Leave your shoes on?

Wouldn’t it be great to show up at a checkpoint and just when you were reaching down to untie your shoes, you heard an officer say “You can leave your shoes on.”

The TSA is well aware that the removal of shoes is not our most popular policy. In fact, it probably ranks up there with root canals and doing your taxes.

What you’ve seen up until now has been our officers enforcing an unpopular policy that is based on the unfortunate truth that intelligence tells us that terrorists are still very interested in hiding items in their shoes.


Today, the X-ray is simply the quickest, most effective way to ensure nothing is hidden inside. What you haven’t seen is all the hard work that’s been going on behind the scenes trying to find an alternative. Our experts and the private sector have been looking for ways to screen footwear while allowing passengers to keep their shoes on for quite some time.

Last year, TSA tested a shoe scanner from General Electric in Orlando. Today, we’re testing shoe scanning technology at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) from L3 Communications. If all goes well, these tests could lead the way to quelling of one of our most unpopular policies.

LAX received two units from L3 Communications last week. Since this is a test to collect data, passengers will still need to remove their shoes prior to walking through the magnetometer. Hey, don’t kill the messenger. I’m just giving you a heads up! :)

DHS Science and Technology, a sister agency of TSA, is also testing this shoe scanner and will collaborate with us on their findings.

Programs like the shoe scanner, the checkpoint friendly laptop bag and diamond lanes are not only good for passenger convenience but they help to reduce the chaos and frustration at checkpoints. This is good for security because it allows more than 2,000 Behavior Detection Officers to better focus on passengers with harmful intent.

And yes, we are going to answer your top 10 questions. :)

Shoes

It’s not all about Richard Reid when it comes to the screening of shoes. Post all of your thoughts about shoes in this blog post. To learn more about how the shoe fits in with the TSA, check out our web page on "why we screen shoes". Then come back here and let's talk.

01.31.08, 6:00pm
Christopher says:
Great first question on the ability to pick up foot fungus at the checkpoint and a very common one at that.

Believe it or not, TSA actually commissioned a study in 2003 with the Department of Health and Human Services to look at just that issue. I'm paraphrasing here and will have the actual letter posted tomorrow but they found that if the floor isn't moist then the possibility is, "extremely small to remote" to contract athlete's foot. If there are checkpoint floors that are moist, we generally have bigger issues on our hands than foot fungus.

Also interesting from that study, 15 percent of the public may be affected with athlete's foot at any given time. Think about that next time you're trying on clothes at the mall, looking for a new pair of shoes or going off the high dive at the local pool.

02.01.08, 2:00pm
Christopher says:

Great and lively debate here on shoes. As added fodders, here are two pictures of an altered pair of shoes our officers discovered last year in Alaska.

Yes, we find stuff like this all the time and yes our intel folks tell us terrorists are still interested in using shoes as (improvised explosive devices) IEDs or to hide components.

We've also posted an x-ray image so that you can see exactly what we are talking about.

02.05.08; 9:30am
Christopher says:

There have been several posts asking about the pictures above. Just to be perfectly clear, the first two pictures are of a pair of shoes we discovered during screening in Alaska last year. The wire and other small metal item were positioned under the insole just as they are shown.

The third picture is of an x-ray image of a pair of altered shoes we use to train our officers on x-ray displays in airports. As you can see, it doesn’t take an x-ray tech to tell these shoes have been altered.

Our officers literally see 4 Million shoes per day and they’re very, very good at telling the bad from the good.