Mainstream Media Reports that TSA is Removing Controversial X-ray Scanners

Michael Chertoff is a former homeland security secretary and the founder of the Chertoff Group, a security consulting firm whose clients include manufacturers of full-body scanners. When Chertoff launched into his pitch for full-body scanners on Campbell Brown, we learned that he is paid by the very companies who make the penetrating devices: In 2009, Chertoff founded the Chertoff Group, a security consulting agency. The Chertoff Group's client list is unknown—Chertoff refused to talk about it in an interview—but he admits in the clip above that some of his clients manufacture full-body scanners. Yet when he appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and on NPR to advocate for full-body scanning, Chertoff is identified only as a former secretary of homeland security.- Gawker, December 30, 2009

The U.S. government is using $25 million in stimulus money to buy and install full body scanners in airports this year, in an effort to ramp up security and create jobs. The Transportation Security Administration is using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to purchase 150 of the full body scanners, according to TSA spokeswoman Sarah Horowitz. These "backscatter" scanners, which use X-rays to provide detailed images of hidden objects in or under a person's clothing, are manufactured by Rapiscan, a subsidiary of Hawthorn, Calif.-based OSI (OSIS). The scanners cost from $150,000 to $180,000 apiece, according to the company. Peter Kant, vice president of global government affairs for Rapiscan, said his company received a $25 million contract from the TSA to produce the 150 backscatter scanners. - CNN, January 5, 2010

Each scanner costs about $130,000 to $170,000, the agency said, and President Obama's budget request for 2010 called for $88 million to buy and install 500 new scanners. The TSA already had already spent $80 million on body scanners, including $73 million received in stimulus funds. - Fox News, November 23, 2010

The Transportation Security Administration spent about $30 million on devices that puffed air on travelers to "sniff" them out for explosives residue. Those machines ended up in warehouses, removed from airports, abandoned as impractical. The massive push to fix airport security in the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led to a gold rush in technology contracts for an industry that mushroomed almost overnight. Since it was founded in 2001, the TSA has spent roughly $14 billion in more than 20,900 transactions with dozens of contractors. In addition to beefing up the fleets of X-ray machines and traditional security systems at airports nationwide, about $8 billion also paid for ambitious new technologies. The agency has spent about $800 million on devices to screen bags and passenger items, including shoes, bottled liquids, casts and prostheses. For next year, it wants more than $1.3 billion for airport screening technologies. But lawmakers, auditors and national security experts question whether the government is too quick to embrace technology as a solution for basic security problems and whether the TSA has been too eager to write checks for unproven products.- Washington Post, December 21, 2010

The TSA Is Not Eliminating X-Ray Body Scanners

Federal agency signed $245 million dollar contract with separate company that specializes in back-scatter machines

January 23, 2013

Infowars.com - Contrary to reports last week that the TSA is eliminating its expensive fleet of x-ray body scanners from airports, the federal agency signed a contract months ago with a separate company to provide the very same machines.

When Rapiscan, the company responsible for providing the TSA with the x-ray scanners, failed to adhere to a congressional demand to install software which disguised images of travelers’ naked bodies, the media announced that the TSA was abandoning x-ray body scanners in airports altogether.

However, the TSA merely announced that it had ended its $5 million dollar contract with Rapiscan, not that the x-ray devices would be gone for good. In addition, the Rapiscan machines will merely be relocated to other government agencies.

What press reports failed to mention was the fact that the TSA signed a much larger $245 million dollar contract with American Science and Engineering, Inc. back on October 9, 2012.

The press release concerning the contract outlines how AS&E will provide the TSA with “SmartCheck® Advanced Imaging Technology.” One look at AS&E’s website confirms that the technology is primarily used in “backscatter” x-ray body scanners for airports that emit “ionizing radiation.”

A promotional video posted on YouTube also shows AS&E Vice President Joseph Reiss talking about how the company has perfected “back-scatter imaging” using x-rays and is also providing the Department of Homeland Security with backscatter vans that can roam highways and conduct drive-by scans, which was also reported by Forbes in 2010.

