WASHINGTON — The first of 150 full-body scanners planned for U.S. airports will be installed in Boston next week, officials said Tuesday.
The plan is to install three machines at Logan International Airport, according to a Homeland Security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement has not yet been made. In the next two weeks, officials plan to install another machine at Chicago’s O’Hare International.
The rest of the 150 machines that were purchased with $25 million from President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan are expected to be installed in airports by the end of June, another Homeland Security official, spokeswoman Amy Kudwa, said.
The use of the scanners in airports is key to the Obama administration’s plans to improve airport security because of their ability to show objects hidden on the body.
The machines show the body’s contours on a computer stationed in a private room removed from the security checkpoints. A person’s face is never shown, and the person’s identity is supposedly not known to the screener.
Still, the American Civil Liberties Union has denounced the machines as a “virtual strip search.”
Boston and Chicago were selected based on risk, the official said, and whether the airports were physically able to install the machines and provide screeners to operate them.
