nevertheless we want to start with the second panel we appreciate all of you gentlemen for being here this day let me do some brief introductions and then swear you in and then we will go to the five minute opening statements mister marc rotenberg is the executive director of the electronic privacy appreciate your credentials and look forward to your testimony pursuant to committee rules all witnesses will be sworn in before they testify please rise and raise your right hand do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you are about to give will be minutes but your entire written statement will be made part of the record we will start with mister rotenberg you are recognized for five minutes thank you mister chairman and members of the committee i appreciate the opportunity to appear today before you i also wanted to thank you personally for the leadership that you have shown on this particular issue which is of great concern to the american public i also want to begin by saying that epic fully appreciates the important mission that the tsa has and the importance of protecting aviation security there is no dispute about that today what i would like to do is describe for the committee the work that we pursued over the last five years concerning a particular airport screening technology that the tsa has adopted and now hopes to widely deploy in u s airports and that is the body scanner technology we became aware of this technology almost six years ago we followed at the very beginning the concerns that had been raised about the privacy impact about the health impacts and also whether the technology would be effective we were very cautious at the outset we wouldn't make any strong statements until we had obtained more facts to understand how the technology would be used so we began a series of freedom of information act requests we were trying to understand the technical specifications the protocols the contracts that had been arranged with the vendors we also began to work with expert organizations civil rights groups groups across the political spectrum groups that represent passengers groups in the travel industry and as we became aware of the concerns that had been raised we joined with these organizations and submitted a petition to secretary napolitano in the spring of two thousand and nine shortly after we learned of the tsa's plan to make these body scanners the primary screening technique in u s airports this seemed to us to be a sharp departure from what the agency had previously said about the use of this technology so thirty organizations wrote to the organization in the spring of two thousand and nine and respectfully asked her to conduct a public rulemaking so that there would be an opportunity for the public to express its views on the tsa's program and so that tsa's decisions on those comments would ultimately be subject to some type of judicial review we also in that petition urged her to suspend further deployment of the technology for primary screening because we felt the case had not yet been made that they were sufficiently tested and i was around this time as well that your bill which you introduced in the house passed through the house with more than three hundred votes which was essentially trying to drive the agency back to the same position to keep these devices for secondary screening where they might be used for special cases now the story actually gets quite a bit more interesting because in january of two thousand and ten we obtained the first set of documents that we had requested under the freedom of information act attached to my testimony just a couple of pages we actually have thousands of pages that roughly fall into two categories the first category is the description of the devices and the second category is the many traveler complaints that the agency has received now the description of the devices and now we are talking about the procurement specifications and the vendor contracts are very significant because what these documents reveal because the device that the tsa described to the vendors in other words the specifications that the agency outlined was for devices that had the ability to store and record and transmit images of the naked human body now i am quite sure there is going to be some back and forth this morning about what that means the agency will say for example that they don't save the images they store them on a temporary basis and then they are deleted but i need to make very clear at this point that we have done a lot of related litigation on this issue and we have obtained for example from the u s marshal service more than one hundred images of a body scanner device very similar to the one used by the tsa this is used by the marshal service in orlando florida in a courthouse the images are routinely stored and recorded the tsa itself subsequent to the documents that we obtained acknowledged that in fact they were storing a recording images in test mode and then when last year i believe chairman thompson pushed them a bit further on that they also acknowledged that they were storing and recording images in training mode now we know that the agency has over two thousand images and i am referring back to the tsa detailed images two thousand they will not turn over to us because they for whatever reason i think they don't want the public to see this okay i will conclude there is a lot  my testimony but just in conclusion the privacy issues here are enormous the fourth amendment implications are enormous there is the harm that we can see about these devices and then there is the harm we can't and that is what i am here to discuss mister chaffetz thank you we director of the centre for radiological research at columbia university and have about thirty years of experience in low dose radiation risk estimation so i think one should preface any comments by saying that i individual risk the risk of one average person going through the scanner once the doses involved are extremely low and that means that the risks and the risks we are talking about are long  radiation induced cancer are also extremely low in fact we can actually put some numbers on those risks so the risk of an average person going through the scanner the risk of a long term induced cancer is like one in ten million now by any stretch of the imagination that is an extremely small risk so i think i would agree with the tsa's characterization that in that context these devices are safe  the risks are correspondingly higher and there are also populations that are more sensitive than average and children are the biggest example there children are more sensitive to radiation induced cancer than adults are so that is individual risk so i would certainly go along with the general consensus that you can consider them safe in that context but there is another way that we always need to think about risk and that is what we usually call either public health or population risk and that is to do with both the individual risk and the number of people exposed to that risk if you have a small risk but only a few people are exposed to that risk there is not much public health concern but if you have a small risk and very large numbers of people wise that means seven hundred