POLITICS JANUARY 29, 2010
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Last summer, I watched a fellow passenger at Washington’s Reagan National Airport as he was selected to go through a newly installed full-body scanner. These machines--there are now 40 of them spread across 19 U.S. airports--permit officials from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to peer through a passenger’s clothing in search of explosives and weapons. On the instructions of a security officer, the passenger stepped into the machine and held his arms out in a position of surrender, as invisible millimeter waves surrounded his body. Although he probably didn’t know it, TSA officials in a separate room were staring at a graphic, anatomically correct image of his naked body. When I asked the TSA screener whether the passenger’s face was blurred, he replied that he couldn’t say. But, as I turned to catch my flight, the official blurted, “Someone ought to do something about those machines--it’s like we don’t have any privacy in this country anymore!”
The officer’s indignation was as rare as it was unexpected. In the wake of the failed Christmas bombing of Northwest Flight 253, the public has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about these scanners. A recent USA Today poll found that 78 percent of respondents approved of their use at airports. Western democracies have been no less effusive. President Obama has ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to install $1 billion in airport screening equipment, and the TSA hopes to include an additional 300 millimeter-wave scanners. Britain, France, Italy, and the Netherlands have all made similar pledges to expand their use. (At the end of January, the European Commission's Information Commissioner, Viviane Reding, announced that in light of body-scanners' "privacy-invasive potential" and unproven usefulness, the machine should not be imposed without "full consideration of its impact.")
Let’s not mince words about these machines. They are a virtual strip search--and an outrage. Body scanners are a form of what security expert Bruce Schneier has called “security theater.” That is, they give people the illusion of safety without actually making us safer. A British MP who evaluated the body scanners in a former capacity, as a director at a leading defense technology company, said that they wouldn’t have stopped the trouser bomber aboard the Northwest flight. Despite over-hyped claims to the contrary, they simply can’t detect low-density materials hidden under clothing, such as liquid, powder, or thin plastics. In other words, the sacrifice these machines require of our privacy is utterly pointless. And, as it happens, it’s possible to design and use the body scanners in a way that protects privacy without diminishing security--but the U.S. government has failed to do so.
Millimeter-wave scanners came on the market after September 11 as a way of detecting high-density contraband, such as ceramics or wax, that would be missed by metal detectors when concealed under clothing--while avoiding radiation that could harm humans. The machines also reveal the naked human body far more graphically than a conventional x-ray. But, from the beginning, researchers who developed the millimeter machines at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory offered an alternative design more sensitive to privacy. They proposed to project any concealed contraband onto a neutral, sexless mannequin while scrambling images of the passenger’s naked body into a nondescript blob. But the Bush administration chose the naked machine rather than the blob machine: Some blob skeptics argue that blotting out private parts would make it harder to detect explosives concealed, for example, in prosthetic genitalia. Of course, neither the blob nor the naked machine would have detected the suicide bombers who have proved perfectly willing to conceal explosives in real body cavities, as a Saudi suicide bomber proved in a failed attempt to assassinate a Saudi prince using explosives planted in a place where the sun doesn’t shine.
Former DHS director Michael Chertoff, whose consulting firm now represents the leading vendor of the millimeter machines, Rapiscan, has been a vocal cheerleader for body scanning: He called the Christmas bombing a “very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery.” In 2005, under Chertoff’s leadership, TSA ordered five scanners from Rapiscan, claiming that its naked images were less graphic than those of competitors. TSA also introduced one additional privacy protection: Agents who review the images of the naked bodies are in a separate room and, therefore, can’t see the passengers as they’re being scanned. According to the TSA website, the technology blurs all facial features, and, based on some news accounts, private parts have been blurred as well. But because the TSA remains free of independent oversight, it’s impossible to tell precisely how they’re being used.
Most troubling of all, the TSA website claims that “the machines have zero storage capability” and that “the system has no way to save, transmit or print the image.” But documents recently obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center reveal that, in 2008, the TSA told vendors that the machines it purchases must have the ability to send or store images when in “test” mode. (The TSA told CNN that the test mode can’t be enabled at airports.) Because no regulations prohibit the TSA from storing images, the House (but not the Senate) voted last year to ban the use of body scanning machines for primary screening and to prohibit images from being stored.
