TSA Tacitly Admits $1 Billion Dollar Body Scanner System Is Critically Flawed
The Transportation Security Administration has tacitly admitted that the critical flaws brought to light in a viral You Tube video yesterday which exposed how airport body scanners could easily be beaten are accurate, rendering the entire $1 billion dollar program virtually worthless.
Engineer Jon Corbett of the popular blog TSA Out of Our Pants! posted a video yesterday that demonstrates how the TSA’s radiation firing body scanners can easily be bypassed. The clip has already received over 700,000 views.
The video shows Corbett carrying a metal case through the scanner, away from his body in his side pocket. Corbett explains that because metallic objects appear as black on the image the scanners produce, the machines do not pick up such objects if they are obscured by the background, which is also black.
The video went viral and despite You Tube slapping an age-restricted censor on the clip, the story was picked up by dozens of major news outlets, forcing the TSA to respond.
On the TSA’s official blog, the agency attempts to discredit Corbett by describing him as “some guy” who launched a “crude attempt to allegedly show how to circumvent TSA screening procedures.”
However, nowhere in the response does the TSA actually address or attempt to disprove Corbett’s demonstration that the body scanner can be easily fooled.
In labeling Corbett’s successful effort to evade the body scanner as “crude,” the TSA has inadvertently admitted that its $1 billion dollar body scanner system can be defeated by “crude” methods.
Body scanners are “one layer of our 20 layers of security,” the blog states, before adding, “our nation’s aviation system is much safer now with the deployment of 600 imaging technology units at 140 airports.”
Obviously, it is not safer if these 600 units can all be rendered useless merely by placing an object inside a pocket sown on to the side of a shirt.
Illustrating how insufficient the TSA’s response is in disproving Corbett’s evidence, the comments in response to the blog post completely savage the federal agency.
“Beautiful, so instead of posting anything to refute the video and/or support it. You give us the old soft shoe and call it good. Sorry, not good enough, if someone has figured out how to bypass the screening. Then this is a cause for concern,” writes one.
“So, TSA detects an artfully concealed item, and it makes that detection a part of its weekly brag report, saying “look how wonderful AIT is, it caught this”. But then when ordinary people find a way to smuggle contraband past a checkpoint, TSA’s response is “oh, that’s not important, because we have other layers, too. Either AIT is important, or it’s not. Which is it, TSA?” asks another.
“This was such a carefully worded blog post that one can safely conclude that the vulnerability described in the video is true,” adds another.
Almost all of the 60 odd comments made in response to the TSA blog post are critical of the agency and express the belief that Corbett’s video has completely destroyed the justification behind body scanners.
During a press conference yesterday, Janet Napolitano was asked about the viral video but stated she had no knowledge of it. Napolitano has probably heard of it by now given the fact that it could represent the final nail in the coffin for the TSA’s expensive, unpopular and completely useless body scanner program.
Comments
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