision scanner is one of several new technologies being tested under the TSA’s “Innovation Task Force” as part of an effort to improve screening and speed up the queues at airport security checkpoints.

The task force’s efforts included the 2016 launch of a new conveyor belt system to move luggage and passengers through a security checkpoint faster.

Innovation lanes, now used at several terminals at Los Angeles International Airport, are designed to move travelers and carry-on bags through the security checkpoint faster (Hugo Martin / Los Angeles Times)

Under the full-body scanning program, the TSA purchased several Thruvision devices to begin testing in November 2018.

The existing full-body scanners used at U.S. airports bounce millimeter waves off passengers to spot objects hidden under their clothes. But Gramer said the Thruvision device uses a passive terahertz technology that reads the energy emitted by a person, similar to thermal imaging used in night-vision goggles.

Thruvision has promoted its scanning devices as being able to screen up to 2,000 people in an hour and detect a concealed weapon at a distance of up to 25 feet.

The screening device was used in 2017 to scan people attending a tribute concert organized by U.S. singer Ariana Grande after her May 22, 2017, concert in Manchester, England, ended in a suicide bombing that killed 23 people and wounded 139 others.

Los Angeles to use body scanners on metro riders

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/08/20/los-angeles-to-use-body-scanners-on-metro-riders/

by Lisa Vaas

Los Angeles has become the first US city to buy body scanners to screen metro riders, in an effort to catch suicide bombers or other security threats.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles Metro and the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) issued a joint press release about the technology, which the agencies say “will help detect weapon and explosive device security threats on the county’s transit system.”

An LA Metro spokesman told NPR that the transit system has ordered several units, costing about $100,000 each. The portable body scanners are Thruvision TAC-TS4 portable terahertz millimeter wave passenger screening devices: devices that can detect both metallic and non-metallic objects, including concealed improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and other weapons intended to cause mass casualties.

The scanners are similar to those used at airports, but they don’t release radiation. Rather, they detect radiation – as in, body heat. When objects are concealed, the radiation waves are blocked. The Thruvision scanners detect such blockage and render it as either a black spot on the body or in a color overlay.

Those visual indicators are rendered on top of a generic avatar: one that doesn’t display anatomical details and hence doesn’t make the process feel like people are being ogled via x-rays that see through their clothes.

The Thruvision scanners also differ from airport scanners in that passengers don’t need to line up to pass through one by one. Metro passengers can just walk through stations the same way they always do.

Polly Hanson, the director of security and emergency management at the American Public Transportation Association, told NPR that passive scanners like these are better suited for metro systems than those used at airports, not just because they can more easily handle the sheer volume of mass transit riders, but also because it means the system can move far faster:

At an airport, you’re funneled through one specific location. Mass transit, there are multiple fare gates [and] some systems are barrierless… it just currently doesn’t lend itself to the kind of security that’s in an airport.

It’s not clear when the devices will be put into use. However, when they do go into general use, they won’t be used on every rider on any given day. Rather, LA Metro will place the new devices at only a few locations in the system. But given that they’re portable, they can be moved around, either randomly or to respond to specific concerns.

Full-body scan fail: The TSA opts out of opt-outs

By Ned Levi

http://elliott.org/blog/full-body-scan-fail-the-tsa-opts-out-of-opt-outs/

Until last week, air travelers could opt out of a full-body scan at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport screening areas, instead choosing an enhanced pat-down.

But on Dec. 18, the agency changed its rules, allowing screeners to refuse passengers the option of opting out.

Specifically, TSA said it was “updating” its Privacy Impact Assessment to reflect a change to the operating protocol regarding the ability of individuals to opt out of the scans. “While passengers may generally decline AIT screening in favor of physical screening, TSA may direct mandatory AIT screening for some passengers,” it said.

When TSA was formed, passengers were screened with magnetometers. Considering them insufficient, TSA decided to use Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) scanners, which at first were based on backscatter X-ray technology. Eventually, the public and Congressional outrage about the insurmountable privacy and health issues of the X-ray-based scanners caused them to be removed from U.S. airports by the summer of 2013.

In their place, TSA installed Millimeter Wave (MMW)-based full-body scanners, in airports across the U.S. They utilize non-ionizing, terahertz radiation, a technology thought to be safer than the backscatter machines.

Soon after their installation, it was uncovered that the new scanners had privacy issues similar to those of the old X-ray scanners. In addition, despite using non-ionizing radiation, there were serious questions about the MMW scanner’s safety.

