Software and smart cards
Can technology improve airport security while reducing the hassles for passengers?
Since then, one company that makes the machines--Rapiscan Systems--has developed a way to "fuzzy up" body images to eliminate clear images of private parts. The firm is also working on a way to show only contraband superimposed on a generic body image. But Peter Williamson, Rapiscan vice president for sales, cautions that "if you compromise [the view] too much, you have a nice, privacy-enhanced product that doesn't work."
In late December, the TSA quietly named 16 "model airports" to test either the backscatter or trace portals or both. Four airports--Baltimore, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Jacksonville, Fla.--will do the first round of double tasking, starting within the next few months. The agency wants to see how multiple new technologies work together--or don't--in real airport settings.
Perfecting passenger prescreening
It has been years in the making, but the TSA thinks it finally has the solution to the vexing problem of how to use air passengers' names to root out terrorists. A new system, Secure Flight, could begin in August. The program is the successor to the controversial computer-assisted passenger prescreening system, or CAPPS II, which drew heavy fire from civil liberties groups for relying on commercial databases and using computer formulas that color-coded each passenger based on the potential threat he or she posed. The airline-administered checks of government watch lists incorrectly flagged many passengers, and there was no easy way to fix the errors.
This newest iteration has the TSA do the name checks, skips the color-coding, uses sharper name-matching software, and includes a smoother method for handling travelers' complaints, says Justin Oberman, chief of the TSA's Office of Transportation Vetting and Credentialing. The Government Accountability Office reported last month that Secure Flight seemed to be on the right track--so far. But groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center say they still have significant concerns.
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