million scans a year at the moment increasing in a few years to a billion scans a year so we are talking about an extraordinarily large number of scanners and you can make a population estimate wel but because we have two technologies here the millimeter wave scanners and the x ray scanners and both are apparently equally effective at doing what they are designed to do but the  scanners do not have that potential for long term population risk but the x ray scanners do to our mind it makes a lot of sense that we should be thinking more about using the millimeter wave scanners subject because the tsa is an agency that touches probably more americans than any other agency which has the power that it has and now of course it is touching them far more intimately and in an environment in which they either choose not to fly or to be subject to that  scrutiny and because so much of the work they do is governed by policies and procedures which are not made public the review date on this equipment largely not made public the oversight of this committee is exceptionally critical perhaps more so than  other area i have been asked to address ait effectiveness and this is a somewhat complicated issue because we can talk about the effectiveness of machines or we can i think more profitably talk about the effectiveness of the machines as they add to a system of security that the tsa is carrying out at airports and it is in that latter context that i think we can say quite safely that aits have introduced a distraction into the security system that may actually be weakening rather than enhancing our security at airports it is useful to remember what aits do they do not detect explosives they do not detect firearms they do not distinguish dangerous from ordinary materials all they can do is identify what they consider to be anomalies on the body of a traveler now that is a pretty limited function it means if the traveler secretes something internally or even in his or her mouth and closes the mouth they can get through security without the  detecting it it also means that if we define anomaly as the tsa currently does to mean anything that looks different than what they would expect we are generating millions of false positives a year this is of course why we have to take tissues out of our pocket and dollar bills and candy all of these are considered anomalies by the ait so despite the fact that these have been advertised in the american public on the basis they can see through clothing to really see if you present a risk the opposite is in fact true they cannot determine what a risk is therefore we have turned the tsa largely into cloakroom attendants who are trying to get all of our anomalous goods off of us so that we can go through the machine thereby leaving less for the tsa to have to screen this high rate of false positives is one reason for concern another is that we in fact have a very difficult time clearing the anomalies that do go through the system because in fact even with a pat down search we often don't know what those anomalies are i mention in my written testimony i was reminded of this last week flying through washington national airport i had dropped an aspirin in my pocket forgotten it was there the machine  identified this as an anomaly you would think this billion dollar technology could tell the difference between a tiny little aspirin and something that might pose a threat but it cannot so therefore this required a pat down the agent pulled it out and said what is this i said an aspirin he said thank you go right on through of course he had no idea what it was once i had been subjected to the search whether it was a dangerous chemical whether it was an explosive no earthly idea he simply let me put it in my pocket and i walked through the search had gained us nothing is actually true in following on our first witness this morning with most medical devices and i experience this as a diabetic who wears an insulin pump so i walk through if i have the insulin pump on i am then either subject to a complete pat down as if for some reason having an insulin pump makes it more likely that i will be a terrorist or if i take the insulin pump off i am still left with a plastic cannula in my stomach that carries the insulin this of course is an anomaly i then become subject to another pat down the agent feels it and says what is that i say it is a cannula okay eight out of ten have no idea what that is anyway they say thank you very much they are invariably polite and i walk on through like one out of five say oh you are on an insulin pump invariably polite and i walk on through now when i asked the tsa what it is about cannulas that they are so worried they say well we are worried you might have bombs inside of you and this would be the mechanism for setting it off i have no idea how great that threat is i do know that agent has no idea at the site of the ait and the search whether that is true or not all they know is that they detected a plastic piece of tubing coming out of my stomach and i gave them an excuse for it now let me conclude by saying i enormously respectful of the difficult and important job the tsa has and would also comment on the extent to which so many tsa agents that i encounter are invariably courteous and i think extremely well intentioned i think they are as frustrated as we are by the irrational policies they are being asked to carry out thank you mister chaffetz and even more impressive only one second on the clock the chair cannot thank you enough for wrapping up your testimony i we obviously can't start this analysis by what we would like tsa to do we have to start with what al qaeda wants to do and al qaeda clearly wants to blow up planes over the united states if it possibly can it is very conscious of what our security protocols are and it shapes its weapons to meet them if we stop looking for shoe bombs they are going to use shoe bombs if we stop looking for underwear bombs they are going to use underwear bombs given that my second point is with that constraint knowing it has to look for those weapons and with one big caveat tsa's measures are relatively effective and appropriately shaped to the nature of the threat they have only changed their protocols by and large in response to demonstrated threats that were actual plots that could have brought down planes and by and large each of the changes they have made is aimed at finding those particular weapons i won't go into the privacy protections that have been built into the ait systems you will be hearing from the tsa about those but they are by and large effective i have been through downs i would take issue with people who describe it as akin to a sexual assault i thought it was very professional and while i would much prefer to go through a scanner the pat downs are not a shocking experience at they were not for me but let me return to the caveat because i think there is a way in which tsa is not doing what it should and could it is still looking for weapons all of the measures that it has adopted since are focused on looking for weapons and as representative cissna said the result is we are all treated as though we are potential terrorists we are all suspects we are all treated the same way