WASHINGTON  The Transportation Security Administration has promised not to store or transmit nude images of airline passengers made by whole-body scanners, but when it asked manufacturers to submit bids for such machines, it required that the scanners have exactly those capabilities, according to agency documents obtained in a lawsuit.

The bid specifications, obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, also show that companies wanting to sell such machines to the government were required to equip them with “10 selectable levels of privacy,” although the document, which was partly censored before its release, does not specify what those are. Some of the machines provide blurring, or the electronic equivalent of a G-string over the genitals.

The government required that the machines have a testing mode that would allow the “exporting of image data” and provide “a secure means for high-speed transfer of image data,” according to the documents.

The images to be stored and transmitted are supposed to be of test subjects, not passengers, for training purposes.