TSA to Look Through Your Clothes
[Update: Welcome Buzzflash readers! If you enjoy this post, please have a look around, you might enjoy the air travel or privacy category archives.]
USA Today reports “TSA hopes modifications make X-ray not so X-rated.”
The TSA now hopes to test modified “backscatter” machines in a few airports this fall that will solve the privacy issue. That’s a “significant software challenge” because wiping out body parts also makes weapons less visible, says Peter Kant, a vice president at backscatter maker Rapiscan Systems.
Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s technology program, says he’s “skeptical that you can both identify dangerous items and eliminate embarrassing imagery.”
TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield said, “Determining whether or not that balance exists is precisely the aim of these tests.” The agency is paying Rapiscan and American Science & Engineering $722,000 to deliver prototypes.
The reporter, Thomas Frank, fails to ask why these are being tested on innocent civilians, rather than TSA and DHS officials. And his paper innocently reveals the truth with this photo, carefully cut off to preserve the model’s privacy.
These child-porn producing machines have been featured before on Emergent Chaos, in posts like
“Small Bits: Xrays..”
Is this all the US Deptmt of Homeland security can come up with????? Something which can be so easily misused.
We all saw what a ‘few’ of the responsible soldiers were doing in Abu Ghraib prison. I guess this is just so the Security personnel back home on US soil don’t feel left out of the degenerate photo jambouree
This is truly a world gone mad. How offensive. Besides having the potential for abuse and misuse–what are the physiological effects of this technology? Are they indeed X-rays? What affect does it have on a cellular level? What is the operating mechanism here with which they take such intimate pictures? It looks deleterious. Damaging to our health. How does it affect children? Pregnant women? Doctors, Radiologists, please comment.