Of course, that assumes If the aim was to catch terrorists and drug smugglers rather than to sell scanners. The technology itself isn’t broken; it’s the administration that needs fixing.

Blowing something else up that’s not an airplane. If I were of the terrorising persuasion I’d say making flying stressful / insanely expensive / inconvenient is a job done, so let’s move on to something else.

What if terrorists would take some explosives or drugs (even milligrams are enough) …make a solution out if it, fill it in a aerosol can or something else and use it as spray…e.g. on the luggage of other people…or take the bus/subway or other public transport where people will travel to the airport and do the same thing….

How will a sniffer dog react, if he thinks every piece of luggage, passenger has his favorite toy hidden?

And this method will work for the electronic sniffer devices (which are in development), too.

And even without doing something it happens:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-25/munich-airport-shutdown-was-caused-by-oblivious-passenger.html

bombjack

Now it’s going to be impossible to smuggle pancakes onto the plane! And I already had to make do with so little syrup…

They can’t very well stop messing with the lives and societies that were evil enough to exist on top of oil reserves. That is impossible, because that would impact profits for the people in charge.

So instead they have to make a grand show of doing ‘other’ somethings. Less effective, but more visible. Also, more profitable.

Doing anything else would just be Unamerican/uncanadian/unbritish. Us not liking it is mostly just us not knowing our place (servile).

IOW he didn’t bother going through passport control. He wasn’t screened before he boarded. He could have been wearing a martyr’s wife beater stuffed with whatever.

These machines, and the rest of the airport BS is sold by modern day carpet baggers “Wouldn’t you like to look like you were doing the right thing for buck-passability (TM)”. But look on the bright side, it keeps them off the streets. They would probably be dealing in arms or something else trying to instigate tensions in a flash point like South Korea to sell arms.

Wait! ohhh they are gooood …….

Well, they do know what can be done to reduce terrorism, but all of this security theater is a political buffer to keep them from having to change foreign policy. The more people are told that those around them are more responsible for terrorist acts than the government, the less people will quibble about it.

If you really want to bend a country’s behavior to your will, make it blatantly obvious that you can wedgie them no matter how many self-defense handbooks they mail order from ads in the back of a magazine.

“in other words, the pornoscanners are absolutely useless. . . ” if you make the assumption they’re for limiting terrorists rather than limiting freedom and training Americans to submit to authority. For that function they’re working perfectly.

Is anything being done to test the TSA methods in court?
I would donate a few dollars towards the costs…!!

As Adam Savage points out from his personal experiences with the scanners in this clip here… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3yaqq9Jjb4

WTF TSA indeed. –AMG