You can pay for TSA PreCheck keep your shoes on when walking through airport security, but what about the rest of us who don't particularly enjoy the indignity of mixing up our socks or — yet! — bare feet across a floor that had thousands of other shoes and feet scraped across it.
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In order to speed up the process and reduce the ick factor, the Transportation Security Administration is on CES 2025 in Las Vegas showing off new technology that will allow you to keep your shoes while scanning your footwear for prohibited items.
Watch this: I made things weird by trying the new TSA shoe scanner machine
The premise is simple: you step onto the platform, placing each foot on a marked area. Millimeter wave technology scans your shoe and sends data to a computer. When CNET's Bridget Carey spotted the technology being demonstrated, she knew she had to shake things up and see how the TSA's new technology would react.
Let's make it interesting,'' Carey said. “Maybe I should put something in my shoe and see what happens on the scanner machine.”
Carrie stuffed a variety of small items, including a toothpick, a gummy worm, a mustard packet and a plastic knife, into her shoe before stepping onto the TSA scanning platform.
Shoes have been a problem at the airport for more than two decades. In December 2001, Richard Reed attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight with homemade bombs. hidden in his shoes. He was subdued after struggling to light the fuse and no one was injured, but in 2006, the TSA began requiring passengers to take off their shoes while going through security.
Brian Lewis of the Department of Homeland Security told Kerry that if the new shoe technology is deployed at airports, the checkpoint officers themselves will not actually review the images.
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“Everything would be driven by an automatic detection algorithm,” Lewis said. “So the officer will get a red light or a green light, essentially saying, are the shoes good to go or do we need to do an additional check?”
The machines look for different things, Lewis said, including shoes that are manipulated, specific material properties and other issues.
The technology transfers the image in pieces, essentially creating the photo of the shoes on the computer screen, layer by layer. One demo shoe had a metal letter “F” hidden inside, and Lewis showed Carey how the metal letter slowly materialized as the pieces in the image were stacked. The scan takes only about a second, and the image is displayed almost immediately.
Detecting rubber worms takes a bit of work
Carrie's shoes full of items showed up oddly on the scan, as one would expect. Lewis could make out the spice packet and the outline of the plastic knife.
“I'm not sure I'm seeing the rubber worm, so we may need to do further development to be able to detect them effectively,” he said.
When the machine rescanned her shoes with no objects, she was ready to go.
“As we move toward trying to get to an easier travel experience, we know that one thing the traveling public would like (is) not to have to take off their shoes anymore,” Lewis said. “So bringing this technology to passengers is something we think they're going to be really excited about.”
The scanner is still a prototype, and data from the CES demonstration will be collected and used for further development.
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