and screened in the same fashion we do not look for terrorists and the reason tsa does not look for terrorists is it doesn't know enough about the people that it is dealing with to actually identify even a risky traveler it doesn't know as much as a state trooper who stops someone on the highway knows about the person they have just stopped it certainly doesn't know as much as other dhs elements like the customs and border protection agency know about people coming across the border where in fact they know more and are able to move the travelers much faster it doesn't even know as much as united airlines if you said who is going to do a better job of using data to find terrorists united airlines would have more data to use than tsa this does not make sense and that brings me to my last point which is we probably have taken the search for weapons as far as we can i know there are people who think we have taken it too far there certainly are possibilities for weapons i don't think we have yet developed threat case aspirin bombs but there are certainly possible weapons and places to hide them that our search for weapons is not going to find them therefore we are going to have to spend more time looking for possible terrorists risky travelers and i would submit that most people who travel today would say if i could give information if the fact that i was just discharged from the hospital after an operation was information that was available to tsa so they could verify my story and speed me through  the line that would be a much better step than having everyone screened in the fashion they are currently screened so my suggestion for this committee for the homeland security committee is that we allow tsa to set up some voluntary programs are already giving people a choice between a pat down and a scan why not let people say you can have my travel information you can have some basic background information on me if that will make the screening more effective and faster i would rather do that than go through the scan every time or the pat down every time so my suggestion for ways to improve the system that we have and potentially reduce some of the intrusiveness of some of the screening is to begin a process in which people can voluntarily agree that they will give up information in exchange for faster screening thank you  i continue to be impressed by the prompt nature of our panel i will duly note that for future panels going forward nevertheless we would love to move to the questioning phase i am going to start by recognizing myself for five minutes  mister baker i think you make an important point that there are many of us that are concerned that what happens at the tsa is more tsa screening theater than it is about truly targeting and highlighting those that pose the greatest risk  i for one believe that the challenge before this country is how do we become more effective and less invasive that we should not have to give up all of our personal privacy in order to secure an airplane nobody needs to look at my kid or my grandmother whatever naked in order to secure an airplane and we as americans should demand that we raise the bar on both and protect people's personal privacy and we shouldn't accept anything less i would ask unanimous consent to enter into the record three articles devices and the components thereof have come to the conclusion that the very best way to actually find these bomb making materials whether they be in a car or on somebody's person is the good old fashioned dog there is nothing like a good german shepherd they can be a whole lot less invasive much less costly my fear is that what these dogs don't have lobbyists and i really do worry that we have propelled ourselves into this false sense of security that talk particularly with this panel and i want to start with you doctor brenner talk about the safety and efficacy i worry about a couple of the more vulnerable people the sixty five thousand people at the tsa that are around in close proximity to these machines on a daily basis we also have people pregnant women we probably have pregnant tsos that are there working at the airports we have people with pacemakers for instance there is an article that was released that was in usa today with a statement that came from tsa on a friday saying that the machines that they had tested were emitting ten times the allowable dose of radiation or the normal dose of radiation do you have any insight chaffetz are you aware of who actually conducted the test on the machine mister brenner no i am not mister chaffetz my understanding is that the people that actually conducted the test on the machines was the manufacturer of the machines do you have any insight into whether or  is very true that the general scientific community does not have access to a measurement from these machines so we are reliant on studies that are commissioned either by the tsa or by the manufacturers m is consistent with the satisfaction of the administrative needs that justify it would you care to comment on that very briefly my time has expired mister rotenberg yes just very briefly both the th circuit and the rd circuit this was an opinion by then judge alito have said that these techniques have to be sciences panel met for two years to look at the question of programs such as this it recommended an option of a framework that congress would require agencies wanting to deploy equipment like this for to determine both intrusiveness into privacy and effectiveness it would do this on the record to the extent consistent with national security goals and it would do it in a way so that congress could provide effective oversight despite the fact that dhs actually paid for that study it has not implemented the framework mister chaffetz thank you my time has expired i  on the technical security aspect or on privacy aspect mister cate i am certainly an expert on the privacy aspects i am also an expert on security systems but not the technical side of this that is why i didn't direct my testimony to that point mister tierney i thought expecting the privacy angle and then you hit it from the other angle and i thought your comments were very interesting but none more interesting i think than the last comment that you made about there having been a recommendation by the national academy of sciences for a proposed framework for evaluating the effectiveness and privacy impact of any new systems and technologies and your testimony is that the tsa is not doing that on every plan that they put forward mister cate that is my testimony sir i would say of course if they are doing it in a classified environment i would not know that mister tierney right i think we will have to ask them that mister baker do you know whether or not that is accurate mister baker i don't know whether the particular framework recommended by the national academy of sciences was followed but certainly these machines were put through  this testing better slower have public comment have a judicial review but we had an underwear bomber in christmas of two thousand and nine these machines were deployed that we understand what the situation is if there was a mathematical error and whether or not that makes them really really really really bad on