Travelers React to Orlando Airport's New Full-Body Scanners
Monday, November 22, 2010
By: Nicole Creston

November 22, 2010 | WMFE - This is the busiest travel week of the year...and this year, it comes in the middle of a big debate over new airport security measures. Earlier this month, the Transportation Security Administration started using one of its new full-body scanners at Orlando International Airport, and many Central Florida fliers are wondering what the new procedures are like.

At Orlando International’s Terminal A security checkpoint, passengers drag carry-on baggage into a line snaking slowly toward a row of metal detectors, wand-wielding TSA agents…and one hulking blue machine.

It’s Orlando’s first full-body scanner, and passengers are being randomly selected to go through. It bounces low-level X-rays off the skin to let agents see what’s under a person’s clothes. But Orlando traveler Tracy O’Connor says when she was selected for a scan, nobody told her that.

“They didn’t really explain what was going on,” O’Connor says. “I stood in the little area and they said, ‘Hold your hands up, place your feet in the markings,’ then I stood there for a while and they said, ‘Okay.’ I’m like, that’s it?”

O’Connor says that really was it, for the moment. She didn’t think about it again until she saw examples of scanner images on TV.

“After seeing on the news what they’re actually seeing, I could see how people would not like that,” O’Connor points out. “So, I guess I was a little bit more comfortable not knowing at the time.”

O’Connor now feels the scanner images are a bit too graphic. But Orlando traveler Joe Zimmer, who’s also been through one of the machines, says he doesn’t mind a scanner that can see through his clothes, if it stops terrorists.

“It’s looking for a gun, it’s looking for a bomb, it’s looking for whatever is not you,” explains Zimmer. “And quite frankly, in my opinion, I’m traveling a lot now for what I do for a living [and] I feel pretty good about this. I think we’ve got to keep as many steps ahead of them as we can.”

Security experts disagree on whether the scanners will make it easier to catch terrorists, but in any case, Zimmer didn’t find the scan invasive. He says the images from the scanners look to him like anonymous human forms. The machines are designed to blur out faces and identifying characteristics. Florida TSA official Sari Koshetz says that’s one of many privacy safeguards.

“The officer viewing the image is remotely located and can never see the actual passenger,” explains Koshetz. “Also, the image won’t be stored, transmitted or printed and it is deleted immediately once viewed. In fact, the machines have zero storage capability.”

Koshetz adds that passengers can always “opt out” of the scanner and get a physical pat-down instead, but not everyone’s satisfied with that option. In fact, civil liberties advocates say it’s even worse, since the TSA’s new pat-down procedures allow officers to touch personal areas that up until last month were off limits. Either way, they think the scanners and pat-downs go too far in trading privacy for security.

“We could eliminate hundreds of thousands of highway deaths if we change the speed limit on the highways to 30 mph, and we could save far more lives than have ever been lost in terrorism,” says Glenn Katon, senior attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “But we as a society say you know what, we value freedom more than that. There are all sorts of oppressive things we can do in our society to make us safer, but we say generally that we want to maximize our freedom and limit the government’s power over us to the maximum amount that’s practical.”

The ACLU is gathering complaints about the machines nationwide, with an eye toward legal action. A D.C.-based privacy rights firm has already filed suit against use of the scanners. Some conservative groups are also fighting the machines – one’s launched a campaign to blanket Capitol Hill with thousands of letters of protest. There’s even a grassroots effort on Facebook asking travelers to refuse the scan on Wednesday, November 24^th, which has been dubbed “National Opt-Out Day.”

Back at Orlando International Airport, reactions remain mixed.

“I think it’s a little bit bizarre. It’s a bit strange how much they actually need to see of you,” says Lisa Rhodes, a tourist visiting from Sheffield, England.

“Far as I’m concerned, whatever they have to do, they have to do it. That’s it. It’s a lot better than having another plane go down,” says Dave Hotchkiss of Leesburg, Florida, as he waits at the gate for his arriving family.

“I think if you had to strip down to your buff in reality and stand there naked, that would be an invasion of privacy,” says Linda Cole, an American who flies often for her teaching job in Thailand.

The TSA says there will be four more scanners installed in the Orlando airport by the end of the year.