SARASOTA - One tool airports use to keep weapons off of planes is coming under more scrutiny.
Germany has rejected use of full-body scanners used at many American airports – including Sarasota Bradenton International – after a ten-month trial that showed they came up with false alarms 49% of the time.
Ten years after 9-11, airports still race to stay a step ahead of terrorists.
“The problem with any security that we have at an airport is unfortunately, you have to have to be right 100% of the time,” says Rick Piccolo, president of Sarasota Manatee International Airport.
Full body scanners believed to help do that have gone into service at airports around the country – including the Suncoast's. A company called L-3 Communications makes the ones used here – and the ones Germany rejected – saying that they often mistook human sweat for explosives.
“When they can't distinguish between body sweat and explosives, or the pleats in a traveler's pants and an underwear bomb,” says John Verdi of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which opposes the scanners on privacy grounds. “It's not making anyone safer.”
But while German officials said the scanners flagged too many innocent things, they did not suggest that the scanners failed to catch any genuine weapons.
“All it said was that it was providing too many false alarms,” says Piccolo, “which slows down the process but doesn't let people through that aren't supposed to be through.”
Piccolo asked the Transportation Safety Administration, which operates the body scanners, for more information about how German officials reached their decision. He says they should get answers sometime next week. If it's only a matter of the scanners doing too through a job, it might also be a matter of better safe than sorry.
“I think it's worth that for the sake of security,” said Piccolo. “I would also think that if the false positive alarm is too high that they would work to lessen that (the number of false alarms),” adding that he's not had complaints or heard of undue delays from the three scanners that SRQ uses.
