The Los Angeles subway system will soon become the first in the U.S. to screen passengers for weapons and explosives using body scanners, in an effort to thwart terrorist attacks in rail and subway stations. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Transportation Security Administration have been testing a few different models for body scanners for about a year.
The scanners that are being used are portable, and project waves that perform a full-body screening of a passenger walking through, without causing them to slow down or creating traffic.
The machines can detect suspicious items, anything metallic or non-metallic on someone’s body, from 30 feet away and are able to scan more than 2,000 passengers per hour. The scanners have been tested by the TSA in New York’s Penn Station and also at Union Station in Washington, D.C., and at a New Jersey Transit station during the 2014 Super Bowl.
While the technology could rekindle the long drawn-out debate over security versus personal privacy, passengers at several public transport stations said they would welcome the devices.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/us/los-angeles-metro-body-scanners.html
