TSA puts controversial scanners in storage

Bart Jansen, USA TODAY | USATODAY

The Transportation Security Administration has put 91 of its full-body scanning machines worth $14 million in storage because of privacy concerns, officials told a House hearing Thursday.

The machines, so-called backscatter machines that use X-rays to scan passengers, produce near-naked images of travelers. The TSA said that software that was supposed to replace the near-naked image on the machine with a stick figure was flawed and couldn't be used to ease privacy concerns.

Hence, the machines have been stuck in storage, John Sanders, TSA's assistant administrator for security capabilities, told the House Homeland Security subcommittee on transportation.

The backscatter machines were pulled three weeks ago from New York's LaGuardia and JFK, Chicago O'Hare, Los Angeles, Boston, Charlotte and Orlando airports. The move was designed to speed up security lines at checkpoints there.

Sanders said it's worked and that lines at those airports are now moving 180,000 more passengers each day.

Using backscatter machines to screen passengers takes longer because of the near-naked image they have of travelers. That requires the TSA security officer who views the image to sit in a separate room from the machine and radio clearance back to the checkpoint.

Originally, the TSA had planned to ship the 91 machines to smaller airports. But it discovered that smaller airports didn't have enough room to accommodate the backscatter machines.

For now, the 91 machines are in a Texas warehouse, which now holds a total of $155 million in unused equipment awaiting either disposal or redeployment, according to Sanders.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., who led the hearing, called it an "extremely disturbing situation" and says he is "really aggravated about it."

The TSA has spent $140 million on full-body scanners, according to Sanders. This includes $40 million for backscatter machines and $100 million for millimeter-wave machines that already produce stick-figure images.

Full-body scanners are used to find non-metallic items, such as the underwear bomb discovered on Christmas 2009. Passengers have the option to decline a full-body scan in favor of a physical pat-down. But moving through a scanner with stick-figure images takes 12 seconds, compared with 80 seconds for a pat-down, Sanders says.

The agency bought 200 full-body scanners in May, bringing its total to 1,000, Sanders says. Covering all lanes at all airports would require 1,800 machines, but Sanders says the agency is evaluating whether to have that many as part of its overall risk-based screening.

Sanders couldn't say how soon the software would be updated for the warehoused scanners.