As long as the TSA fails to blur images of both faces and private parts, the machines will represent a serious threat to the dignity of some travelers from the 14 countries whose citizens will now be required to go through them (or face intrusive pat-downs) before entering the United States. Some interpretations of Islamic law, for example, forbid men from gazing at Muslim women unless they are veiled. It’s also unfortunate that, a year after the Supreme Court declared, 8-1, that strip searches in schools are unreasonable without some suspicion of danger or wrongdoing, virtual strip searches will soon be routine for many randomly selected travelers at airports, rather than reserved for secondary screening of suspicious individuals.
But the greatest privacy concern is that the images may later leak. As soon as a celebrity walks through a naked machine, some creep will want to save the picture and send it to the tabloids. And the danger that rogue officials may troll the database is hardly hypothetical. President Obama’s embattled nominee to head the TSA, Erroll Southers, conducted two searches of the confidential criminal records of his estranged wife’s boyfriend, downloaded the records, and passed them on to law enforcement, possibly in violation of the Privacy Act, and then gave a misleading account of the incident to Congress. (On January 20, Southers withdrew his nomination.) That’s why the images should be anonymous and ephemeral, so agents can’t save the pictures or connect them to names.
Even if the body scanners protected privacy, Schneier insists, they still would be a waste of money: The next plot rarely looks like the last one. But, if we need to waste money on feel-good technologies that don’t make us safer, let’s at least make sure that they don’t unnecessarily reveal us naked. President Obama says that he wants to “aggressively pursue enhanced screening technology ... consistent with privacy rights and civil liberties.” With a few simple technological and legal fixes, he can do precisely that. Blob machine or naked machine--the choice is his.
Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor of The New Republic.
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*This article has been updated to coincide with developments since its print publication.
19 comments
Sorry, I simply cannot muster any outrage about this whatsoever. What outrages me is stupidity and wasted time and resources -- doing pointless things that are supposed to make us feel like we are safe but other accomplish nothing or make things worse. On the other hand, aircraft are targets and I am much more concerned about being blown up in one than I am about being ogled on the screen of some detector. So, to me , the question is first, second, and third a question of efficacy. And on this subject, Mr. Rosen, you are both ambiguous and disingenous, shifting rapidly between claims about utility and claims about personal dignity. The first thing to get straight is what these machines can and cannot accomplish and whether there are in fact less intrusive means of doing the same thing without created mile-long lines at airports. If these machines can expose otherwise undetectable threats, weapons, etc., I am all for them, lots of them, and I suspect the overwhelming majority of the flying public would agree. To the extent that we can protect personal dignity -- by obscuring faces or whatever means -- without degrading the performance for the intended purpose, by all means. As for side issues such as preventing the archiving of images (what purpose would archiving them serve?) and maintaining anonymity and preventing embarrassment, absolutely we should do whatever makes the system less intrusive without degrading performance. But if they work, we should not lose sight of the goal which is public safety in the air. As for people, foreign or domestic, whose sensibilities may be grossly offended -- tough. Take a train, take a boat, or don't come here at all. I care not. Your sensibilities, religious or otherwise, should not be a threat to my ability to step off that plane at the other end with myself and my family intact. In other words, get lost.
- roidubouloi
January 29, 2010 at 12:24am
The problem here is focusing on things rather than people. Our current "security theater" is a joke, and everyone who travels frequently knows it. Inevitably, whatever kind of new and undoubtedly even more expensive gizmos we come up with will be staffed by sleepy people who couldn't make the cut for Assistant Manager at Burger King looking at the same boring images hour after hour, day after day, week after week, etc. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. On the other hand, profiling works. It is impossible to imagine that AQ could come up with someone willing to kill themselves for Allah who hasn't left a trail of involvement in radical Islamic activities. American Express is able to screen kazillions of daily purchases by millions of people, and still identify suspicious ones that may require further checking. Why can't we similarly screen the relatively small number of people connected however directly or not with radical Islam? I don't even think AQ really cares if they bring down a plane. We are doing to ourselves what they want done--causing major disruption in the vital transportation system. If they really wanted to, they could conduct a Mumbai-style attack every few weeks for years.
