Good news: Next time someone's looking at your naked body at an airport, it'll be of your own free will. Naked x-rays are no longer a required burden of flying the skies. Controversial "nude" x-ray body scanners will be phased out of airports by the summer, the Transportation Security Administration announced Friday.
The "nude" advanced imagining technology scanners first drew national attention in 2010, becoming the focus of intense media and public scrutiny around Thanksgiving of that year. Aside from the obvious privacy concerns, some experts questioned the safety of the devices, claiming the scanners' effect on health was unproven, and that the technology was also ineffective at detecting smuggled weapons or explosives.
The government announced Friday that it plans to abandon the "backscatter" technology machines made by the ironically-named Rapiscan company - a joke which writes itself - because the company couldn't meet deadlines to switch over to generic imaging that uses so-called Automated Target Recognition software, according to the TSA. In their place will be new millimeter wave technology scanners made by L-3 Communications, which use the generic imaging software.
"Due to its inability to deploy non-imaging Automated Target Recognition (ATR) software by the Congressionally-mandated June 2013 deadline, TSA has terminated part of its contract with Rapiscan," the TSA said in a statement to Wired. "By June 2013 travelers will only see machines which have ATR that allow for faster throughput."
In English: airport security is still going to force you to go through one of two types of scanners when you fly, but passengers' naked bodies will no longer be produced. An image of a generic outline of person will appear in place of the nude x-rays.
The news arrives just three months after Rapiscan came under fire for potentially manipulating tests on the privacy software designed to prevent the machines from producing graphic images of nude bodies. Rapiscan's parent company received a letter from the TSA in November requesting information about the testing of the software trying to discover if there was malfeasance.
Rapiscan's advanced imagining technology scanners represent a tremendous waste of government spending; the TSA spent $90 million replacing the traditional magnetometers with the "nude" body scanning machines at airports across the country. The company had a contract with the government to produce 500 of the machines, which cost about $180,000 each. The 250 Rapiscan machines still deployed at airports will be gradually phased out by June 2013 and replaced by the generic imaging machines from L-3 Communications, the TSA announced.
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