"Stripping" scanner at Hamburg Airport
At that time, a decision was made to abandon their use: the devices were too slow and unreliable; 70 percent of passengers still had to undergo personal pat-down searches after scanning.
However, scanners eventually caught on in six German airports: 14 'stripping' devices that scan passengers down to the skin are now used in Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt am Main. Primarily, security personnel use scanners to examine passengers flying to the United States of America and Israel.
The same practice will continue in the future, said Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate. The use of the machines is not a ministerial order: airport management companies voluntarily decide to use them.
In the near future – over the remaining two months of this year – another 14 such scanners will appear at airports in Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, and Cologne/Bonn. In 2015, it is planned to install about 75 scanners for screening airline passengers at all German airports from which international flights depart.
Tobias Plate cites the progress in the development of both weapons and the devices themselves as the reason for the blanket coverage of German airports with screening scanners, not a change towards stricter security rules. On the one hand, attackers have gained access to new types of weapons and the ability to produce explosives virtually at home using 3D printing technologies; on the other hand, scanners manufactured by the American company L-3 are now capable of detecting those explosives and many other deadly technical innovations.
Unlike simple metal detectors, scanners help find dangerous substances that do not contain metal – liquids or powders. When the use of such technologies becomes widespread, by the end of 2016 it will be possible to say goodbye to the rules introduced after the September 11 attacks banning liquids on board aircraft.
The cost of one scanner for screening airline passengers is about 200,000 euros. Each explosive detection sensor costs another 60,000: for a scanner in the familiar arch form through which a passenger walks, several such sensors are required. According to Tobias Plate, the new scanners are noticeably different from those that caused numerous complaints a few years ago.
Already in 2012, a new phase of testing began – this time at Frankfurt am Main Airport. While in Hamburg the technology triggered false alarms when scanning 70 percent of passengers, in Frankfurt errors occurred in only half the cases. According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Germany is developing its own scanners on behalf of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, which will also be able to 'strip' passengers on the go – the scanned person will no longer need to enter a special booth and raise their hands, which will significantly speed up the check.
It is worth noting that currently in Germany only scanners are used that show airport staff the scanned passenger only as a pictogram, not their naked body: suspicious items are marked with yellow squares on this image. In this way, law enforcement agencies have managed to appease both the majority of passengers and human rights activists, who were concerned that such screening constitutes a serious intrusion into a person's private life, because it allows seeing physical defects, as well as tattoos and piercings. The first scanners tested in Hamburg four years ago provided airport staff with fairly detailed images of each scanned passenger.
However, as the reputable computer magazine c’t once reported, followed by 'RG/RB', even the new generation of screening scanners cannot do without human intervention: the device cannot itself determine where hidden suspicious items are on a passenger's body. In a specially equipped secret room deep within the airport, a specialist sits at a computer monitor, who is forbidden from having a camera or mobile phone. This employee sees the original 'naked' image of the passenger from the scanner, and marks the suspicious areas with those same yellow squares at their own discretion: they are then passed to the public monitor as a symbolic image.
Pyotr LEVSKY.
'Russkaya Germaniya'