- Robert Powell
January 29, 2010 at 2:29am
Agreed, RP. However, what you call "profiling" is not what ordinary people and most politicians, left and right, understand when they hear or speak the word "profiling." So when advocating the security practices you're advocating, you need to use a better, more precise word than "profiling." Because the two things that people understand the word to mean -- criminal profiling, like in the movies, and racial profiling, like in actual law-enforcement -- manifestly and provably do not work. The latter is also both illegal and a fundamental violation of civilized values. What you're talking about is neither of those. Call it behavioral screening, or passenger analysis, or whatever, but if you call it any kind of profiling, all we'll get is a debate between politicians on the right who just want to throw all the damned Arabs in Gitmo and politicians on the left who oppose that. Even if the racial profiling advocates win, the screening system they would put in place still wouldn't catch the British hippie and the soft-spoken black African who've actually attempted plane bombings since 9/11. But part and parcel of the kind of behavioral screening you wisely advocate has got to be reducing the number of people flying. Israel can defend El Al with that kind of behavioral screening because nobody actually flies El Al. In a year, El Al screens as many people as fly on a typical American airline in a week. To be truly safer, then, we need fewer flights, and that means investments in improved telecom infrastructure to reduce the need for business travel and huge investments in rail to significantly reduce demand for air travel for trips of under 1,000 miles. We can have secure air travel, or we can have hourly shuttles between Boston, New York, Philly, and DC, but we can't have both.
- rhubarbs
January 29, 2010 at 9:29am
I like to name things as they are, rhubarbs. It is certainly politically incorrect to use "profiling" because it has bad connotations from news stories. But while it is absurd and abusive to stop vehicles driven by black Americans in disproportionate numbers "on suspicion", it is even more absurd to ignore the obvious shared characteristics of people who have actually committed terrorist acts. I guess we could dream up some newspeak label for what is in fact defining a typical terrorist profile and screening those who have it more carefully, but everyone will still know exactly what's going on, and I for one feel no need to make excuses for it. Most of these guys have been young male Arabs, but ALL of them, including both shoe- and underwear-bombers, had extensive, known associations with radical Islamic groups. It seems that we are more afraid of being politically incorrect than we are concerned with catching terrorists. Disassembling some grannie's wheelchair and strip-searching little kids does little more than increase the impact of the terrorists' activities. And certainly crippling our vital transportation system that depends at this point absolutely on the ability of more rather than fewer people to fly seems to be taking "safety" way too far. At the end of the day, it is a scam run by politicians and their clones in the media to continue spreading panic about a risk that's in reality on the order of being struck by lightning and a meteorite at the same time.
- Robert Powell
January 29, 2010 at 9:57am
I do travel on El Al and fly in and out of Israel with some frequency. While there is no question that Israel is more sophisticated about passenger screening, these conversations, such as the one above, often suggest to the naîve that Israel does not use technical means, including screening machines and bomb detection machines. It must certainly does. There are great, big ones in the lobby of Ben Gurion airport before you even get to the counters. On the other hand, Israel's passenger screening is not godlike in its ability to discern exactly whom to search and whom to ignore. I have had my children's luggage searched in detail when leaving the US for Israel. The searchers were very apologetic, although I kept reassuring them that I understood and was happy to cooperate, because the could clearly see that we were not a threat -- me a middle-aged Jewish man with a beard, two little girls who were clearly my own children, and multiple entries to Israel on all of our passports -- but something in the protocol required it on that day. And they were following the protocol regardless of their own sensibilities. The one delight for me with airport security was leaving Paris and being questioned by a young Israel woman at security. When I said I was going to attend a wedding and she asked where, it turned out she knew my niece who was getting married and other friends at the same kibbutz, and we had a nice personal chat. I got on the flight. To my left, someone was refused boarding and told summarily to take another airline. He tried to argue. There was no give, no apology, and no explanation, just a polite but unyielding admonishment that the man would not be boarding the flight today and had best make other plans. While it is true that the absolute risk of the risk from terrorism is low, it is not the same as lightning. How we respond bears directly on the risk. If we had no airport security, there would be many more incidents, just as their were many more aircraft hijackings before countermeasures were taken. I object to security theater as much as anyone. That does not mean there are not useful measures to be taken of both and technical and security nature. The fact that there seemingly exists in our security apparatus no search technology to take information that came in about the Nigerian threat and automatically search for related matters is pretty shocking. Can't the government find Google to ask for assistance in setting this up?
