The Malaysian Insider

LONDON, Jan 11 — The European Union’s counter-terrorism coordinator announced over the weekend that he supports plans to introduce full body scanners at airports throughout the continent.

Reacting to the foiled terrorist attack on a United States-bound airplane on Christmas Day, Gilles de Kerchove, a Belgian whose job is to promote European security measures, claimed that the scanners “are useful, very useful even, for detecting cases such as the Detroit case where someone hid explosives around his private parts which are not searched by hand”.

However, de Kerchove’s intervention is unlikely to silence a growing European debate about the use of devices capable of peering through clothes to create three-dimensional images of passengers.

Airport operators are scrambling to deal with technical difficulties. And civil liberties campaigners are outraged about the legal implications.

Last week, Britain and the Netherlands led the way in adopting the scanners, largely for political and commercial reasons.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who allegedly attempted to destroy the Detroit-bound plane, studied in London and boarded his airliner after evading Dutch security inspections.

Both countries needed to respond fast.

Furthermore, the Netherlands’ Amsterdam airport Schiphol is trying to compete with Britain’s Heathrow, currently Europe’s largest air transport hub; neither of them can afford to lag on security measures.

Yet it quickly became apparent that speed does not necessarily mean efficiency.

The Dutch have only a few scanners at their disposal. Meanwhile, bosses at BAA, the company which operates London’s Heathrow, privately criticise the British government for its rush.

“The industry does not think that a batch of quickly thought-out, short-term measures is a good thing,” one airport official told the local media.

One difficulty is the cost of the devices, at about US$200,000 (RM670,000) each. This may not be a problem for big European airports, but it is an obstacle for smaller, regional ones.

Large numbers of people still have to be trained in their operation, and nobody knows whether the scanners can sustain the volumes of passengers expected to be checked. Heathrow, which famously botched the opening of its newest terminal in 2008, is anxious to avoid another public relations disaster.

And then, there are legal concerns. Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to “virtual strip-searching”.

Governments have already decided that the scanner operators will work at a different location from the machines and will, therefore, have no eye contact with passengers.

The images will not be stored, and could not be matched against the identity of particular people.

But these reassurances are dismissed by human rights activists.

Simon Davies from Privacy International, a pressure group, claims that saving the scans of celebrities — or of people with unusual or freakish body profiles — will prove an irresistible temptation for unscrupulous scan operators.

And there are other legal complications. Terri Dowty, of Action On Rights For Children — a British non-governmental organisation — now alleges that the scanners violate the country’s protection of minors, under which it is illegal to create an “indecent image or a pseudo-image” of children.

Although the British government rejects this interpretation, its actions betray some hesitation. When the scanners were on a trial project at Manchester airport in the north of England recently, operators were told not to check anyone under 18, just in case this may subsequently be deemed illegal.

Meanwhile, there are scores of organisations claiming that the scanners — which use microwaves to see through clothing — may be harmful to health. No evidence for this was ever produced, but then, facts have never stood in the way of previous health scares.

Such uncertainties have meant that some of Europe’s biggest countries still prefer to wait. Germany’s government has remained largely silent, mainly because the country’s privacy laws are among the strictest in Europe, and amending them guarantees a political dispute of major proportions.

Spain, meanwhile, has announced that it would do nothing unless procedures are adopted uniformly across Europe.

The result is that the scanners are likely to be introduced piecemeal in Europe, and probably under varying conditions. In some countries, their use would be optional, while in others it may be compulsory.

And in some airports, pregnant women or children could be exempt, while elsewhere they will not be.

“We are missing a great opportunity to educate the public that this is our best and safest current option,” a British security expert told The Straits Times over the weekend, on condition of anonymity.

“The only alternatives to the scanners are even more intrusive manual checks, plus racial profiling, which nobody wants,” he added. — The Straits Times