The only difference between Rapiscan’s body scanners and those developed by American Science and Engineering, Inc. is that the latter company was able to develop “privacy friendly” software to comply with congressional demands. The scanners they will provide to the TSA are the same x-ray backscatter version that have been linked with cancer by numerous prestigious health bodies.

Although AS&E claims x-ray scanning technology is safe, numerous respected health authorities have warned that the radiation-firing body scanners can cause cancer, including the Johns Hopkins school of medicine, Columbia University’s center for radiological research, the Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety, and the University of California.

The TSA will also continue to use ‘millimeter wave’ scanners that pose a threat to health because they emit terahertz photons which can “unzip DNA,” “creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication,” according to the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The mainstream media has got it wrong once again – far from abandoning dangerous x-ray scanners, the TSA has signed a contract worth almost 50 times its previous deal with a company whose primary function is providing x-ray scanners for airport security.

TSA to remove controversial X-ray scanners

January 17, 2013

AP - Those airport scanners with their all-too revealing body images will soon be going away.

The Transportation Security Administration says the scanners that used a low-dose X-ray will be gone by June because the company that makes them can't fix the privacy issues. The other airport body scanners, which produce a generic outline instead of a naked image, are staying.

The government rapidly stepped up its use of body scanners after a man snuck explosives onto a flight bound for Detroit on Christmas day in 2009.

At first, both types of scanners showed travelers naked. The idea was that security workers could spot both metallic objects like guns as well as non-metallic items such as plastic explosives. The scanners also showed every other detail of the passenger's body, too.

The TSA defended the scanners, saying the images couldn't be stored and were seen only by a security worker who didn't interact with the passenger. But the scans still raised privacy concerns. Congress ordered that the scanners either produce a more generic image or be removed by June.

On Thursday Rapiscan, the maker of the X-ray, or backscatter, scanner, acknowledged that it wouldn't be able to meet the June deadline. The TSA said Friday that it ended its contract for the software with Rapiscan.

The agency's statement also said the remaining scanners will move travelers through more quickly, meaning faster lanes at the airport. Those scanners, made by L-3 Communications, used millimeter waves to make an image. The company was able to come up with software that no longer produced a naked image of a traveler's body.

The TSA will remove all 174 backscatter scanners from the 30 airports they're used in now. Another 76 are in storage. It has 669 of the millimeter wave machines it is keeping, plus options for 60 more, TSA spokesman David Castelveter said.

Not all of the machines will be replaced. Castelveter said that some airports that now have backscatter scanners will go back to having metal detectors. That's what most airports used before scanners were introduced.

The Rapiscan scanners have been on their way out for months, in slow motion.

The government hadn't bought any since 2011. It quietly removed them from seven major airports in October, including New York's LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, Chicago's O'Hare, and Los Angeles International. The TSA moved a handful of the X-ray scanners to very small airports. At the time, the agency said the switch was being made because millimeter-wave scanners moved passengers through faster.

Rapiscan parent company OSI Systems Inc. said it will help the TSA move the scanners to other government agencies. It hasn't yet been decided where they will go, said Alan Edrick, OSI's chief financial officer, in an interview.

Scanners are often used in prisons or on military bases where privacy is not a concern.

"There's quite a few agencies which will have a great deal of interest" in the scanners, Edrick said.

OSI is taking a one-time charge of $2.7 million to cover the money spent trying to develop software to blur the image, and to move the machines out of airports, Edrick said.

The contract to change the software on the scanners came under scrutiny in November when the TSA delivered a "show cause" letter to the company looking into allegations that it falsified test data, which the company denied. On Thursday it said final resolution of that issue needs approval by the Department of Homeland Security.

The agreement with the TSA is an indication that OSI Systems will be cleared of the issues raised by the agency, Roth Capital Partners analyst Jeff Martin wrote on Friday. OSI shares soared $2.37, or 3.5 percent, to close at $70.02.

Besides the scanners being dropped by TSA, Hawthorne, Calif.-based OSI Systems makes other passenger scanners used in other countries, as well as luggage scanners and medical scanners.

Related:

The Chertoff Connection: Body Scanners Are About Profits Not Protection