New Body Scanners Installed In Airports

KahunaBurger writes "The Boston Globe has an article today titled "Rights backers fight scanner that gets under clothes". The US customs service has installed new scanners in five major US airports "that can see through passengers' clothes and search for contraband with an image that shows the naked body." Rights activists are equating this to a 'electronic strip search.' I don't know; getting frisked always makes me feel like a bad guy on COPS.

Comments

Simplicity Generates Ubiquity, and a Solution

[Effugas]

Consider the ever rising age for requiring identification when purchasing alchohol or tobacco. What started out as a check against the young(read: politically irrelevant) became a burden against not only those commiting crimes but a privacy worry for anyone under the age of thirty(read: politically less relevant).

The parallels to not being able to move from city to city without the proper papers are striking, and while slippery slope logic may be fallacious, there's some pretty empirical evidence that this slope is very slippery, though it takes years to take the trip.

It is likely that the widespread presence of human scanning equipment would lead to mandatory "virtual strip searches" on everyone who passed through, just as the rather private contents of one's pockets and purses must be shown to an X-Ray technician in order to fly.

And strangely enough, should the equipment be there, this would absolutely be the right thing to do in terms of maintaining security.

C'mon. Many of us are network engineers here. If we don't thoroughly check the content that client software passes our servers, we're lambasted for excess trust as we should be. Network security is not different from physical security--the problem is that while packets don't mind being poked, prodded, analyzed, and logged, humans have a...somewhat different perspective. Worse, a human client can piggyback much more than a CGI exploit in their, um, packets.

Greater risk, with a higher "cost" of alleviating that risk. Ouch.

Frisking is undeniably more invasive than any scanner, but the high privacy cost means that agents cannot afford to roughly fondle every member of the public. The selection process used is guaranteed to incorporate profiles that are, at minimum, more accurate than chance, but much, much more questionable for political reasons. The entire quandry of getting full coverage on identified profiles without specifically inconveniencing those parties is cleanly avoided by a quick hands-free scan.

Security up, highly inconvenienced innocents who match the profile down.

Unfortunately, there's the whole problem of T&D.

Happily, this problem can be removed with some amount of programming. You're looking for an algorithm that takes the three input "discoveries"--

A) Blank backdrop
B) Skin
C) Object thicker than clothing that is obscuring skin

--and flags the machine operator if a given subject possesses any obvious non-skin segments in his scan. Should there be a hit, the computer could execute a filtering operation where the background flesh was erased from the foreground object, and a chart on the screen would overlay the shape of the object over live video of the subject. Should the only offending object be something that the agent could see directly on the person(such as a heart shaped belt buckle), the individual would be waved on. Only if the unidentified object could still not be easily explained by questioning the target would either a pat down search or a full scan need be executed.

Such a solution would prevent inappropriate context from being passed to the shape analysis system(another human) while still allowing universal, non-profiled, secure scanning of aircraft clients wishing to be granted access to company hardware.

I would feel safer with this system.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Long time now ...

[MikeBabcock]

This is old news. I don't remember when I first heard this; might have been summer, 1999. They were testing this technology at two major airports as I remember it.

What really bothers me is that there are now concealed weapons that can't be found with metal detectors (non-metalic guns and knives, for instance). What 'hackers' need to do is work out a way to properly secure airplanes the way they've been giving information on how to secure networks. Unlike network administrators, I think the average airport is actually concerned about security and would take suggestions if we put some good ones together.

We can't always just say "this is a breach of my privacy" when the other side is saying "it's that or getting hijacked!" We won't get any public support that way.

Lets throw around some real ideas on how to detect contraband, etc. without (excessively) invading peoples' privacy.

Note: I say 'excessively' because if you have a rod in your back and didn't want anyone to know, they'll find out if they're in line with you at the airport. This is pretty unavoidable. However, having to be "naked-ish" for the security guard isn't great.

Idea: if we used the same technology with an AI system that recognised non-human items and displayed those areas on the security screen? Open source of course ;-)