Imagine that. The federal government wasn’t honest about something. What else could they be hiding or lying to us about? -Ed.
After years of assurances from government officials that the feds’ full-body scans of airline passengers and other persons are discarded immediately and never saved, the truth comes out: Some federal agencies have indeed been keeping the images.
As a result of a lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is seeking an injunction against such scanners in airports, it has emerged that the U.S. Marshals Service has retained over 35,000 full-body images of persons entering the Orlando, Fla., federal courthouse, Declan McCullagh reported at CNet News.
On top of that, added McCullagh, another scanner tested in the Washington, D.C., federal courthouse was returned to the manufacturer with the images still in the machine’s database. Where those images are now is anybody’s guess.
The Transportation Security Administration has not been implicated thus far, but its specifications for airport scanners are not encouraging. McCullagh wrote:
A 70-page document showing the TSA’s procurement specifications, classified as “sensitive security information,” says that in some modes the scanner must “allow exporting of image data in real time” and provide a mechanism for “high-speed transfer of image data” over the network. (It also says that image filters will “protect the identity, modesty, and privacy of the passenger.”)
The TSA has also admitted, in a letter to the House Homeland Security Committee, that the scanners “have the capability to retain and export imagines only for testing, training, and evaluation purposes,” though it insists that the machines delivered to airports are incapable of storing, printing, or transmitting images.