The Scanner Scam

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Never one to cross the road to avoid an approaching bandwagon UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has given the go-ahead for full body scanners to be introduced at Britain's airports. BAA, which runs six UK airports rather badly, said it would now install the machines "as soon as is practical" at Heathrow. Experts have questioned the scanners' effectiveness at detecting the type of bomb allegedly used on Christmas Day in an attempted plane attack over Detroit.

Here's the latest hoop to jump through. Yes, there's a 'professional' that can see all your gadgetry. That part I don't personally mind, but just where is it gonna stop? This is incremental erosion of privacy and freedom, all in the name of the government protecting you.

The £80,000 full body scanners, which produce "naked" images of passengers, remove the need for "pat down" searches. They work by beaming electromagnetic waves on to passengers while they stand in a booth. A virtual three-dimensional image is then created from the reflected energy. Some have voiced concerns about privacy, with campaigners saying they are tantamount to a "strip search".

In the London Evening Standard Tory MP Ben Wallace, who was involved in the testing and development of the technology, warns it was not "the big silver bullet". He said the "passive millimeter wave scanners" probably would not have picked up the failed Detroit airliner plot or the explosives used in the 2005 London bombings.

Mr Wallace (Lancaster & Wyre) was employed by QinetiQ as their overseas director in the security and intelligence division. QinetiQ helped develop the passive millimeter wave technology. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The advantage of the millimeter waves are that they can be used at longer range, they can be quicker and they are harmless to travellers.


Body Scanner

"But there is a big but and the but was all the testing that we undertook, it was unlikely that it would have picked up the current explosive devices being used by al Qaeda. It probably wouldn't have picked up the Detroit Delta Airlines bomb on Christmas Day." He continued: "It probably wouldn't have picked up the very large plot with the liquids in 2006 at Heathrow or indeed the later July bombs that were used on the Tube because it wasn't very good and it wasn't that easy to detect liquids and plastics unless they were very solid plastics.

In the same paper columnist Sam Leith observes; “The political necessity of being seen to do something in the wake of a terror attempt means security rules are always out of sync. We wait for something we know was possible to be attempted, then panic about it. We're like public-health programmes vaccinating against last year's strain of flu.”

Philip Baum, editor of Aviation Security International, said scanners were not the only solution and profiling passengers was, in fact, the best way to prevent terrorist acts. "We've got to face the fact that you can build a bomb in the duty free shop, after you've gone through screening. Bearing that in mind, we need to look at what people's intent is, not what they are carrying on their person."

Altogether with the questions over whether these scanners really work there is the question of knee jerk reactions to yesterday’s problems. The only really effective form of Airport security (ask El Al and the Israeli’s ) is that based on profiling rather than installing expensive equipment and creating nightmare queues for families with children, elderly, disabled and frequent flyers to go through. Of course the big disadvantage of this only proven secure method of protecting planes, airports and passengers is it can’t be carried out by scarcely trained outsourced minimum wage staff?

TAKE A LOOK AT THIS VIDEO TO SEE WHAT THESE SCANNERS ARE REALLY LIKE