Pro Publica: How Good Are The TSA’s Body Scanners?

“I’ve had it tested, and to me it’s not acceptable,” Mica said at the hearing earlier this year. “If we could reveal the failure rate, the American public would be outraged.”

Mica’s comments received almost no press coverage. But his outrage, together with other reports by government inspectors and outside researchers, raise the disturbing possibility that body scanners are performing far less well than the TSA contends.

The issue is difficult to assess since the government classifies the detection rates of the devices, saying it doesn’t want to give terrorists a sense of their chances of beating the system.

But the evidence is mounting.

Just last week, Department of Homeland Security investigators reported that they had “identified vulnerabilities” in the scanners’ detection capability, though the specifics remain classified. Previous research cast doubt on whether the scanners, which are designed to see underneath clothing, would detect a carefully concealed plastic explosive like the one used by the underwear bomber on Christmas Day 2009. One study suggests the $170,000 scanners would likely miss some explosives that could be found during a pat-down.

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Originally published on Pro Publica. Republished with kind permission.