By Jesse Liebman --
February 18, 2010
Airport security screeners have revamped their detection policies, now expanding to include swabbing people's hands and carry-on items.
The Transportation Security Administration will soon begin randomly swabbing passengers' palms at checkpoints and gates to test for traces of explosives.
The agency said it had increased efforts to detect explosives at security checkpoints after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day. A Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, has been indicted in that case.
The practice of using a swab to trace explosives has been used for years. Typically a swab is run over items that a passenger is likely to have touched, such as handles or zippers. The swab is then placed in a machine that detects molecules of certain explosives.
The TSA has more than 7,000 explosive trace detection (ETD) machines and has purchased 400 additional units with $16 million in federal stimulus money. The president's budget calls for $60 million to purchase approximately 800 portable ETD machines.
The TSA said the machines test only for explosives. It declined to name specific explosives, citing security reasons.
The added security measures are not expected to increase wait times at airport checkpoints.
The American Civil Liberties Union has no problem with the machines -- which it has "always supported explosive detection as a good form of security that doesn't really invade privacy," said Jay Stanley, a lawyer for the organization -- the primary concern is that the TSA doesn't discriminate while selecting people for screening.
Since some legal materials -- such as fertilizers and heart medicines -- can result in false positives which the ACLU wants to prevent from being mistreated. Swabbing the hands themselves does not raise any civil liberty problems.
TSA employees will be trained to resolve any alarm with additional screening of the passenger or their property.
