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Trying Passenger Patience

One traveler criticized the body scanners at airport checkpoints as “an overpriced technology that provides a false sense of security and a real sense of intrusion into our personal lives.” A second called the machines a “disgrace,” requiring travelers to stand “with arms in the air and hands overhead, for screening our entire bodies each time we fly.” A third said simply, “You have NOT made me feel safer!”

The Transportation Security Administration, under a court order issued nearly two years ago, has finally been soliciting public comments about its use of body scanners and pat-downs at airports. More than 500 people have offered their thoughts — overwhelmingly negative — so far. The deadline for submitting comments is June 24.

The security agency was required by federal law to seek public comment before using the scanners for primary screening at airport checkpoints.

In 2010, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group, sued to block the use of body scanners, arguing that the machines violated travelers’ constitutional rights. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in a ruling in 2011, did not find the checkpoint technology unlawful, but it ordered the T.S.A. to “act promptly” to seek public input, noting that the “privacy, safety and efficacy” of the body scanners “no doubt would have been the subject of many comments had the T.S.A. seen fit to solicit comments.”

The feedback filed so far addresses precisely those topics, with a large majority of respondents objecting to the technology. (The instructions and copies of the submissions filed so far are available at regulations.gov.)

But it is not clear how this input will affect airport screening procedures, since more than 800 of these machines are already being used at 200 domestic airports.

“That’s sort of an open question,” said Ginger McCall, director of the privacy center’s Open Government Project. “We have seen some agencies close the notice and comment period and issue the rule the same day, which means they’re not really taking public comments into account.”

David Castelveter, a T.S.A. spokesman, said the agency would analyze the comments once they were all collected.

Mr. Castelveter added that the privacy concerns raised by many passengers when the scanners were introduced had already been addressed. The agency has added software privacy filters to all of the millimeter wave scanners so screeners see only an outline of the passenger being scanned — not the more graphic body image the machines originally produced.

Since the backscatter X-ray machines could not be updated with a similar software filter to comply with a Congressional mandate, they are being removed from airports by June 1, easing another major concern: the potential health risks of widespread exposure to even low-level radiation.

Even so, privacy concerns are among the most frequently cited issues in the comments submitted so far, particularly among passengers who choose not to be scanned and must submit to a pat-down instead.

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Stuart Mendenhall, a cardiologist in Pittsburgh, likened methods of disease detection to terrorist detection.Credit...Jeff Swensen for The New York Times

“I opt out of the scanners, and it’s not a comfortable experience,” Allison Schauer said in a telephone interview after she filed comments on the government site. “There is no patting — they run their hands along every part of you.”

In her written comments, Ms. Schauer criticized the machines’ false alarm rate, their impact on travelers with physical limitations and the longer wait times for those who opt for pat-downs. She also questioned the machines’ effectiveness, a subject many other commenters raised.

While the T.S.A. has declined to publicly release the results of tests that would indicate how well the scanners detect explosives and other threats that could bring down an aircraft, lawmakers who have seen some of these performance results have called them disappointing. And during a hearing last week held by the House Subcommittee on Transportation Security, the growing cost of airport screening was a central concern. President Obama’s 2014 budget request includes $7.4 billion for the T.S.A., and a proposal to increase the aviation security fee travelers pay to $5 per one-way trip. The fee is currently $2.50 per flight segment, so it would double for a trip without a connection.

Researchers have been pressing this issue as well, pointing out that with any investment intended to save lives, standard risk analysis would determine if the measure is cost-effective, not just whether it is effective.

“The question is, Will it reduce the risk of a terrorist attack enough to justify the cost?” said John Mueller, a political-science professor at Ohio State University.

Professor Mueller and Mark Stewart, an engineering professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia, have written multiple papers about balancing the costs and benefits of aviation security, and said they planned to file comments summarizing their research.

Their analysis, published in The Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management in 2011, found that the body scanners would have to prevent a terrorist attack once every two years to justify the cost to buy and operate the machines at every checkpoint in the United States.

Researchers in other fields have also looked at this issue.

G. Stuart Mendenhall and Mark Schmidhofer, both cardiologists who teach at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, recently published an article, “Screening Tests for Terrorism,” in the journal Regulation, which they said they planned to submit.

The article evaluates airport screening measures based on principles used by the medical community to decide whom to test for diseases — and how much to spend to detect a rare condition.

“There is a correlation between the detection of disease and the detection of a terrorist,” Dr. Mendenhall said. “The same approaches can be useful and valid.” Those approaches, he said, include making sure that the test does not miss or overdiagnose whatever it is intended to detect, that the results are reliable (with repeatable results), and that it is cost-effective and accepted by the population being examined.

Dr. Mendenhall said he was motivated to write the paper after being interviewed by a behavior detection officer in the security line at Logan Airport in Boston. The officer asked how he had enjoyed visiting Boston and misinterpreted Dr. Mendenhall’s dour response: he had traveled to the city for a funeral.

That experience, he said, was the catalyst for exploring how a screening measure to detect terrorist intent — a rare occurrence — compares with tests doctors use to diagnose a rare medical condition.

“The test has to be really good before you start applying it to a lot of people and act on the results,” Dr. Mendenhall said. “Any sort of invasive or secondary screening must be reserved for high-risk individuals.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Trying Passenger Patience. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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