Skip to main content

Activist bypasses $200,000 TSA nude body scanners with cloth and a sewing kit

tsa scanner fail
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Jonathan Corbett, who has been embroiled in a civil suit against the TSA since November 2010 and taking the case to the Supreme Court, turned to the Internet to reveal just how easily the TSA’s nude body scanner can be easily undermined. In watching his YouTube video, we’re compelled to wonder about the efficacy of such scanners in catching the next shoe bomber. Are the scanners in fact just a $1 billion dud?

Recommended Videos

In its efforts to maintain the security for passengers in the case of another bomb threat, the TSA has conjured up all sorts of contraptions and preventative measures that have succeeded to varying degrees. In the last two years, after the failure of the “puffer,” a machine intended to capture bomb reside from a puff of air, the government pursued the next available tech. According to the TSA, it purchased 600 nude body scanners at nearly $200,000 per machine, which have been deployed in 140 airports nationally. What they did not expect was the outcry and public backlash.

The public’s concern has been directed at the sheer invasion of personal privacy by a machine intended to reveal the nude body to a screening TSA agent. In turn, policy makers and governing bodies have had to weigh the risk of a successful, albeit rare, terrorist attack, against the privacy of passengers.

The scanner to a degree serves as a psychological deterrent for passengers intending ill-will on others. In other cases, with the help of scanners, the TSA has uncovered guns, knives, grenades and even a loaded spear gun. But passengers attempting to carry on prohibited items had not been privileged with the information that bypassing the screening merely required a swatch of fabric and a sewing kit.

The TSA screens only the front and back of your body within the scanner, and the detection of a prohibited carry-on item is achieved visually by an agent. When scanned, a passenger’s body is revealed on-screen as a white figure juxtaposed to a black background, and a concealed object is noticeably rendered black. Due to this technicality, any object shown against a black background will be rendered undistinguishable to the human eye. As Jonathan demonstrates in his video, simply sewing a pocket to conceal the item on the side of any shirt will suffice for any passenger attempting to bypass the scanners undeterred.

Digital Trends talked to Jonathan about his video and asked him why there was such a proactive backing from the government to integrate these scanners, to which he clued us in to four scenarios:

I think there could be many reasons, some well-intended, some not:

1) Because someone may actually foolishly believe they make us safer

2) Because the body scanner manufacturers have government connections and lobbyists

3) Because the government wants to condition Americans to accepting more invasive searches and airports are a good place to start because people are afraid

4) Because the TSA likes shiny, expensive new toys (seriously).

We reached out to the TSA regarding the video and TSA spokesperson, Lisa Farbestein, informed Digital Trends that the video was, “a crude attempt to allegedly show how to circumvent TSA screening procedures.” She declined to go into detail about the technology but the confidence in the machines was evident. “TSA conducts extensive testing of all screening technologies in the laboratory and at airports prior to rolling them out the field,” Farbestein said. “Imaging technology has caught many items large and small, and is one of the most effective tools available to detect metallic and non-metallic items, such as the greatest threat to aviation, explosives.”

If in fact the TSA has been mistaken about the efficacy of the X-ray scanners, it’s a daunting uphill battle for Jonathan as he reveals that its use in screening passengers traveling by train, subway and bus is catching steam. The Australian government only days ago announced a $28 million overhaul of their security system to integrate the scanners throughout the country, and would require passengers to be scanned or risk losing their ride. But, to the credit of the latest designs, the Australian scanners is purported to depict passengers as “stick figures,” which will render the people in them unidentifiable.

tsa scanner upgrade
Image used with permission by copyright holder

According to Farbestein, the upgraded scanning software in question, intended to protect passenger’s privacy, are currently being testing in the United States for its more advanced, “backscatter” body scanning devices. Its earlier model, “millimeter wave” scanners, have been updated with the latest software. “The TSA recently installed new software on all millimeter wave units currently in use – upgrades designed to enhance passenger privacy by eliminating passenger-specific images and instead auto-detecting potential threats,” Farbestein said. The new upgrade is coined, “automated target recognition” as the software is able to highlight the general location of the perpetrating object. “TSA plans to test similar software on backscatter technology in the coming months,” Farbestein added.

In the event that Jonathan’s efforts prove to be successful, we asked of him suggestions for maintaining the security of passengers, while outwitting the rare outliers intending harm.

“My understanding is that the number one fear of “the terrorists” is bomb-sniffing dogs. These cute and non-invasive little things can do better than anything we can create and cost a fraction of a nude body scanner,” Corbett informed us. “Re-enforcing cockpit doors, arming pilots, and a watchful set of passengers has done much more to prevent another 9/11 than the TSA has.”

Edit: Included comments from TSA spokesperson,  Lisa Farbestein. Image of upgraded scanner software provided by TSA included.

Francis Bea
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Francis got his first taste of the tech industry in a failed attempt at a startup during his time as a student at the…
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs
Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Read more
DeepSeek readies the next AI disruption with self-improving models
DeepSeek AI chatbot running on an iPhone.

Barely a few months ago, Wall Street’s big bet on generative AI had a moment of reckoning when DeepSeek arrived on the scene. Despite its heavily censored nature, the open source DeepSeek proved that a frontier reasoning AI model doesn’t necessarily require billions of dollars and can be pulled off on modest resources.

It quickly found commercial adoption by giants such as Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, while the likes of Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly gave it a spot on their platforms. Now, the buzzy Chinese company’s next target is self-improving AI models that use a looping judge-reward approach to improve themselves.

Read more