- roidubouloi
January 29, 2010 at 10:11am
The dialogue about seems to suggest that we failed to detect the underwear bomber out of political correctness. That is not the case. We failed to detect him because, even when we had ample information in our system, we were systematically unable to analyze it and bring it to bear. That is incompetence, not political correctness. If you want to talk about political correctness, consider the fact that we have lists of undesirables that are so secret, to protect our "intelligence means," that they cannot be disclosed to airlines or ports of entry or embarkation so as actually to keep those people out. That sort of right-wing political correctness is so insufferably stupid it belongs in Catch-22. "You can't see Major Major Major. Why not? Because he is in. When can I see him? When he's out. But how can I see him when he's out? I don't know. That's your problem."
- roidubouloi
January 29, 2010 at 10:19am
I don't think political correctness had anything to do with the last case, but that it was a combination of incompetence and trying to screen everything about everyone all the time instead of being more focused. The latter may indicate some indirect effect of bending over backwards to avoid hurting someone's feelings or appearing predjudiced, but I doubt it. On protecting intelligence means, it's a genuine concern. If we ever figure out how to get someone inside one of these groups, or as today are getting second-hand information from agencies that have done so, it is a tightrope to walk between interdicting someone who might have dangerous intent, and by doing so exposing the source that might provide much more and much more valuable information down the road. Not to mention getting them killed.
- Robert Pow
January 29, 2010 at 11:18am
What would Jeffrey Rosen think of the questioning one gets before boarding an El Al flight? I suspect not much, even though the time that has passed since the inception of the questioning has corresponded with a lack of attacks on that airline's planes and passengers. Of course, this is America, and if you don't like the security, you do not have to get on the plane. If you do not want to engage in the process that protects you and other passengers, take a boat, Nothing's perfect, but I do not think that protection of civil liberties means that we have to accept an increase in the palpable risk that someone is going to hijack or blow-up a plane.
- Stuart Wilder
January 29, 2010 at 12:57pm
All very lovely in theory, RP, but I'm not buying. Sounds to me like it has at lot more to do with protecting the "assets" of bureaucratic regimes than protecting the nation. Of what use is the intelligence if it cannot be used to protect us from threats? To savor over tea and biscuits in Langley VA?
- roidubouloi
January 29, 2010 at 1:23pm
"Most of these guys have been young male Arabs ..." That's simple BS, and that's the problem with calling behavioral analysis "profiling." Sure, on 9/11, all of the attackers were young male Arabs. But since then, would-be attackers have tended not to be Arabs. We've had South Asians, British hippies, and polite black men. Ethnic identity, age, skin color, and national origin are obviously useless in picking these needles from the haystack of the traveling public. Using the word "profiling" encourages the political leaders who must enact policies to rely on a technique that, while viscerally satisfying to the Krauthammers of the world, is not merely useless but actually counterproductive. (By focusing on, say, Arabs, we increase AQ's chances of success in getting non-Arab bombers onto planes. If we can't agree that increasing the enemy's odds of success is a bad idea, then we really have nothing more to talk about.) The information that is useful has to do with individual behavior, not ethnic identity. The young Arab man with a wife and daughter in Toledo who has a round-trip ticket and has never visited Yemen, Somalia, or Pakistan is not a threat. The white dude from Orange County with a one-way ticket bought with cash, no luggage, and a Yemeni stamp in his passport, he's the guy who needs to be searched. And since that is not what is understood by the word "profiling," it behooves us to call it by another name. This isn't about PC, it's about using words in such a way as to maximize clarity and minimize misunderstanding. It doesn't matter how right you are that "profiling" is the "correct" word -- the simple fact is that when most people, including most informed policymakers, hear the word "profiling," they understand it to mean something other than what you intend. Why insist on sabotaging yourself?
- rhubarbs
January 29, 2010 at 3:41pm
I can't tell whether backscatter scanners will decrease significantly the odds of a suicide bomber getting aboard an airplane or not. That would require some actual testing, with real people trying to fool the system - of which there has been very little. But the personal dignity argument made here is just hysterics. Get over it already - we let doctors and nurses and undertakers see us naked,and they all do far worse than anonymously scan a digitally altered picture of us for 30 seconds. I have no tears for someone so concerned about their dignity that this would be a problem - they can walk. But I do pity the poor SOB who has to sit in a phone booth and look at images of the naked bodies of people like me - I can barely stand my looks in the privacy of my own bathroom. Just 1 hour of watching one fat American after another parade digitally naked across my screen would probably make me physically ill. Those folks'll deserve hazardous duty pay as far as I'm concerned.
