The Transportation Security Administration plans a software upgrade for its full-body scanner machines at 40 airports including Raleigh-Durham International, to get rid of the explicit video images that have drawn complaints about personal privacy.

The millimeter wave imaging machines now used at RDU and many airports produce a silvery image of the traveler's skin -- with detailed, intimate body outlines. TSA says the image is viewed only by a security officer isolated in a nearby room, but many travelers have objected.  Some say they'd rather undergo intimate body pat-downs than submit to the body scanners.

[7/21/11 update: ACLU welcomes the change. See today's story.]

The new software will display a generic, cookie-cutter outline of a human body, marked to show the location of anything that warrants a closer look ... [ MORE]

Triangle air travelers say they don’t feel any safer after the death of Osama bin Laden. They don’t want the United States to relax the airport security measures inspired by the terrorist leader nearly a decade ago. [5/3/11 update: see today's story with reader comment.]

“If you do that, you’re just opening yourself back up,” said Carl Covington, 44, of Hope Mills, a military contractor on his way home from work in Kuwait. “Because they always look for some type of loophole to get in and do some damage when you turn your back.

"I just don’t think terrorism is ever going away.”

Jenny Kaiser of Goldsboro noticed a “buzz of excitement” when passengers on her flight from Los Angeles learned that Navy SEALs had killed bin Laden Sunday in Pakistan. ... [MORE]

Some air travelers say they face an uncomfortable and even humiliating choice at airport security checkpoints:

 - step into a full-body scanning machine, which produces images of what we look like under our clothes, or

 - submit to an increasingly intimate, aggressive pat-down. No body parts are off-limits for the hands in blue gloves, but the TSA head says he'll try to make the procedure "as minimally invasive as possible."

I'm reporting on this story today for The News & Observer.  [Update: see 11/23 story "Those hands may get up close and personal" with lots of reader comments.]

If you recently submitted to an invasive TSA pat-down, I'd like to hear from you. 

Or if you're traveling for the holidays and you'd like to discuss this issue,  let me know.

Please include your name and daytime contact info, along with any details you'd like to add about your TSA checkpoint experience.

Bruce Siceloff (919) 829-4527 bruce.siceloff@newsobserver.com

What a choice air travelers singled out for special security screening now face. They can be "patted" about the body or put through a virtual disrobing machine. Worth considering: the shelf life of revealing images.

The Transportation Security Administration uses something called millimeter wave technology for its full-body scanners at a growing number of U.S. airports including RDU's Terminal 2 ("RDU's new scanners see down to the skin").

It's hard to know just how explicitly the scan records the details of your sex, your surgical scars, and the rest of your body. You can certainly tell the boys from the girls.

One TSA official told USA Today: "You can actually see the sweat on someone's back."

Click the image above for a larger version of the low-rez sample photo provided by TSA.

Read the ACLU's take on body scanners and "virtual strip searches."