Privacy advocates and many air passengers have expressed concern about the level of personal detail the machines provide in their current configuration, even though the agency tried to mitigate those concerns by having the officers who viewed the images sit in a remote location so they could not connect any image to a particular passenger.  In Tuesday's demonstration, Transportation Security staffers walked into one of the newly configured machines and stopped with their arms raised, as passenger being scanned are asked to do. A small video monitor near the unit's exit displayed the results for both the passenger and the security officer operating the machine.  Those who deliberately carried objects were detected and portrayed as generic human outlines, with regions of their body highlighted by a box indicating additional security attention was warranted.  Those who carried no questionable objects saw a screen that was green with "OK" in the middle.  Pistole acknowledged Transportation Security workers will no longer be able to see the shape and size of the questionable objects that are detected by the machines.  "That's one of the things we'll be assessing in our pilot testing at the three airports," he said. "How do the security officers engage the passenger based on what they're seeing, and is there any diminution of efficiency in terms of what we're doing?"  The software upgrade takes several hours per scanning machine, but involves very little additional cost, officials said. When the new software is installed, it will no longer be possible for TSA workers to observe detailed characteristics of the subjects' bodies.
Tests are beginning on a software change in airport passenger scanning machines that will discontinue the display of personal body characteristics while still promising to catch questionable