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Blogger/TSA Critic Shows 'How To Get Anything Through TSA Nude Body Scanners'
In early November 2010, the Transportation Safety Administration began forcing air travelers to submit to a nude body scanner (also known as "AIT devices," or "backscatter x-rays") or accept an "enhanced pat-down." As has been well documented, the enhanced pat-downs unfortunately involve TSA agents grabbing between your legs and moving around other private parts of yours in ways you probably don't like. On Nov. 16, 2010, Jonathan Corbett filed a lawsuit against the TSA "requesting an injunction against the TSA to prevent them from touching or photographing our private areas without any reasonable suspicion."
Since then, while he pursues his lawsuit, Corbett has maintained a blog called TSA Out of Our Pants on which he discusses developments in his case, as well as other TSA-related lawsuits and news. On March 4, Corbett told his readers that he had a huge announcement that he would share no later than March 6 that he "believed will be the end of the nude body scanner program." Yesterday, he wrote that he had "sent the TSA their advance copy of my blog post so that they can act on it to "keep us safe" (I hear that's their job 
)." Later yesterday he posted an item entitled, "$1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog -- How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners" (via The Fraud Files Blog) that shows, on video, how anyone with pre-existing or improvised side pockets on their clothing can get a metal object past the nude body scanners.
According to Corbett, and as demonstrated on his video below, nude body scanners show the body of the person being searched as drawn with light colors and placed on a black background. Metallic objects in your shirt pocket, for example, will clearly appear as a black shape on your light figure. However, he observes, "if you have a metallic object on your side, it will be the same color as the background and therefore completely invisible to both visual and automated inspection."
To demonstrate this, Corbett sewed a pocket directly on the side of a shirt, placed a heavy metal carrying case in the pocket, and sailed through nude body scanners at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and also at Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport. Corbett concludes that the nude body scanner program is "nothing but a giant fraud ... the TSA must immediately end the nude body scanner program, and return to the tried-and-true metal detectors that actually work, and work without invading our privacy, as well as implement better solutions for non-metallic explosives, such as bomb-sniffing dogs and trace detection machines."
Check out Corbett's video of how he easily got his metallic carrying case through security.
Posted by Bruce Carton on March 7, 2012 at 04:31 PM | Permalink
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