Last year during summer season, the Transportation Security Administration, also known as TSA, claimed that, all ‘Body Scan Images’ could not be stored or recorded, but today, despite all such past statements by our much sincere government agencies, a federal agency has admitted to having stored about 35,000 Body Scan Images.
As CNET wrote, the US Marshals Service admitted this week that roughly tens of thousands of Body Scan Images that were recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse, had been underhandedly saved by it.
According to the latest reports, the TSA recently noted that all of its checkpoint scanners, being used at airports, were required to have the ability to save and share images. The agency further added that such features are only for ‘testing, training and evaluation’.
However, it has also been reported that the capability to record or store ‘Body Scan Images’ is not normally activated when such instruments are installed at airports.
Sari Koshetz, a spokesperson for the TSA, later said “the image storage capability of body scanners are never activated when deployed in airports”.
The detail and resolution of these Body Scan Images reportedly differs depending on the technology used in the scanner i.e. millimeter wave v/s X-ray backscatter.
The privacy advocates have strongly been criticizing the machines for generating images so graphic they are tantamount to ‘virtual strip-searching’ since the news of storing the ‘Body Scan Images’ started to surf around and the Electronic Privacy Information Center is at present willing to sue the TSA to suspend the exploitation of body scanners at US airports.
Body Scan Images
