London’s Heathrow Airport to begin using full-body scanners

LONDON — Despite ongoing privacy concerns, authorities will start using full-body scanners at Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s busiest, in about three weeks, the British government announced Tuesday.

The move reflected the determination of Prime Minister Gordon Brown to deploy the controversial technology as soon as possible in the wake of the failed attack Christmas Day on a Detroit-bound airliner from Amsterdam. Such scanners already are being tested at a smaller airport in northern England.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson told
lawmakers that body scanners would have stood a “50 percent to 60
percent chance” at detecting the explosives concealed by alleged bomber
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in his underwear before he boarded the Northwest Airlines flight.

However, Johnson added, the machines at Heathrow
will not be used on all travelers but rather “on a random basis” as
part of a beefed-up security strategy that would also include deploying
more sniffer dogs, training staffers to spot unusual passenger behavior
and installing sophisticated explosives-detection equipment in all
British airports by year’s end. “The scanners themselves aren’t the
magic bullet here,” Johnson said. “We need to use this perhaps not as
the first line, but as the second line … of our defense.”

As in the U.S., critics in Britain
have been outspoken in their concern over privacy, calling the
technology “electronic strip-searching” because the machines see
through clothing to generate detailed images of people’s bodies.

As an added difficulty for the British government,
children’s-rights activists here say that such revealing images of
minors could be tantamount to child pornography and therefore illegal.

The Guardian newspaper reported Tuesday that a trial run of the machines under way at the international airport in Manchester, in northern England, began last month only after children under 18 were exempted from scanning.

Johnson did not say whether the same restriction would apply at Heathrow,
whose five terminals serve 68 million passengers a year. But he
insisted that measures would be in place to preserve as much privacy as
possible. The scanners’ images are to be destroyed immediately after
viewing, and the screeners themselves would not be in the same room as
the person being scanned.

The government is “mindful of civil liberties
concerns,” Johnson said, but also “conscious of our overriding
obligations to protect people’s life and liberty.”

Two full-body scanners already are in use at Los Angeles International Airport, where they serve as a security measure when passengers set off metal detectors, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam
said it would introduce scanners for passengers on all U.S.-bound
flights, but those machines will be fitted with software that projects
a stylized human figure rather than an image of the actual person’s
body, The Associated Press reported Tuesday.

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