IU professor: Airport scanners have many limitations

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March 17--Whole-body scanners at airport checkpoints have proved to be expensive and probably ineffective, according to an Indiana University security and privacy expert testifying Wednesday before a congressional committee in Washington.

"Even if advanced imaging technologies were living up to their technological potential, their potential is clearly limited" in what they can find and identify, said Professor Fred H. Cate, speaking to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The committee is holding hearings into the effectiveness of procedures, such as the controversial airport pat-downs by the Transportation Security Administration.

He said the advanced imaging scanners or AITs "do not detect explosives. They do not detect firearms.

They do not distinguish dangerous from ordinary materials.

All they are technologically capable of doing is calling attention of the TSA screeners to 'anomalies' on the person of a traveler."

Cate, who directs the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, has been a critic of TSA procedures.

He told of a personal experience last week in the Washington National Airport, when TSA agents saw a loose aspirin in his pocket, patted him down and accepted the answer that the pill was just an aspirin when it could have been a lethal drug.

He also is a diabetic with an insulin pump strapped to his waist. He has been subjected to an extensive physical pat-down in airports, "but at the end of the search, the agent had no better idea than he did at the beginning whether the pump is loaded with insulin or high-tech explosives."

Such false positives divert screeners' attention from real threats, he told the House committee.

"We have spent $2 billion installing technology to identify anomalies that then can't be evaluated for their risks," he said.

"This inability to clear false positives has led to the TSA's disastrous policy of intimate, intrusive searches. And despite their intimacy, the searches are not linked to a process for determining whether the anomaly is a real risk."

Real terrorists are always learning from the past and trying to invent new ways around security, he said, so the TSA should spend less time and money focusing on past events and backward-looking technology.