We tried to fool the TSA’s new airport shoe scanner with rubber worms at CES 2025. Here’s what happened
You can pay for TSA PreCheck wearing your shoes when going through security at the airport, but what about the rest of us who don’t particularly enjoy the humiliation of messing with our socks or… hey! — bare soles on the floor where thousands of other shoes and feet have scraped.
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To speed up the process and reduce the ick factor, the Transportation Security Administration is at CES 2025 in Las Vegas I show myself new technology that will allow you to save your shoes while scanning the shoes 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 in 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,” Kerry said. “Maybe I should put something in my shoe and see what happens on the scanner.”
Carey stuffed various small objects, including dental floss, a gummy worm, a packet of mustard 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 tried to blow up an American Airlines flight with homemade bombs that would 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 implemented at airports, the security personnel themselves will not actually be reviewing the images.
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“Everything will be driven by an automated detection algorithm,” Lewis said. “So the officer is going to get a red light or a green light basically saying are the shoes ready or do we need to do an additional check?”
The machines look for a variety of things, Lewis said, including shoes that have been tampered with, specific material properties and other issues.
The technology relays the image in pieces, essentially building the photo of the shoes on the computer screen, layer by layer. One demo shoe had a metal letter “F” hidden inside, and Louis showed Carey how the metal letter slowly materialized as the pieces of the image piled up. Scanning takes only about a second and the image is displayed almost immediately.
Finding rubber worms takes a little work
Kerry’s item-filled shoes showed up strangely on the scan, as one might expect. Louis was able to make out the spice packet and the outline of the plastic knife.
“I’m not sure I’m seeing the resin worm, so we may need to do some additional development to be able to detect them effectively,” he said.
When the machine rescanned her shoes without the items, she was done.
“As we strive to try to achieve a more seamless travel experience, we know that one thing the traveling public would like (is) to no longer have to take off their shoes,” 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.
For more from CESlook the best TVs we’ve ever seen and on the most innovative things you can actually order now.
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