Remarks By Assistant Secretary For TSA Kip Hawley On X-ray Shoe Screening
August 15, 2006
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Good afternoon, I am here with Earl Morris, who is our general manager of field operations, and he is in charge of all of our Federal Security Directors and operations around the country.
TSA instituted mandatory shoe screening, an additional security measure, when the threat level for the aviation sector went to orange, or high, on Thursday, August 10, 2006. Screening shoes by X-ray is an effective method of identifying any type of anomaly including explosives. Our highly trained transportation security officers can see if a shoe has been tampered with when it passes through the X-ray equipment. By requiring all passengers to remove their shoes for X-ray screening we increase both security and simplicity at the checkpoint.
Today, improvised explosive devices, IEDs, are the number one threat that we guard against. More than 31,000 of our Transportation Security Officers receive rigorous training in IED detection and are required to complete four hours every month of explosive detection training.
Training and technology are two layers of our systems approach to security at the airport. Other layers include intelligence, behavior observation techniques, random canine-team searches, Federal Air Marshals, Federal Flight Deck Officers, and additional security measures, both visible and invisible to the public.
Each one of these layers alone is capable of stopping a terrorist attack. In combination, their security value is multiplied; creating a much stronger much more formidable system. I want to assure the traveling public that we are working aggressively to protect the public against threats we expect and those we do not expect. Again, I want to thank the public for their continued cooperation and vigilance.
Now, I've mentioned a large part of our program is in training and testing. It's training I have taken myself, and it's why I really wanted personally to come over here myself to talk about the ability to X-ray shoes for explosive devices.
What I want to share with you are actual screen shots of X-ray images we use, which until about 15 minutes ago were classified material. We decided to de-classify them because of intense interest on the part of the public on whether or not we can find shoe bombs with our X-ray equipment at the checkpoint. You'll be able to satisfy yourselves with the fact that we can.
This is a slide or several images showing a mockup of the Richard Reid shoe bomb with simulated explosives, which look the same on as real explosives on an X-ray. We use these images in our covert testing program.
What you see are X-ray images of the shoe with explosives and the shoe without explosives, and this was taken with the X-rays we use at the checkpoints. You can see very clearly the difference between the shoe with the explosives and the shoe without (the dark orange spots on the X-rays indicate the explosives). The images show quite clearly, that there is in fact something you need to look at further. The picture to the left of the image shows what was in the shoe.
This image is available for downloading. De-classified X-ray Image (JPG, 1 MB)
