TSA and body scanners

This item appears on page 4 of the May 2013 issue.

The US Congress passed a law requiring that by June 1, 2013, all full-body scanners used in US airports must produce only a generic outline instead of an image of a naked body. 

The maker of one of the two types of full-body scanners is unable to meet that deadline, so the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been removing 250 backscatter x-ray scanners from the 30 airports where they were used and replacing them with millimeter wave scanners. 

The TSA currently has 669 millimeter wave scanners, and some are being transferred from smaller airports to larger ones. Some smaller airports may have to go back to using metal detectors only.