math is one question but i think we should just get the facts now you testimony raises really potentially serious public health concerns so i want to make sure i understand it correctly on this the american college of radiology released a statement and it said it was not aware of any evidence that either of the standing technologies that the tsa is considering would present significant biological risks for passengers  screened before that the food and drug administration the national institute for standards and technology and the johns hopkins university applied physics laboratory all determined that the radiation doses for individuals being scanned by x ray backscatter machines was minuscule and far far below the accepted industry guidelines so according to those studies one x ray backscatter scan is equivalent to roughly two minutes of traveling in an airplane at altitude one hour spent outside generally outdoors or eating one banana do you disagree with any of those three studies that say the total radiation exposure provided by one x ray backscatter scan is roughly equivalent to those basic every day but those are unavoidable the question is well this is potentially avoidable mister tierney okay no i get it i am just trying to understand it better so yes you might have one hundred cases for being outdoors yes you might have one hundred cases for spending two minutes in an airplane at altitude  and yes maybe there would be some impact for going through these scanners on that but it is all about the same mister brenner i would agree with that i think the general issue is because you have one risk in your life that doesn't mean you have to accept other risks in your life when you don't have to and you say it is perfectly possible that the individual risk could actually be significantly lower or indeed zero but that it is also quite possible the individual risk could actually be significantly higher mister brenner yes i think that is true trying to estimate with these very low doses is very recognizing the gentleman from arizona for five minutes mister gosar doctor brenner i in my former life was a dentist for twenty five years so we do understand that there is all cumulative aspects of all radiation am i not right committee is self reporting numbers based upon government agencies so we are reliant on what the government gives us and it doesn't seem that we are parlaying those or comparing apples to apples a lot of times we are comparing apples to tangerines so we are having some problems with our data and that seems to be the biggest problem here now mister baker you alluded to something very interesting to me i am from arizona as well and you talk about a multi tier task effect tsa is not really gifted in regards to analyzing certain factors of passengers and actually noted something about border security isn't there a place here for interagencies to be essentially scrutinize closely about one out of two hundred of the people who cross the border and the rest just walk through at thirty seconds or less showing their passport and providing more of that information to tsa so that tsa can make decisions about the kind of screening it will do for passengers is something that should happen it has begun to happen i understand in the context of flights from europe to the united states that is to say it is not so much that the information is shared but that there are shared decision making processes i think tsa will be a little nervous about getting that information because in the past congress fred cate epic have made a big about them having any information about travelers claiming that tsa has a travel dossier on us so it would be very helpful if they got a certain amount of authorization or encouragement to actually use the data in a constructive fashion rather than just try to do it on their own with cbp mister gosar mister brenner again based upon the quality of the image you know i am sitting here with a dental x ray and if i don't have qualifications or the parameters set on my machine they are worthless to me and we have now come about seeing the experts talking about we don't really know what is in the general  parameters of this scan we are looking for abnormalities in your opinion does it justify the spending of almost a half a billion dollars on these machines and going further with this mister brenner well you are asking me about the efficacy of the machines and i cate on the broader issue of whether these are ineffective are they worth the risk i would say they are not worth the risk and would in fact would much to his annoyance support mister baker's earlier point which is in fact knowing more about travelers or certainly those that wish to have more known about them would be a far more effective way one of the things we always say in security is you want to focus your resources on the greatest risk we have built the entire tsa system around doing the exact opposite mister gosar thank you very much  seems to be some they look at these measurements in different ways so we are in a situation where congress has to make critical decisions about our nation's homeland security and the public health based on scientific evidence and there seems to be all kinds of ways they do these measurements and questions have come up with regard to those measurements but considering the conflicting scientific estimates on this issue and the significance of the security risk what do you think mister baker should be the next steps that congress should take should we request further scientific analysis on the actual results of these machines instead of just using extrapolated estimates mister baker i am not a medical expert so i am cautious about expressing a view on that i can tell you there are some costs to delay not only are the risks to the traveling public but for those who are worried about waste and abuse in government right now there are two competing machine suppliers to do body imaging if you say we are not going to buy from a people who use backscatter x ray then you are giving the other machine supplier a monopoly and you are go get a price that reflects that monopoly so it will have a significant cost and i think you need to bear that in mind as you make a decision mister cummings professor cate a privacy law professor at indiana university  d in his written testimony advanced imaging technology is generally not effective at contributing to greater security airplanes and airports in fact it appears that the way in which the no i think that these clearly add to our security perhaps if you compared this technology to some imaginary technology that was perfect you would say well these machines are not as good as that imaginary technology but if you compare them to the magnetometers that are the alternative for us they are clearly much more effective at finding things that now could be used as weapons that couldn't be used twenty years ago and therefore they are very likely the best alternative we have today obviously it would be great to find something better i am a big believer in dogs but they only really work for about half an hour then they have to go play and they cost thirty  dollars a year on that basis so it is a great solution although i guess i have to say i have a golden