Academic

A New Meaning to Security Screening

By Jacqueline Lipton

Cleveland Hopkins International Airport is trialling "whole body" security scanners for the first time, according to last week's Cleveland Plain Dealer.  The new scanners see right through travellers' clothes and pick up security threats that metal detectors can miss, such as liquid explosives.  The machines use radio waves or weak x-rays to take full body scans of passengers, raising significant privacy concerns.  The airport is adopting a protocol where the person reading the scan never sees the actual passenger in an attempt to protect privacy to some degree.

What struck me as particularly interesting was the following paragraph from Jim Nichols' report in the Plain Dealer:

"The machines will replace metal detectors in two of the airport's dozen security-screening lanes as "primary" screening devices. Each passenger in a security line will be assigned to the next open lane, meaning they'll effectively be sent at random to either a full-body imager or an X-ray machine. (At 15 other airports, they're "secondary" screeners: Only passengers who set off metal detectors go through the full-body scanners, unless they opt for a pat-down.)"

Is there something wrong with Cleveland's approach?  It seems that in Cleveland, you have to take the more intrusive option (full scale pat-down) if you object to the initial full body scan, while in other airports you only face either of the intrusive options (pat-down or full scan)  if you set off the metal detector in the first place.  Does Cleveland Airport's approach raise more of a civil liberties issue than other airports?

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on August 03, 2009 (boomark / email).