Global travelers are mostly willing to submit to airport full body scans, finds a new survey of attitudes toward security in 10 countries.

The survey, funded by Unisys and conducted by the Lieberman Research Group, asked 9,400 people if they would be willing to submit to a full body scan. Australians proved the most willing, with 87 percent of respondents saying they would. Mexicans proved the least willing, with only 24 percent saying they would willingly assent. In the United States, 65 percent of telephone survey respondents said they are fine with the scans.

The Transportation Security Administration plans on deploying 450 additional body scanners to airports this year. The TSA says it safeguards privacy by blurring facial characteristics but that it can store body scan images for testing, training and evaluation purposes.

However, members of the public have already submitted more than 600 complaints to the TSA about use of the machines, according to documents retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which calls body scans a "digital strip search."

An Jan. 27 Government Accountability Office report cast doubt on the effectiveness of the scanners, stating that it is unclear whether their use would have been able to detect the explosives carried by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in his underwear on a Dec. 25, 2009 flight to Detroit from Amsterdam.

"TSA is in the process of developing a risk assessment for the airport checkpoints, but the agency has not yet completed this effort or clarified the extent to which this effort addresses any specific vulnerabilities in checkpoint technology," the GAO report stated.

For more:
- see the Unisys survey (registration required)
- see EPIC's webpage on body scanners, including a TSA letter addressing privacy concerns (.pdf)
- read GAO report 10-401T (.pdf)

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