retriever whose searches of me are substantially more intrusive than the tsa ever has been  therefore i say we should continue to look for new technologies but this may be the best we have for deployment in the next five years mister cummings tsa has evaluated and tested advanced imaging technology in the field since two thousand and seven and deployed the on a mass scale and has a reasonable chance of preventing a terrorist attack from explosives brought on to an airplane mister baker i am not you know we did do quite a bit of testing in two thousand and seven two thousand and eight we had high different questions mister baker you have indicated that you have undergone the pat down and did not find them intrusive was this just the pat down you took when you opted down or have you triggered an anomaly in one of the machines and received the secondary more intrusive pat down have gotten the opt out search and i have set off the anomalies with change in my pocket but the search consisted of having to show what had set off the anomalies so i am confident there are certain kinds of exposure of the tsa agents who are there i know in typical radiological applications x ray technicians are required to wear detection devices to determine their cumulative exposure to radiation are we doing anything to protect our tsa agents from radiation that may spill out of these machines mister brenner well of course a film badge film monitor won't protect the tsa agents but it will certainly give an estimate for future use as to whether they are being exposed and it makes no sense to me at all that they are not wearing film badges in any academic setting in any medical setting anybody who has any association with ionizing radiation wears a film badge mister farenthold i don't know if you are married or not but millimeter wave technology are there any risks associated with the millimeter wave technology we are aware of at this point in time mister brenner well as scientists we are trained never to say something is perfectly safe but there is no evidence of  risks associated with a millimeter wave and there are no biological mechanisms that are established that would lead us to conclude that there are risks associated with them which is in contrast to the x ray situation where we know especially the ones that show the images not the gumbies what would your organization's stance be or if you can't speak for your organization your personal stance be on actual voluntary trusted traveler program where the government is able to database certain information about you to allow you to bypass this type of invasive scanning mister farenthold we have studied those programs as well and  i think what we have concluded is that there is simply no silver bullet for example the clear traveler program which was a registered traveler program that company which collected a lot of biometrics on frequent fliers over one hundred thousand deep background checks so that they could get that certification go through the lines more quickly actually found themselves in financial trouble mister farenthold they went out of business right after i gave them my credit card  i can sympathize with that mister rotenberg but you see the story gets worse because having collected this extraordinary amount of personal information used to conduct the authentication at the airport that was their chief business asset and they turned around and wanted to sell the database that they had acquired on american travelers and it took a class of the customers of the company to actually go into court in new york and say you can't do that you can't sell our personal information that way so my warning here and while i don't actually disagree that i think a lot could be done to improve the assessment of passengers it is one of the recommendations of the iata this particular approach has been tried and there are some risks mister farenthold do you think the airlines might be a rotenberg that may be well yes this is one of the things that has always seemed a little odd to me in other words if the concern is trying to make sure that the people you know which is another way of saying the people you can trust go through more quickly the airlines do have that information those are the frequent fliers and the people you know less well are the ones you probably want to look over a little bit more closely that is actually the basis of the approach that is now recommended by the international aviation transportation association mister farenthold thank you i yield back my negative two seconds mister chaffetz i thank the gentleman lee right and the present ones mister brenner the x ray machines potentially do and certainly one of the things that we should do is have these machines available to the general scientific community to study them rather than just have to  radiation your concern with the present current technology ait is what mister brenner the concern is that although the risk is very very small as i think everybody agrees for any individual going through the scanner if you the billion though i know that our previous witness indicated that travel for her is airplane would you concede that it would be important to mend it and not end it to try to mend the situation that we are addressing is security an strong sense that their old tactics won't work and the advanced imaging technology is the only approach other than some very intrusive pat downs that make us reasonably comfortable  testified that both types of machines employed by tsa are currently incapable of storing or transmitting images do you dispute tsa's testimony that the machines are currently incapable of storing or transmitting images retain but also indicate that they cannot in any way hold these images or they have no capacity to do so would that be of comfort to you mister rotenberg i would like to see the technical specifications i  saying if you look at page nine it will tell you exactly what they can do they can enabledisable the image filters they can access the test mode they can export raw image data in test mode that is what the tsa required that looked for different models the british probably were the best in advising us because they are the only country that had a countrywide system for screening and also and i talked to those who run the federal maximum security prisons and other state organizations who  also dealt with probably the most invasive types of screening of both prisoners and people who visited them and i was told by them that weapons all penetrated the system i have been a strong advocate of using whatever means we can put in place that would provide us security and i do believe in answer i went to new jersey and they tested the puffer went through the puffer at least three times with some material that should have set it off none of the three times did it set it off but i was assured it was just a technical problem and that they would be used they started as you know an expensive deployment must say and have been supportive of using advanced technology but i think the important thing is testing now i was told the puffers would work and they didn't work god only knows where they are sitting i ask the committee staff to i can tell you the equipment is badly flawed it