Logan and the TSA, for example, have already spent more than $180 million to build what's called an in-line baggage screening facility. When you check your bags, they're whisked away and screened for explosives before they're put on the plane. The drawback is that passengers aren't present in the event that a security agent needs to pop the latches on their Samsonite. At other airports, like T.F. Green in Providence, baggage is screened in the airport lobby, which allows passengers to supervise any latch- popping, but it forces them to stand in yet another line after they've checked in.

Congress has mandated that all airports screen 100 percent of checked bags by the end of this year - but many of them will use a patchwork of temporary measures to do so, including machines in the lobby, bomb-sniffing dogs, and hand searches. Reveal wants to sell its technology to airports before they do what Logan did - spend scads of money on a separate in-line facility for baggage screening. T.F. Green is an ideal potential customer - an airport that doesn't want to force customers to stand in a third security line and one that eagerly anticipates moving the hulking baggage scanners out of its lobby.

This solves three problems - it eliminates an extra queue for baggage screening, it gets the big SUV-size machines out of airport lobbies, and it also allows passengers to be present when their bags are opened. Reveal CEO Michael Ellenbogen says it's a cheaper, faster, and simpler solution, because it doesn't require setting up a separate facility for in-line screening, as Logan did. And he anticipates that labor costs will be lower than putting big machines in the lobby.