Security staff at Melbourne Airport will be able to look at the genitals of passengers under a trial of a new generation of X-ray equipment.
The scanners use a low energy X-ray to reveal any objects, metal or otherwise, under a traveller’s clothing including their body.
For the next six weeks domestic travellers at Melbourne Airport will be able to volunteer to go through the airport’s new “virtual strip search”.
Operators have refused to blur the genitals of those scanned, saying it limits the effectiveness of the equipment.
“It will show the private parts of people, but what we’ve decided is that we’re not going to blur those out, because it severely limits the detection capabilities,” says Cheryl Johnson, general manager of the Office of Transport Security.
“It is possible to see genitals and breasts while they’re going through the machine, though.
“The security officer that’s looking at it is located away from the screening lane, so there’s no comparison of the person walking through and the image.
“The images are not saved, you literally walk through, the screener hits a button to say clear and the image goes.”
Johnson claims the machine is actually rather tame.
“The faces are automatically blurred and ... it’s only a chalk-style outline, it’s not as invasive as some of the other equipment that we’ve got,” she said.
Further trials will begin at Sydney and Adelaide airports will start next week.
Operators claim the machine will be used as an alternative to a hand frisk with a hand wand if they fail a normal metal detector test.
The machines will have operators of both genders, so woman can be scanned by women and men by men.
Employees will not be able to take camera phones or any other type of photographic equipment into the monitoring room and it is not possible to save images the machine produces.
The machines will be trailed alongside the ‘Rapiscan secure 1000’, a baggage x-ray machine that can find explosives in luggage.
