The organization may claim to do everything in the interest of keeping people safe, but the public generally detests the TSA for requiring us to take our shoes off and stand in front of the infamous full-body scanner in order to board a plane. The fact that said scanners produced all-but-naked images of travelers felt like an invasion of privacy to many Americans, and some politicians even set up their own PR stunts in order to protest being subjected to the whole process.

Well, last week we heard about what may be the TSA’s biggest recent PR win–though it certainly didn’t happen at the group’s request. In short, it looks like the era of “naked” full-body scans is coming to an end. We have a feeling the TSA’s PR agency of record breathed a sigh of relief upon learning that the organization, under pressure from a new law to develop scanners that produce less intimate images of travelers’ bodies, announced that its partner in scanning Rapiscan Systems would not be able to update the relevant software in time. The org even blogged about it!

Of course, this is by no means an end to the TSA’s ongoing PR problem.

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So can it be that the media blew the issue out of proportion? That’s Howard Kurtz’s opinion. According to his story on The Daily Beast, NBC Nightly News did four stories on the subject last week, the CBS Evening News did five, the story was the lead on today’s morning shows and network programming, and took a cover spot on the New York Times.

All this and the scanners have only reached 70 out of 453 U.S. airports.

In response, TSA head John Pistole “stiffly sticks to his talking points and keeps turning the conversation to terrorism,” Kurtz writes. “The only ground he would cede is that ‘we haven’t done a good enough job educating people.’”

Indeed, some argue that it’s the comms lapses that have been the biggest problem all along.

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