- IowaBeauty
January 29, 2010 at 3:54pm
rhubarbs-- I guess it depends on how you define "people who have actually committed terrorist acts" ie whether you include attacks outside the US, etc. I don't want to nit pick here, but a disproportionate number of Salafist, jihad-prone Muslims are in fact young male Arabs. A significant number of other terrorist profiles exist, most relevant here some of the Shi'ite groups and Iran's various Sunni proxies, Europeans of South Asian and various other ex-colonial extractions, but why pretend the data doesn't exist? We can narrow things down considerably and avoid ethnic myopia by tracking of membership and/or connections with known radical groups, but I don't want to exclude any potentially useful data, including that which associates some particular classes of people with the obnoxious ideology. roi--this sort of thing is the most difficult of judgement calls. Certainly "protecting sources" has been used as a cover for all sorts of institutional bungling, but it is still a critical consideration. We can't improve our humint as we badly need to if all, or even very many of our sources get burned by sloppy use of their intelligence product.
- Robert Powell
January 29, 2010 at 5:43pm
RP: I'm curious as to why you posit that AQ "could conduct a Mumbai style attack every week for years if it wanted"? Do you have a theory as to why they would refrain from this if they has the capability? It would appear that they actually don't have that capability, otherwise we would expect them to use it. Schneir has a long piece about why he believes that suicidal terrorists are so rare (basically there are few suitable candidates, few opportunities to connect and train, and they only perform one act) in his latest newsletter. As you say, statistically you are not going to be killed by terrorism, from which we can infer there are very few (albeit potentially very dangerous) terrorists.
- Nari224
January 29, 2010 at 10:33pm
Nari-I'd appreciate a link to the Schneir piece if you can. It does seem to be true that AQ & Co. are having increasing difficulty recruiting people who have both the will and the capability to carry out suicide missions as demonstrated by those who have been captured, including in Iraq and Israel. I remember thinking that they were beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel a few years ago when a mentally deficient Palestinian kid was captured at an Israeli checkpoint, around the same time bombers in Iraq were found to be family rejects who had been essentially purchased, and etc. It is easy to get across the Mexican border. It is easy to obtain guns and ammunition in the US. Over the years, it seems to me enough capability could have been infiltrated, trained and equipped to launch a pretty effective wave of attacks if that was a goal. I think they have decided that our transportation net is the most efficacious target. More bang for the buck, if you'll excuse the phrase...
- Robert Powell
January 30, 2010 at 3:05am
Misdirected voices of protest! Airline hijacking invention? The PLO. Airliners as bombs after being hijacked Al Qaeda with 15 Saudi terrorists aboard. Every time we have to pass any inspection, shoes off, scanning, body scanning... Never forget to thank Islamic terror for this horror not the government trying to protect us. I prefer to be body scanned then even the remote chance to be blown up.
- Poupic
January 30, 2010 at 7:42am
IowaBeauty- Very funny, and right on. I also agree with much of the sentiment here that, setting aside the question regarding the efficacy of the scanners, Rosen's objection on privacy grounds is overwrought. Rosen himself acknowledges that 78% of persons polled on the issue said they would have no problem with the scanners. In my view, the scanners would be less intrusive than pat-downs, or than having custom's agents rifle through your luggage, as happened to my family, rummaging through our underwear, bras, condoms, tampons, etc., in order to confiscate some vacuum-packed ham that we were honest enough to declare.
- dhurtado
January 30, 2010 at 5:18pm
RP: On an iPhone with no copy'n'paste right now, but if you google "Crypto-Gram" or "Counterpane" you should be able to find it with only a few links to follow. I think it's still the current issue of the newsletter; if not it'll be the first in the archive. As you say, there are lots of ways to hurt us (and bring down airliners). That this is not occuring very often hopefully indicates that a) it's very hard to find the people to do it and b) the government is doing a good job catching or stopping those who are wanting to.
- Nari224
January 30, 2010 at 10:41pm
Thanks Nari.
- Robert Powell
January 31, 2010 at 6:18am
I'm sorry but I happen to think that personal dignity is VERY important.
- Sophia
November 15, 2010 at 4:20pm