That's what TSA says. As you may know, they have lied before. Also, do you really imagine you could take a picture of an object, say a penny, in a plane by placing it on a film for 2 minutes. In contrast, you will surely get it (as a negative of a circle) if you place a penny on a film when you go behind the scanner (you can get far more considering how many pixels they get on their screens). They haven't given technical specs of the exposure to anyone outside government and prohibit TSA operators from wearing radiation badges.
Note also that comparing high energy cosmic radiation (typically gamma) to low energy X ray photons is comparing apples and oranges.
a) One cosmic ray photon will have equal energy as millions of soft X ray photons. Yet each of these photons may break a chemical bond if it strikes a molecule, hence even though you are exposed to the same energy from 1 cosmic ray (gamma) photon as from million X ray photons, the latter will break many more chemical bonds (each break is a possible mutations, e.g. if it is on the DNA molecule).
b) Soft X ray photons have much larger wavelength than cosmic ray photons, hence much greater cross section with interaction with molecules. Hence even one for one, each X ray photon has more chance of striking molecule than a gamma ray cosmic photon (because of greater cross section).
c) Each pixel they get on their screen is equivalent to at least one back-scattered X ray photon (along with damaged molecules from which it bounced back, plus all molecules for photons absorbed i.e. those that didn't bounce). Those images we have seen seem to have several millions pixels (1000x1000 is 1 million pixels), hence you will have tens or hundreds of millions damaged molecules after the scan. While many will be just water molecules, some will be proteins in your retina and some DNA in your skin cells, thus causing mutation, possibly cancerous.
d) Ask your doctor should pregnant womenm, children or elderly go through it? Ask also about eyesight damage. Doctors are already advising patients to opt out.
e) Experts on this technology are warning, based on quality and size of published images, that TSA's proclamations are at least one to two orders of magnitude understated (because of comparisons of apples and oranges and because of using volume rather than surface exposure units, which will superfically average the total absorbed radiation over all molecules in human body rather than just over molecules of the skin, making it thus appear as much lower average exposure per molecule; while cosmic gamma radiation will go through your entire body, mostly merely passing through due to low cross section, the soft X-ray photons from the scanners will either abosrb entirely or scatter inelastically from molecules, doing damage ether way).
Here’s what a Professional Pilot’s website has to say about the scanners:
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/434370-tsa-pilots-exempt-scanners-pat-downs.html
You raise interesting points about the radiation itself. If what you say is true — and I’m going to read more about that — then you win this argument.