LiveWire

All that controversy, all that fighting, all that radiation, all that taxpayer money and they’ve been “quietly” removing them for the past several weeks. These bastards put us through so much for so long. Infuriating. Keep in mind, there will now be different, supposedly less naked, more cartoon figure machines in their place. Click through and read the whole thing.

Via Mashable.

You know those x-ray body scanners that not only expose you to radiation but reveal your nakedness to security agents? That unsettling experience will be a thing of the past at many major airports, because the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been quietly removing them, according to ProPublica.

Over the past few weeks, the TSA has quietly removed backscatter x-ray scanners from airports in Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Orlando and New York’s JFK, replacing them with safer millimeter wave scanners.

Those new devices use less-harmful radio waves similar to cellphone signals rather than the ionizing radiation emitted by x-rays, and they show a cartoon-like figure to the security agent instead of a realistic negative image of a traveler’s body.

The new scanners are smarter, too — able to automatically detect which items are threats and then showing them on the screen alongside that cartoon figure. Using this technology, agents will only need to view those images when the computer has detected a threat.

Many of the removed backscatter machines will be sent to smaller airports. Meanwhile, the TSA says the new millimeter wave scanning machines will move people through airport checkpoints faster, because the old backscatter X-ray machines require a TSA agent to view each image.