Because of all the debate about the new millimeter and backscatter scanners used by the TSA, my friend and I put together a fairly simple site that tells you what sort of "Advanced Imaging Technologies" are used at any given airport. You pretty much just type in a city/airport, select it from the autosuggest-drop-down-thing, and it slides over to show you our data. The weird thing is that there really isn't a complete compilation of this data out on the Internet... we had to do lots of googling, and calling.

http://www.theScanningAuthority.com/

It's pretty much done now - I just need to add proper error messages and such. Thoughts/comments?

Doesn't show anything for Philly yet. Although that doesn't surprise me, our airport is a goddamn re-purposed parking garage.

Yeah, most small airports don't have them - yet. I did notice that PHL has one backscatter machine.

http://www.thescanningauthority.com/#PHL

Why are you using JPEGs re-encoded as PNGs for most of the text? It's especially jarring as your ClearType settings are set for BGR monitors, resulting in weird colour fringes when viewed on a more typical RGB monitor.

@benryves
It was a last minute swap when I realized a font I was using really wasn't web-safe.

And thanks for pointing that out!

Hey, that's a pretty cool project, Rthprog! I hope you get it out there on the netz, it seems like something that Reddit, Digg, and those kinds of places would find cool.

What would be really cool, is if you went to your local airport, you could say what kinda scanners they had with a web app, and using GPS or something, it would upload it to the site.

@Kerm Thanks!

@graphmastur Nifty idea... I think I might do it.

One limitation that comes to mine though is that you can't say if a particular type of scanner _isn't_ there - you can only confirm that it _is_ there.

Yay! My airport doesn't have them! Very nice page rthprog

Actually, our data is accurate - if we say "no", it's not there. If we don't have data, it throws an error. However, if we decided to take data from the public, their reports could only be used to confirm the presence of machines...but atm, this isn't a problem.

Oh, then I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarification on that, rthprog.