At Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, four cutting-edge scanners can literally look inside passengers' clothes and detect the kind of explosive that almost brought down a Northwest Airlines jetliner approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.
Relatively few passengers go through these Advanced Imaging Technology devices, however. That's because the machines are employed only for "secondary" screening of a select few chosen at random or because something didn't look right in the primary screening by metal detecting devices.
The technology, which produces a revealing image of the contours of the human body, has been criticized by privacy advocates and civil libertarians. But a sampling of opinion among BWI passengers Tuesday found that almost all would support widespread use of the technology if it would make them safer.
Deloris Allen of Port Arthur, Texas, said she was "skeptical" about the notion of having her body image being displayed on a screen. But in light of recent events, she said she wouldn't mind.
"If it's going to stop the problem that happened, I'm all for it," the 66-year-old said. "I don't want to be blown up in the air. I really don't."
The federal Transportation Security Administration has deployed 40 of the high-tech scanners in 19 airports around the United States, including BWI and Washington's Reagan National Airport. The agency recently announced that it has bought 150 more and that it plans to acquire another 300 next year.
According to TSA spokeswoman Lauren Gaches, nobody is now being required to pass through such screeners. Whether selected for secondary screening at an airport such as BWI or passing through one of the six airports that use the "millimeter wave" machines as their primary scanning devices, passengers have the option of choosing more traditional methods such as wand screenings or pat-down searches.
Other countries have been even slower to adopt such technology. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian Muslim who is accused of attempting to detonate a device using the non-metallic explosive powder PETN aboard Northwest Flight 253, apparently passed through nothing more sophisticated than a standard magnetometer - useful for detecting metals but not PETN - on his flight from Lagos, Nigeria, through Amsterdam to Detroit.
