Are Full Body Scanners the Right Solution?

This post is not a rant against the full body scanners and how they violate our privacy. It is also not a post about the safety of the full body scanner. There are plenty of posts like that for you if that’s what you are looking for. But this is a post that questions if the full body scanner is solving the problem that the TSA needs to solve.

I myself have been through a full body scanner and likely will go through one again in the future. But why?

There are two things we need to examine to determine if the full body scanners that are causing great controversy are the solution we need. First, what is the problem they are trying to solve? Second, is this the right solution to that problem?

I first wrote about full body scanners on the Amateur Traveler blog in a news post in October of 2009. The story read:

A human X-ray machine which produces “naked” images of passengers is being trialled at Manchester Airport. The scanner can spot any hidden weapons or explosives but also shows up breast inserts, false limbs, piercings, and an outline of people’s genitals.

The real drive towards full body scanners came with the infamous underwear bomber last Christmas. Someone slipped onto a plane with explosives in his shorts that, except for a bad triggering device, would have blown up. Explosives don’t show up when you walk through a magnetometer or metal detector so we know that the metal detector is the wrong solution for this particular new problem.

Different solutions have been bandied about:

Strip searches / Body searches / pat downs – Ignoring for a moment that people don’t like to be patted down, a pat down is probably better to find a knife or a gun after you set off the metal detector than it is to find something that might blow up. Pat downs might have found the underwear bomber but would not have worked to find the attack before that where the bomb was a liquid nor the one last week where the bomb was a powder placed in laser printer cartridges. Bombs can come in all sorts of forms. Could you spot one? Neither can the TSA screener visually.

Full Body Scanners – When we first saw the pictures of full body scanners you will note that the manufacturer show pictures of people carrying hidden guns. See the photo above? That is what the full body scanner is good at finding. It is a virtual strip search so it is good at finding what a strip search will find. Can it detect a bomb? Maybe. If it looks like a bomb.

Bomb sniffing dogs – If we are looking for bombs then dogs are a real solution. We know that they are good at actually finding bombs. Explosive devices leave residue that you and I cannot smell but a dog can. Now getting enough bomb sniffing dogs and trainers might be difficult or prohibitively expensive since a dog has to have time off to clear its super sniffer, but at least this is a solution that is appropriate.

Profiling – People point to Israel’s security system as effective and to their use of physiological profiling as a good tool for screening. It is a good tool and does have some advantages that no matter what the weapon might be (gun, bomb, box cutters) profiling can help spot the bad guys. But profiling is not particularly better at finding bombs so this is something that should be looked at in parallel with other solutions.

Gas Chromatographs – When the TSA thinks you have something that looks suspicious that they think could be a bomb what they do is swab the object and then put that swab in a gas chromatograph. The gas chromatograph is an appropriate tool for detecting chemical residue. It works better than a dog’s nose and does not get tired. We could swab everything and everybody and that would be a viable tool to find explosives, but it might take longer than desired.

Chemical Detector Booths – Another approach to chemical detection provided by a gas chromatograph without the swabbing has been deployed in some airports. You go into a glass booth and it blows in a puff of air. This air then goes through a gas chromatograph and the booth either gets a green light which says it did not find suspicious chemicals or it flashes red (or locks). This solution is not only less invasive than a full body scanner, but actually addresses the right issue. It looks for bombs. Why aren’t we rolling these out instead?