can be subverted our staff went out and our staff subverted the equipment they inform me in a very simple manner mister pistole said well it may require more training or something and gao was clever what the hell does he think the terrorists are terrorists have gone from a very sophisticated shoe device and i visited orally interviewed people saw what took place i was awakened in texas the morning of the liquid bombers and we put in measures to try to deal with that the diaper i had in january tested the system for the pat down which is supposed to catch what this equipment doesn't catch or be another device i can tell you i can thwart the system not only dangerous material can get through because that system is flawed too i am very concerned again about the testing of this equipment before it was deployed it looks like  have a bigger puffer fiasco on our hands in buying this if it wasn't just the half a billion it is going to be another half a billion because tsa couldn't possibly use existing personnel or transfer some of the positions the three thousand seven hundred and seventy bureaucratic positions in washington to get their butts out working online of course they are making one hundred and five thousand dollars on average a year and mister pistole told me yesterday  testimony when i went before the appropriations committee that they start the average screener at twenty eight thousand dollars a year something seems out of kilter we have also seen them move from now to cargo so i think they are slightly bypassing these machines would you say if they are planning to blow up planes over the sky with electronic remote devices would you say that that would be surgical implants i leave this question with you we know that now the folks that gave us some of these devices and attempts are moving to body cavity inserts which we saw in saudi arabia ways to maximize security while minimizing intrusions on that privacy i understand that tsa is currently testing software commonly used in europe on ait machines that shows only a screen with  passenger without revealing particular details of that person's body and i think it is a better way from a privacy standpoint to allow an officer to physically inspect the area of the body where the anomaly occurred but at no point in this system would any human being ever see an actual picture of the passenger being screened and once approved tsa would be capable of deploying this software manchester airport has it schiphol has it which is where the automatic target recognition software is being deployed italy tried it and then dropped it we are really alone right now at this point in treating air travelers as we do in this country but people do point to schiphol because they have deployed atr now it is a different configuration the other thing that you need to know about this is that the tso will not be in a remote viewing location the tso will actually be standing now in front of the passenger looking at the so called gumby image and then identifying on the person now in front of them by the way those areas of the body that alert for an anomaly and that will then lead to the subsequent  down to try to resolve what the anomaly is now you could say that that is less intrusive because the image is not as detailed but of course what the tsa told us previously was that the reason they had the tso in a remote viewing facility was to simply a photo processing technique it is a bit like when you have a digital camera you take a color photo you can make it black and white you can invert it you can add sepia tone if you want to but what you started with is the actual image and that is still what t have and that remains our concern we think more needs to be done to try to resolve the problem of the unfiltered image that the devices will capture  problematic to get rid of that part of it then mister rotenberg well you see it is a bit of a tradeoff the image that is displayed on the screen will be less detailed no dispute on the other hand the image that is captured will be the same and the tso instead of being in a remote room will now be in front of the passenger so that is roughly where you will end up mister lynch well the current system the tso is in front of the passenger mister rotenberg they have two actually there is the tso in front of the passenger and he is communicating by headset with another tso who is in the remote viewing room and the tso in the remote viewing room says we have a problem under the right arm you need to look there mister lynch but what i am saying is that neither be i want to point out also in terms of the rollout of the atr when administrator pistole was asked about the use of this technique last november i think this was in front of the senate commerce committee he expressed a lot of concern he said it was because i think a lot of people have worked hard in understanding how thoroughly useless this technology currently is now that is an assumption i am making but let's walk through it so that i make sure that i have an agreement at the current time with fifty seven thousand tsa professionals we only check a small fraction of the passengers isn't that true if you look at all the places including san diego where to be honest we have all of them all the stations are there except in order to not back up well passed downtown san diego they do random they do anecdotal if you will so first of all from a security standpoint we are not secure if the vast majority of passengers do would prefer that mister issa okay let's continue along because this is the old problem we have you take away all of our civil rights and you say but it has some value but certainly not enough crazy people who put shoes  their bombs you are saying that they wouldn't have done it if they thought they might be caught is that right mister baker they wouldn't have done it if they thought they might they might be caught mister baker much less likely to try that yes mister issa okay so we will assume that these products cut in half the likelihood of a bomb blowing up an airplane we will give you that is it worth fifty seven thousand tsa individuals and the countless billions of dollars to cut in half but not even come close to eliminating that would be my rhetorical question m i want to go through a couple of items with you if it is possible to have technology do completely automated check using something similar to these products so that there is no human element except an x in the case of a high likelihood of something which is a legitimate anomaly would you say that when that technology is ready to be used you would consider it if it met all of those requirements i just want to quantify that you are not being unreasonable you simply want a technology that currently doesn't exist is that right mister rotenberg mister chairman i don't think the technology has to be perfect i don't think it would be realistic to expect a technology to be perfect i think what i have suggested as mister chaffetz has is that the technology should be effective i think that is reasonable and i think it should be minimally invasive because that is what the courts have told us  issa and at the current time the false positives are huge i have watched them it doesn't take much to go