Wired Threat Level takes on the naked body scanners

In Wired's Threat Level blog, a three-part series on the technology and politics surrounding those "nude body scanners" introduced to a number of American airports last year. "Court Likely to Uphold Constitutionality of 'Nude' Airport Scanners," and "'Nude' Airport Scanners: Are They Safe?," and "Airport 'Nude' Body Scanners: Are They Effective?."

• [Ugly Canuck]

  We are all naked in the sight of God… and the TSA.

  • [Cowicide]

    I wonder what gawd sees the naked TSA doing?

• [Cowicide]

  tl;dr everything summarization of all three articles via speed reading/skim-actions:

  The courts, the TSA notes, “have invariably upheld airport screening procedures as ’special-needs searches’ or ‘administrative searches’ under the Fourth Amendment.”

  “You would have to go through the scanner 1,000 times to equate to one medical X-ray,” said Peter Kant, Rapiscan’s executive vice president, summarizing the study. “You get twice as much radiation when eating a banana than when going through the scanner.”

  A study published in the November edition of the Journal of Transportation Security suggested terrorists might fool the Rapiscan machines and others like it employing the X-ray “backscatter” technique. A terrorist, the report found, could tape a thin film of explosives of about 15-20 centimeters in diameter to the stomach and walk through the machine undetected.

  But the real question to me is… are do Americans have any self-respect anymore?

  NOPE

  • [Nadreck]

    The actual article is much more ambiguous about the safety of these machines. A couple of studies have been done but they don’t contain the raw protons/area data and so you can’t really evaluate their claims. Furthermore, unlike normal X-ray machines which shoot the radiation right through you evenly, the porno-scanners are entirely focused on one organ; your skin. All of the radiation is focused on the surface of the scanned person. Does that make a difference wrt skin cancer rates and does that mean that the standards for such scans be different? No one looked into these issues before deploying them.

    Even if the risk is low, what’s the lower risk? Getting blown up by a terrorist or dying of cancer from the scans? I’d guess that both are very low probabilities but that the chance of cancer over the general population is noticeably higher.

    • [Cowicide]

      Even if the risk is low, what’s the lower risk? Getting blown up by a terrorist or dying of cancer from the scans?

      Good point. But beyond that what does increased subjugation and public humiliation do to the public’s psyche?

      Americans are being broken in every way. It’s sad, sad, sad. The American spirit is being hijacked by corporatists and as long as American Idol is in good supply, most of the cows seem happy to just eat, fart, nap.

  • [IronEdithKidd]

    Hey, Cow, is that you on the Wired coments?

    Anyway, BOT, obviously these backscatter machines were designed to do one thing, and one thing only – enrich Michael Chertoff.

    • [Cowicide]

      Hey, Cow, is that you on the Wired coments?

      No, just here. It would say my Cowicide name if it was me. Steer me to the comments you’re talking about please, I’d like to see them.

      • [IronEdithKidd]

        Uh, it’s in the comment section of the Wired article in your link. Toward the bottom.

        You’ve always been rather civil here, but the Cowcide comment on Wired is rather 4-letter wordy.

        • [Cowicide]

          Uh, it’s in the comment section of the Wired article in your link. Toward the bottom. You’ve always been rather civil here, but the Cowcide comment on Wired is rather 4-letter wordy.

          Oh, I linked to Dangerous Minds, not Wired… now I know which comments you’re referring to. Yes, that’s my comments and I stand by them.

          I find this security theatre humiliating and absolutely enraging and those images at Dangerous Minds make me want to vomit in anger. I’d probably throw in a few more 4-letter wordy action in there if it’d help express myself further, but I think that just about covered it.

• [Anonymous]

  Hang on, what the TSA does has been upheld as ‘special needs’ searches? Oh, I’m going to be giggling about that for hours, now.

• [Baldhead]

  I think the issue of whether or not they actually work is a big one- if they don’t they are a pretty big waste of money.

• [EH]

  Looks like Threat Level figured out a new way not to write about Bradley Manning.