The TSA worked to address the privacy issues by requiring major changes in the scanners’ software. Along with the implementation of MMW scanner changes to address passenger privacy concerns, the agency instituted a “Privacy Impact Assessment” for TSA’s AIT scanners.

On Dec. 18, they released their report. In its seven pages, they detail three key assessments made in the evaluation of the updated system.

1. Scanner images of passengers reviewed by TSA screeners no longer show any personal body attributes of passengers. Each passenger’s image in the scanner monitor is generic and genderless.

2. AIT scanners don’t generate underlying images of passengers scanned.

3. AIT scanners no longer have the ability to store images for later review.

With the privacy issues solved, DHS clearly believes there are no more objectionable issues with the MMW-based full-body scanners, so they should be free to require that all passengers be scanned in them, at their absolute discretion.

They are incorrect.

There are potential serious health and safety concerns with full-body scanners using terahertz radiation. In fact, these concerns are the reason I’ve been opting out of these scanners and getting an enhanced pat-down before my flights.

There is some evidence that terahertz radiation can be unsafe, but current test results are mixed. Boian Alexandrov, with the help of his colleagues at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, studied the effects of terahertz radiation and reported significant genetic damage was possible. Elsewhere, some scientists have reported no damage.

The MIT Technology Review reports that Alexandrov created a model to investigate how terahertz radiation interacts with DNA. Alexandrov and colleagues reported that while the forces involved are tiny, their effects allow terahertz waves to “unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication.”

While terahertz waves are part of our environment, TSA barrages air travelers with these waves in closed booths with their full-body scanners. That TSA is utilizing these machines, despite a chance they can damage human DNA, is disturbing.

The problem with Dr. Alexandrov’s study of terahertz radiation and safety is we don’t know if its implications are fully applicable to air traveler security scanning, as to date there have been no long-term, third party safety tests of the scanners or their terahertz radiation by physicians and scientists. I’m unaware of any clinical trials of the effects of multiple exposures to terahertz waves, accumulated over a long period of time.

Additionally, the Food and Drug Administration, from what I can determine, has never granted approval for any full body scanner to be employed by TSA, even though they clearly qualify as medical devices, despite being purposed for non-medical use.

It’s clear to me, the new protocol adopted by the government, which permits TSA to refuse to allow air travelers to opt out of MMW full body scans, is a mistake which may be putting U.S. air travelers at serious risk.

Advanced Photonix makes advances with it's Terahertz applications the T-Gauge, F-35 product line, and moves it's anomaly detection system into non-airport market

My Note: On November 13th, 2012 Advanced Photonix held a conference call for listeners.
Here are some of the highlights:
The company announced that a record number of it's T-Gauge systems would be shipped in the 3rd Quarter for factory installation. COO Rob Risser indicated that API is beginning to get market traction in the industrial sensing sector with the early adopters of THz based sensing technology finding multiple uses for the T-Gauge. The company anticipates a steady growth of sales in the second half of the year.

CEO Rick Kurtz, indicated that the company is completing several F-35 contracts, (which appears to coincide with recent press about the delivery of the first F-35's to the Marines. http://www.sacbee.com/2012/11/20/5001044/lockheed-martin-delivers-three.html 
Rick also indicated that the goal is to fully commercialize the products which have been developed for use by API in the F-35 program for the companies domestic and international partners. 

Rob indicated that the companies anomaly detection system which it calls the Saf-T-Chek, has been evaluated by both the TSA, and In-Q-Tel, and was "well received". This month, the company is finalizing additional software improvements to the automated algorithm system, contained in the product, and anticipates that it will then be eligible to be placed on the intermodal transportation list, for use of the Saf-T-Chek, for a number of potential non-airport applications. It was interesting to hear that the company anticipates that FEMA will fund the development of this use. 

Use of the Saf-T-Chek, will requires a more rigorous qualification process before the product can be placed on the airport qualified equipment list, and is anticipated to be more than a year away. 

Overall, Rob expressed that the companies THz applications will be lower cost, and that the list of qualifed Value added resellers of the products continues to grow domestically and internationally, with an increasing sophistication in understanding how the companies THz applications are useful in  filling  a number of niche applications and markets.
 These of course, are my interpretations of what I heard listening to the conference call. Please listen for yourselves, to formulate your own understanding.