We've noted all sorts of privacy and health problems related to full body "naked" scanners -- but there's a separate but important question: do they actually work? There's been some evidence presented that they wouldn't have spotted a variety of recent terrorism attempts, but now German police have noted that the machines also have a ridiculously high false alarm rate:

The weekly, Welt am Sonntag, quoting a police report, said 35 percent of the 730,000 passengers checked by the scanners set off the alarm more than once despite being innocent.
The report said the machines were confused by several layers of clothing, boots, zip fasteners and even pleats, while in 10 percent of cases the passenger's posture set them off.
[....]
In the wake of the 10-month trial which began on September 27 last year, German federal police see no interest in carrying out any more tests with the scanners until new more effective models become available, Welt am Sonntag said.

I would argue that this is actually worse than useless, in that providing a significant number of false positives makes it much, much harder to spot the actual positives. It desensitizes agents to assume that any alarm is a false alarm.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Read more http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110805/15314915411/german-police-admit-that-full-body-naked-airport-scanners-suck-35-false-alarm-rate.shtml

• < Prev
• Next >