GIANTS IN SCREENING


TECHNOLOGY:


ADVANCED IMAGING


PRIVACY AND HEALTH CONCERNS


Following Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009 with explosives sewn into his underwear, personnel scanners have been gradually rolled out at airports around the world. Sarah Grynpas looks at some of the issues and concerns surrounding their usage.


a person steps onto an aeroplane, their concerns are safety, efficiency, and privacy. They don’t want to be the victims of a terrorist attack; they want to know that appropriate safeguards have been put in place to protect them.


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No one wants to lose the opportunities air travel affords, making it incumbent on both airlines and governments to ensure air travel remains pleasant and affordable. No air passenger wishes to sacrifice their privacy or dignity – a sense of invasiveness will compromise the overall travel experience and might prevent people from flying. Passengers don’t want to worry about getting cancer from unnecessary scanning machines. They don’t want to feel naked and exposed to the strangers that screen them at the checkpoint. But, equally, they don’t want to be on the evening news, the latest innocent bystanders caught in a global crossfire. Despite the media brouhaha, governments and airport operators are actually finding that ‘advanced imaging technology’, to use TSA parlance, (‘full body scanners’ as far as the general public are concerned) are a way to alleviate these concerns and make air travel as pleasurable and stress free as possible.


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hether it’s a businessperson travelling to Davos, or a family travelling to Disneyland, when


The full-body scanners predominantly used


today are backscatter machines, which produce a two-dimensional image, and millimetre wave machines, which produce a three-dimensional image. The backscatter machines use ionising radiation. Unlike traditional X-rays (used for medical purposes), in which the radiation is transmitted through the object, backscatter X-rays detect the radiation that reflects from


“…backscatter


machines operate with approximately 0.05 μSv of radiation per screening…airport baggage scanners are allowed to emit leakage radiation up to about 1 μSv per hour…”


an object and uses that to project an image onto a screen. Rapiscan Systems is the most popular manufacturer of these machines, with backscatters in airports in America and Europe. Douglas McMakin is a staff engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He helped develop the modern millimetre wave


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scanners currently used in airports. These machines have an advantage over backscatter ones inasmuch as they don’t use ionising radiation at all. Rather than analysing reflected radiation, they simply use the energy given off by the object being scanned. There are also body scanners on the market that use X-ray transmission imaging. These normally use a radiation level 100 x more than that used by backscatter scanners, which equates to about 3-5 μSv. But even this is well within safety limits according to most independent reports. However, X-ray transmission units are not used in passenger screening at the current time, albeit that they do offer the best image quality and, consequently, highest detection capability. Airports will of course continue to use traditional security methods – hand-held magnetometers, archway metal detectors, X-rays for luggage and shoes, and pat-down checks if something suspicious is found or an alarms cannot be otherwise resolved. But of all the new security technology being developed all over the world, full-body scanners have proven to be the most reliable in detecting explosives, plastics, ceramics and other non-metallic items concealed on, or inside, a person.


For a time, explosive trace-detection portal machines, popularly known as “air


February 2011 February 2012 Aviationsecurityinternational


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