Full-body scannersControversial full-body scanners at U.S. airports to be replaced

The  controversial full-body airport scanners which  upset many  passengers because of the anatomically accurate images they produced, will be removed from U.S. airports by June, according to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), ending a $40 million contract with Rapiscan Systems, the manufacturer of the scanners.

The approximately 250 scanners the TSA will be removing from airports, however, will not be collecting dust for long  The TSA has reached an agreement with Rapiscan Systems  to use the devices for “other mission priorities within the government,” the TSA said in an official blog post.

“We are working with the TSA to send them to other government agencies that already use the technology,” Peter Kant, executive vice president at Rapiscan, told Talking Points Memo in a phone interview. Rapiscan is a subsidiary of OSI Systems.

Kant would not say which government agencies would be receiving the scanners and how many they would get, but he did say the scanners would be used by “military and law enforcement, for the most part.”

“We have a long history of working with the TSA and we support the move of these technologies,” Kant told TPM.

TPM reports that the scanners, specifically Rapiscan’s implementation of the scanners, have raised both privacy and health questions. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, though, released a study in 2010, saying the scanners presented “no more than a miniscule risk to people being scanned.”

It was privacy concerns over the  detailed images of passenger’s bodies which  ultimately led to the undoing of Rapiscan’s contract with the TSA.

The TSA will replace the roughly 250 individual Rapiscan Secure 1000SP scanners with a new type of technology, millimeter wave, which use radio waves instead of X-rays, and have not raised nearly as many health questions or privacy concerns.

Rapiscan will not upgrade the removed scanners with any new technology before the redeployment, Kant told TPM. Instead, Rapiscan will eat $2.7 million in order to remove and redeploy the scanners, but will most likely sign new contracts with  agencies that use the scanners later this year.

The scanners were originally deployed in airports across the country in the wake of the December 2010 “underwear” bomber attempt on a Delta flight heading for Detroit. The scanners rely on a technology called backscatter, which involves beaming low dose X-rays against a passenger’s entire body.  Rapiscan says on its Web site that it uses a narrow pencil tip sized beam, and then collects and analyzes the resulting photons that bounce back off the person’s body.

Security officials can then pinpoint whether the passenger is carrying a prohibited item that is not made of metal, such as plastic explosives.

“There’s no other effective way to detect explosives aside from hand scanning, which is even more invasive,” Kant TPM. “That’s why we went and developed this technology. It’s the most widely used non-metal scanning detector in the world.”