TSA Scanner Argument Grounded by Delta Shuttle

Jeffrey Goldberg
Bloomberg
January 3, 2012

One of the great joys of flying the Delta Shuttle to Washington, D.C., out of the Marine Air Terminal at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport — oh, what am I saying? There are no joys associated with flying the Delta Shuttle from LaGuardia, or from anywhere.

Let me try this again: One of the small consolations of flying the Delta Shuttle out of LaGuardia is the absence, at the Marine Air Terminal, of the Transportation Security Administration’s patented Let’s-Look-At- Passengers-Naked-While-They-Raise-Their-Hands-Like-We’re- Mugging-Them Machines. (This is not, by the way, how the federal government refers to these devices.)

The TSA deploys two types of advanced passenger- screening machines in U.S. airports: Millimeter-wave whole- body imagers and so-called backscatter X-ray devices, both of which can detect non-metallic objects under a person’s clothing. These very expensive machines are crucial to the TSA’s protocol, which is why it strikes me as strange that the security checkpoint at the Marine Air Terminal goes without one, and instead relies on an old-fashioned metal detector.

On busy days, more than a dozen flights are dispatched from the Marine Air Terminal to Washington’s Reagan National Airport, which, as anyone who has flown there knows, is mere seconds by air from the White House and the U.S. Capitol (as well as TSA headquarters, it should be noted). Why would the federal government not equip this particular terminal with its most advanced machinery? The answer is both banal and telling.

Full article here

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