Events | 2010.01.03
Full-body scanners ordered for airports
Full-body scanners are to be introduced at Britain\'s airports after Gordon Brown gave the go-ahead for the technology in a move which pre-empted his own urgent review of airline security.
Despite questions over the effectiveness of the devices, the prime minister said today that passengers would see their "gradual" introduction, along with hand luggage checks for traces of explosives. Even those travelling through UK airports in transit would have to go through the heightened security screening.
BAA, which runs six UK airports, said it would install the £100,000 machines "as soon as is practical" at Heathrow.
Experts have cast doubt on whether the scanners are able to detect the type of explosive that 23-year-old Umar Abdulmutallab is accused of using in an attempt to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day.
But Brown told BBC1\'s Andrew Marr show the government would do everything in its power to tighten security and prevent a repeat of the attack.
His backing of scanner technology came before Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, reports to parliament this week the findings of an urgent review of airport security begun after the failed attack. It also pre-empts a European commission meeting, to be held shortly, on whether to endorse the use of the machines across the continent.
Four scanners have lain unused at Heathrow airport awaiting approval for use from the European commission but a government source said they would be deployed "with or without" the international co-operation ministers said was needed in the aftermath of the attempted terror attack.
The source pointed to the decision by Amsterdam\'s Schiphol airport to install the 17 scanners it bought two years ago but was unable to activate after receiving EU advice that there were privacy and human rights implications. This advice was used by the Department for Transport to explain why four of the UK\'s own scanners lay unused at Heathrow.
Ben Wallace, a Conservative MP involved in a British defence firm\'s project to test the scanner\'s effect before he entered parliament, said at the weekend that the kind of low-density materials used in Christmas Day\'s attempted attack would not have been detected. The machines could detect shrapnel, heavy wax and metal but not plastics, chemicals or liquids.
Wallace said: "Gordon Brown is grasping at headlines if he thinks buying a couple of scanners will make us safer. It is too little, too late." Instead, he said, the time had come for the use of passenger profiling.
Alongside the purchase of more scanners, a government source has told the Guardian that passenger profiling is "in the mix" of the review\'s recommendations.
Today a BAA spokesman backed profiling. "It is our view that a combination of technology, intelligence and passenger profiling will help build a more robust defence against the unpredictable and changing nature of the terrorist threat to aviation," the spokesman said.
But Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil liberties group Liberty, warned the government against profiling.
"Any nods in the direction of ethnic profiling are dangerous, self-defeating and downright irresponsible," she said. "Has no one noticed the terrorists\' ability to capitalise on discrimination or the recruits from a range of different backgrounds? Whether on the street or at the terminal, suspicious behaviour is a sensible basis for search by policing professionals; race or religion is not."
Brown\'s swift response to the possibility that terrorists are using different types of explosive came as he also had to admit Downing Street may have oversold the response to tackling the threat posed by Yemen, where the alleged bomber is thought to have been trained by an al-Qaida offshoot.
Brown said on Friday that a conference planned for 28 January to address Afghanistan will now also address the "failing state" of Yemen.
Over the weekend Downing Street went on to say the prime minister and President Barack Obama had agreed in a personal telephone conversation that Britain and the US would jointly fund a counterterrorism police unit in Yemen. This afternoon the White House said it was a discussion held only at official level.
Brown then admitted there had been no direct contact between the two leaders on the issue and that the US and UK counterterrorism initiatives had been going on "for some time".
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/[...]rt-security-full-body-scanners