through these lines and see every third or fourth person who actually goes through the machine in a secondary and by the way that is after they pause and wait for did to people who had their shoes fitted using that technology mister brenner oh yes and those devices continued to be used well after it was pretty well established that there was a risk associated with them mister issa and my understanding is not only did they increase the likelihood of cancer for those who were having their shoes fitted or those who were using it more often but they created almost certainty that a shoe salesperson over time would have doses likely to give them cancer and some other problems isn't t are right the biggest doses were to the salespersons rather than the individuals getting the foot examination mister issa so clearly these products although they may be less than the fluoroscope of old they are showing about the same thing they are designed to show about the same thing they in fact represent a high likelihood that our fifty seven thousand tsa individuals who are not badged to see if they are getting excess dosage are getting dosage far higher than the rest of us would clear passenger i gave them my retina scan i gave them all my fingerprints and i was dismayed when i found out that they thought they were going to sell their asset that in fact i had paid to give them which is what made me a little worried about things more than i had been in this cyber era but let me just ask the simple question including you mister baker since you think that everything helps a little false id is easy to get people get it every day and they come to this country in vast amounts over the mexican border a few miles from my district the ids that will let you come through the country illegally are the same ids that tsa looks at with some level of does the picture match anyone can print out a boarding pass anyone can take a boarding pass and effectively make a new boarding pass once you have a few of them from the standpoint of actually is the person who they say they are and are they actually on the flight that they say they are in isn't one of the gaping flaws right now that when you go through security anywhere in america they don't actually know for sure that you are who you say you are because the id is questionable and they don't even know that the ticket you have is valid for the flight you are on haven't we left gaping holes that should be filled first at a fraction of the cost of what we are looking at today just quick answers from anyone that wants to partake particularly you mister baker  for sure bad id is a problem tsa has done a much better job than the airlines did of checking those ids that is why they have the loops that is why they have the fluorescent lights they are checking id and they are finding fake id much more than was the case er baker would you agree or disagree that layered security is really the only way to move forward there is no foolproof solution mister baker absolutely mister chaffetz my concern is that these whole body imaging machines as they have been deployed do give us a false sense of security and in fact are in part security theater as i call it that don't necessarily give the degree of confidence that i would like in securing that  airplane your concern is just by going through the metal detector there are things that go undetected but conversely aren't there things that go through a whole body imaging machine that go undetected mister baker absolutely none of this technology is perfect it is just that these body imagers are much more effective as finding the kinds of weapons we are worried about than magnetometers mister chaffetz are you familiar with the government accountability office who issued an unclassified report in march of two thousand  said it remains unclear whether the ait would have detected the weapon used in the december two thousand and nine incident mister baker i am aware of that and i understand the argument that they are making it remains unclear to al as well i would point out the important thing to say here is since there is no perfect solution we have to find a solution that is better than what we have and we don't have something better than these machines today mister chaffetz and while you mock the idea of the current ait in fact do we have up the slide here i just returned from afghanistan two three weeks ago if we could pull up that slide how many whole body imaging machines do you think we have deployed to afghanistan mister baker i have no idea mister chaffetz how many have we deployed iraq or pakistan where we have literally over one hundred thousand of our men and women in harm's way where we have to deal with the threat on a daily basis what i am looking at is people who are really truly concerned about what is going on in the green zones they are dealing with these improvised explosive devices which come at them in every way shape or form we are not deploying whole body imaging machines we are deploying dogs and to suggest that they only work for twenty minutes i believe is wholly inaccurate i think the t failing us because they are so insistent on technology technology for technology sake doesn't work technology is great but if it doesn't work it is not so good and what i worry about as the gentleman from massachusetts pointed out i going to a gumby like type of thing what if the technology is not working so again i wish there was a fool proof solution i wish we didn't have to deal with the reality of the threat that there is truly terrorists that want to kill our people and blow things up i worry though that the tsa is maybe a little too anxious to deploy technology even though we know from a parallel experience in afghanistan and pakistan and whatnot they are so quick to deploy technology at an enormous cost at invasion of privacy when there are things out there that will make us more secure i show you this picture because again three years ago they weren't importing whole body imaging machines they had dogs when we had the state of the union here how do you justify saying that the privacy concerns are counterproductive we heard testimony from representative cissna here to say that critics are making a privacy mountain out of a mole hill mister baker absolutely because if we had listened to the privacy advocates we would have no machines deployed we would have no protection against the kind of bombs that were used on december th other than magnetometers that do not work that is the result of privacy lobbying and i think it is counterproductive well i for one wholeheartedly disagree with you i think that a lot of people have offered a reasonable use of certain machines in certain instances i for one believe that as a secondary screening device  the whole body imaging machine does have a certain place somebody has a hip replacement a knee replacement i think that is a productive use of this i guess the question or the encouragement i would have moving forward is to try to find the balances between the fourth amendment time to review the procurement specifications and the question that you ask is actually on page ten of my testimony it is the key excerpt and i can tell you looking through the documents that the problem the threat