Are North Country airports taking next big step?

By Melissa Erny
Airports around the world are adding more and more security by placing new devices called full body scanners into action. International airports have become a main location for the technology, but it is still uncertain whether local airports – Plattsburgh International Airport, Albany International Airport and Burlington International Airport – will be getting the technology.
The Transportation Security Administration placed 150 of these new scanners into airports across the United States at the beginning of 2010 because of the attempted Christmas Day attack that occurred on a flight to Detroit. The TSA says that the technology can catch things a metal detector misses and would be able to replace pat-down searches. At the end of January, they announced 300 more of these scanners would be purchased and distributed, but had no comment on where they would be going.
Thomas Long, manager of the Plattsburgh International Airport, would not comment as to whether or not he knew if any of these full body scanners coming to his airport. Similar walls were put into place by management at the Albany International Airport, Burlington International Airport and the Burlington division of the TSA, blocking any information saying if scanners will be coming to the North Country region in the near future. “We cannot make a comment at this time,” a representative from the Burlington TSA said when asked to be interviewed on the matter. He said the only information available on the scanners can be found on the national TSA website, http://www.tsa.gov.
There is still some hope for those in the area who want full body scanners to secure their travel and willing to drive about 70 miles to get it. In Montreal’s January 22 newspaper, The Gazette, Mathieu Larocque, a spokesman for the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, announced that they are in the process of putting 11 full body scanners in the Montreal International Airport. The timeline is still unclear for when they will be up and running, but Larocque says they hope these scanners will be ready come this spring.
Full body scanners are backscatter machines that use millimeter waves to take a 3D X-ray image of their body. Passengers step into it one at a time with their hands over their heads, fingertips touching, while it scans the image. The idea is for them to replace metal detectors and physical pat-downs.
Before the Christmas Day terrorist attempt, the amount that the images revealed and who was viewing them concerned many people and was a major reason for why more were not already in place.
For those worried about what an image reveals, the new technology has developed so that scans blur the passenger’s face and he or she appears to be no more than a chalk outline. It focuses mainly on areas where items are frequently concealed. They reveal items that metal detectors cannot, like plastic or chemical explosives and nonmetallic weapons hidden in pockets or strapped to a person’s body. Machines can also show guns, knives and other metallic objects that metal detectors catch.
The process takes two different security guards; one assisting the passenger and running the machine, and one closed in a walled off room where they can only see the image and not the person. The guard viewing the images cannot take a cell phone or camera in with him and images are not saved or able to print. When the screen guard notices something unusual, he alerts the guard assisting the passenger to check them further.
Unfortunately, the technology still takes around 15 seconds to scan one passenger, making it slower than using metal detectors. Though the TSA insists that in some instances the technology is actually faster. For persons who would usually have to go through a metal detector multiple times due to some medical devices, they would only have to go through the full body scanner once.
According to the TSA, the millimeter wave technology these scanners use is less than what you are exposed to while using a cell phone. The backscatter machines used also pose no threat to a person’s health. The X-ray technology is equivalent to what someone gets from riding on a plane for two minutes, says the TSA.
Physical pat-downs are still offered for anyone who is still unsure or afraid of the technology.