Full body scanner images released online -- just not images from an airport scanners

By Melissa Bell



(Dayna Smith/The Washington Post)

Amid the furor over new security checks at the airports, online tech magazine Gizmodo released a sensational-sounding report Tuesday morning: 100 blurry images of full-body scans.

The introduction to the piece reads:

At the heart of the controversy over "body scanners" is a promise: The images of our naked bodies will never be public. U.S. Marshals in a Florida Federal courthouse saved 35,000 images on their scanner. These are those images.

Gizmodo describes the images as "leaked," but acknowledges later that they were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. And while the report makes clear that the images come from a federal courthouse in Orlando, Fla., it argues that their release "demonstrates the security limitations" of scanners operated by TSA employees across in airports across the country.

That suggestion, however, is something of a stretch.

The TSA and the marshals service are separate government entities, and courthouses aren't airports. Also, the TSA is the agency that has been arguing that it has strict standards of privacy. The TSA writes on its Web site, "Advanced imaging technology cannot store, print, transmit or save the image, and the image is automatically deleted from the system after it is cleared by the remotely located security officer." After the images were posted to Gizmodo, the TSA reiterated that images cannot be saved on the airport scanners.

The U.S. Marshals Service has been upfront about the storage of these files, writing a letter to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, admitting that images had been stored on body scanners.

Also, the scanners used in the two locations are different scanners. The courthouse scanners use a millimeter wave machine, which takes lower resolution images does not use radiation to create the scans. The images were stored on hard drives. While some airports do use the millimeter wave machines, most airport machines are more sophisticated x-ray backscatter machines that use radiation to map high resolution images. The TSA said the option to save images on these machines is turned off before the machines are sent to airports.

There are arguments to be made against the scanners: the price of installing and using them, the possible radiation, the displeasure over the opt-out pat-downs, or the need for more training. There are arguments to be made in favor of the scanners: security, security, security.

Either way, it's not clear what these images add to the conversation.

I spoke to Gizmodo author Joel Johnson by phone and he said he disagrees[with me]. "It is impossible for TSA to guarantee a leak will never happen," he said. He thinks that if it could happen in a courthouse in Florida, it could happen at an airport near you -- all it would take is one TSA employee who decides to break the rules one time.

What do you think? Do these photographs have a place in the TSA debate? Or does a courthouse protest need to start?

Elsewhere in the TSA debate, a passenger was arrested for punching a security officer in Indianapolis and the head of TSA said the new pat-down procedure is "clearly more invasive."