I think the sniffing device has turned out to be a very interesting exercise in government contracting and science. The science of the sniffing devices appears to work. It appears that you can put a person into the sniffers and get a very good idea of whether or not they have a range of explosives on them.
But the United States has found out that unless you have a very careful process of contracting and making sure your science works in an airport, you're going to have a device that winds up sitting on a shelf. I think the United States government has several hundred of these devices sitting on shelves in boxes because they don't work in an airport. They are unable to work in the high humidity of an airport. They're unable to work with all the debris floating around in the air. Quite frankly, the sniffers got clogged
I certainly think that if the TSA had it to do over again.... I think they would be wishing that they had done something we call the O'Hare test. They would have tried to see if it could work operationally at an airport as large as O'Hare the day before Christmas under high passenger loads, under the same environment.
I think this cautionary tale applies to the whole-body imaging as well. We need to make sure that it operates under high passenger loads, should that be the route people want to go.