Anchorage Daily News

Despite a U.S. House vote in June to limit their use, electronic strip searches are routine now at an increasing number of U.S. airports. The Transportation Security Administration is gearing up to use these invasive searches, which literally see through clothing to reveal the passenger's body, on every person who goes through security at U.S. airports. Whoa, tiger.

The TSA's enthusiasm for the devices reverses its own policy, which until this year reserved whole-body image scanners for cases where additional screening was required for some reason. In other words, if you set off an alarm going through the standard metal screener, you could get the full-body scan that sees through your clothes or submit to a pat-down search.

Now the goal is to replace the metal-detecting screeners with the euphemistically named "image scanners." The machines use what's called millimeter-wave technology to provide a virtual strip search of a fully clothed passenger.

Where six airports were using the scanners about a year ago, more than 20 airports are using them now, and they've already replaced some metal-detecting machines.

The House voted 310-118 to restrict the scanners to secondary screening and imposed other limits to protect privacy. Passengers would have to be given information about the searches, and they could choose to be wanded or have a pat-down search instead. The House measure also banned any storage capacity for the images, so they would immediately disappear after the person cleared the security check.

Similar legislation is still pending in the Senate.

But TSA isn't waiting for the people's elected representatives to set the rules.

TSA does have strict protocols in place to protect passengers' privacy. The officer who looks at the scan doesn't see the passenger; no cell phones or cameras are allowed in control rooms; machines include no storage or memory.

All that's fine, but it isn't law. Those protections can be changed by bureaucratic whim.

In effect, TSA leaders are deciding the extent to which they can invade citizens' privacy and what protections they will provide. That's too much authority to give to any bureaucracy.

TSA has a job to do, and the electronic scans save time in doing it for both agents and passengers. Some passengers prefer the method as less intrusive than a pat-down.

Others are outraged at the invasion of privacy. Some question how much more security the scanners provide. And the potential for abuses is obvious.

Privacy-rights groups have called on Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to suspend the conversion to whole-body scanners until privacy provisions are tighter -- and until the Senate takes a closer look at the House action in June.

That makes sense. The high-tech scanners are a good secondary screening tool. Beyond that, if Americans are required to submit to electronic strip searches in order to fly, that mandate should come from elected officials who have to explain their decision to voters, not from a bureaucratic agency.

BOTTOM LINE: TSA should stop expansion of electronic strip searches until Americans decide if the security increase justifies the invasion of privacy.

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