Airport Body Scans
It has been reported that Incheon Airport ran a full body scan on a passenger whose ticket was secretly coded, on the suspicion of carrying a hazardous item.
A full body scan is an additional search when boarding an international flight, where a passenger’s entire body is scanned by a full body scanner.
On October 17, Democratic Party Congressman Park Ki-joon of the National Assembly’s Land, Infrastructure and Transportation Committee said at the parliamentary inspection of Incheon Airport that, “Incheon Airport has run full body scans on nearly 40,000 passengers in the past three years, but what’s shocking is that this has been done by secretly coding the tickets of target passengers.”
Park said, “If the airline marks the ticket with an SSSS code, then the security staff ran indiscriminate full body scans,” and added, “Yet there has not been a single case of finding the suspected hazardous item in the 40,000 scans.” Park explained that the tickets of various passengers from three year old children to 70 year old seniors have been marked SSSS.
According to Park, passengers who received full body scans did not receive any detailed explanations about why they were searched, and that the search standards depended solely on data provided by the US TSA.
Park requested alternative methods of searching to the airport saying, “The so-called full body scanners, or ‘Naked Scanners,’ have already been an issue of human rights violations, so the US is trying to find other methods as well.”