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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Transportation Security Administration confirms that it is getting rid of airport body scanners that produce a naked image of travelers.

Right now the TSA uses two types of scanners. One makes a generic image showing where agents should look for an object on the traveler's body. Those scanners are staying.

TSA says the X-ray scanners will be gone by June. It says the company that makes them, Rapiscan, was not able to come up with a software fix to make the scanners comply with the Congressional mandate.

Allied Pilots Association president Dave Bates is suggesting that American Airlines pilots go through a pat-down search by Transportation Security Administration personnel rather undergo the repeated radiation from the “advanced imaging technology” body scanners used.
“While I’m sure that each of us recognizes that the threats to our lives are real, the practice of airport security screening of airline pilots has spun out of control and does nothing to improve national security,” Bates wrote.

An undercover TSA agent was able to get through security at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport with a handgun during testing of the enhanced-imaging body scanners, according to a high-ranking, inside source at the Transportation Security Administration.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said this week that her department is considering beefing up security on trains, ships and mass transit amid a public backlash over the body scanners and "enhanced" pat-downs at airports across the country.

"Air passengers already tolerate a large invasion of their privacy," the committee said in a report, citing pat-downs and bag searches as specific examples. "We do not feel that full body scanners add greatly to this situation."

The privacy fears raised by the deployment of full body scanners at airports are overblown, a committee of British lawmakers said Wednesday, adding that the technology was no more of a threat to passengers' rights than pat-downs or bag searches.

A bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate requiring all airports to use full-body scanners lacks sufficient privacy safeguards, says a prominent watchdog group.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center says the bill, introduced in the Senate by Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), "contains particularly weak privacy provision[s] that ignore many of the problems with the devices already uncovered."

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura sued the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration on Monday, alleging full-body scans and pat-downs at airport checkpoints violate his right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

"Full body scanners and enhanced pat downs in private rooms are fueling anger among air travelers in the US. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is coming in for severe criticism while passengers are planning a boycott of the scans on Nov. 24 - traditionally the busiest travel day of the year."

The degradations of passing through full-body scanners that provide naked pictures of you to Transportation Security Administration agents may not mean that the terrorists have won -- but they do mark victories for a few politically connected high-tech companies and their revolving-door lobbyists.