Although the benefits of having the body scanners are great and they allow the TSA officials to detect all sorts of harmful substances, there have also been cases where the scanners have been proved to not be so affective. In 2008, a passenger had actually passed through security at Ronald Reagan International Airport in Washington D.C. undetected. What had caused this story to gain so much popularity is the fact that the man had a gun on him as he passed through security. Once he went through he had remembered that he had a gun on his person and went back to alert officials of his mistake (Ahlers,2008). This caused many officials to argue the point that body scanners were not only unethical, but also inefficient. In another article written in USA Today by Thomas Frank, another test was conducted at two of the busiest airports in America and it was concluded that the screeners failed to detect small bombs hidden on undercover agents. The issue here is that although these scanners have been put in place, when put to the test, many objects go undetected. Some argue this may be because now that these scanners have been put in place, TSA is not paying as much attention to what are in peoples bags, or small objects are making it through the scanner itself (Frank,2007). That being said, others claim that the benefits outweigh the risks. By putting travelers into the scanners TSA can monitor passenger activity and be alerted when something harmful is found. However on the other side of the argument, when these Body Scanners have really been put to the test, conclusions have shown that Body scanners have not always done what they were set to do.

One key health aspect that I came across while doing my research was whether body scanners could affect our health. On the TSA fact sheet on the U.S department of Homeland Security they claim that the radiation that is passed into a person's body is very minuet, less than .10 microsieverts (tsa,2012). TSA states that this is safe because;

"It is all around us. We are continuously exposed to this background radiation. In 17 minutes of ordinary living, a person receives more radiation from naturally occurring sources than from one scan." (tsa,2012)

According to an article written in the Journal of Radiology, there could be some health risks associated with the radiation that passes through your body while you are being scanned. Dr. David J. Brenner discusses how in individual cases, the radiation emitted is low enough to be considered "safe" for people who only travel a few times a year. For more frequent fliers and flight personnel, the risk of cancer is higher (Brenner,2011). Brenner states that we should be concerned about the long-term consequences of having a large amount of people exposed to small amounts of radiation. He also claims that there are better alternatives that do not include ionizing radiation that officials must consider. (Brenner,2011).