assessment when the t began the ait was plastic knives ceramic guns plastique c four dense nonmetallic images that is what these devices are designed to detect and you see the problem with petm which is the powder that was used by the trouser bomber and the shoe bomber the devices were not designed to detect so when you look at the research that came out post december th the gao report and the academic that has a public safety question and one that doesn't as a cost effectiveness measure as opposed to any other reason to have both of them mister baker as i said there will be a cost to going to a single sole supplier for something as si deployed in iraq and afghanistan it is not like there are just dogs over there that have been used for the past six years and i just quote from an article that appeared on march st of two thousand and three that examined the possibility of replacing bomb sniffing dogs with handheld chemical systems among the drawbacks of using dogs the article stated is that they require rigorous training testing and validation exercises in various operational scenarios and with different types of explosives the animals performance which requires constant retraining frequently declines over time and after extensive field work according to the articles the dogs became tired of the thirty to one hundred and twenty minutes which means using more than one dog at each location dogs also exhibit behavioral variations and changing moods which might affect performance in addition dogs often trigger false alarms because they are trained to detect chemicals which may appear in other forms than just explosives and finally terrorists also may turn to certain stable explosives that emit very little chemical vapor and therefore harder for dogs to detect so while i wouldn't totally also for five legislative days for members to submit other information we would also ask and hope that you would cooperate if members have additional questions that they be able to submit those to you if you can provide those answers back to us we will make sure that the other members of the committee have that we thank you for your expertise for your insight into this and thank you for your time and effort to be here today the second panel is we had talked about as they dismiss here we would need some time to set up the third panel but i have also come to learn that this committee room has been scheduled and has been committed to that needs to set up and  on consequently it is going to be this chairman's prerogative to delay what was supposed to be two gentlemen from the tsa that were going to be here as part of the second panel insisting that they have to have their own separate hearing and they can't be sitting next to somebody that the issue we have asked the tsa to come over here today they are here so they came across to accommodate the chairman and the rest of this committee having them on this panel now or putting them on separately now is not going to be a time factor at all it will take about a minute and a half to put up new name tags and then we would have forty five minutes minimally to have this hearing which would have only extended this current panel forty five minutes i don't think there is any real rationale for that i am a little upset that we went through the whole process trying to be cooperative tsa did come downtown it would be effective to have them testify at this hearing i just think it is totally appropriate and i don't think your reasoning is sound enough to give us a real true matter of why it is you won't let them proceed i ask that the chairman reconsider that he allow them to come out right now they will have forty five minutes you want to bring them back again if you feel that it hasn't given you satisfactory opportunity to question them i will agree to that and we will work that out for another return but to send them away after having gone through that whole process this morning bringing the chairman and the ranking member of the full committee in discussing it out having an agreement inviting them down here and then sending them away i just think is totally inappropriate and disrespectful frankly mister chaffetz well i appreciate the gentleman's comments i appreciate the working nature that our staff and the members have here together nevertheless i do believe that this is of keen interest to most every member that is on this committee i want to allow adequate time to hear their testimony and allow members to question them we are also under committee rules allowed to have multiple rounds of questioning we certainly have right now just a handful of members here without any sort of notice that would give them adequate time we have run over by a good fifteen minutes longer from the time that we thought we would start the third panel in deference to those members who do want to participate on this panel and ask questions given the late nature of which this second panel was there and given the fact that they had notice we had planned on they had committed to being here for this panel number two schedules in order to accommodate that hearing which is going to start which would be less than an hour from now consequently i want to do this the right way i want to do it the right way for the tsa i want to do it the right way for every member on this panel so we have tierney rather than keep this going on so that you actually make it a reality that there is not enough time let me just say one more time that there is forty five minutes you don't know that the panel was going to go an hour with these people anyway forty five minutes could be entirely adequate let's get them started let's get them out here if you want to bring them back at some other point in time you can do that you have essentially all the members that you had earlier here and they were all made aware that we had come to some agreement this morning that tsa would come on the last panel this is no surprise to anybody everybody had their testimony from last night i just find your whole reasoning behind this totally lame and inappropriate and i am not pleased at all with having come to an agreement this morning on that and have you come up with a rather lame excuse to put that agreement aside chairman i know we may not complete this i have been assured that the next subcommittee could move a little to give us a little additional time i have also been assured we won't have votes before to one thirty my concern which i share with the chairman is that we will need to ask the tsa to be willing to come back if we do not conclude by the time of the vote if that can be agreed to i would join with the other gentleman to try to start but we would need that more of our valuable time but we have them here and i just want to point out that your hearing our hearing was in conflict with a lot of other hearings when we originally scheduled it that is why members are back and forth  there is no guarantee that that won't happen again when we reschedule it it is just the way things work here i do like the comprehensive aspect of this where you had a bunch of good panels in here and i would like to hear from the chaffetz this committee will stand in recess for five minutes while we redress and we will make a ruling at that time th