The Chris Moeller Archives

X-Ray vs. Groping: Choose Your Own Orwellian Adventure

Americans, who can often be trusted to willingly surrender their own individual liberty, recently informed pollsters for ABC News and the Washington Post, by a 64% affirmative, and a 2-1 margin, that they're cool with the use of full-body scanners before boarding an airplane. Perhaps this should be unsurprising however as the framed debate on airport security in the nation nowadays is between these digital x-ray images of fully-naked bodies and getting "gate-raped" by a same-gendered, uniformed employee of the federal government wearing rubber gloves. Also, the divide is wider, 70-27%, among those Americans that seldom or never fly so what do those people care about who's getting padded down, right? An airline passenger stripped to his or her smile by a public x-ray image has about as much of an impact on their daily lives as a dead Afghani.

But here's what Americans don't know about these whole-body scanning machines: The TSA has promised travelers that the scanners blur the facial features, that they place the viewing employees in a separate room, and that the images are immediately deleted upon a single viewing, but according to information delivered to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC.org) after a successful FOIA request earlier this year, the body scanners expressly ordered (demanded) by the TSA from the manufacturer have the ability to record, store, even transfer these digital images, and TSA officials have the ability to remove any and all of the privacy filters, contrary to their public claims. Why are they lying?

Meanwhile, a number of prominent scientists have been speaking out about the immediate and long-term radiation effects of these machines. They argue that there has been a mountain of misinformation about their safety provided through the media.

And for the privilege of all of this lost privacy and increased health risk, these scanners cost taxpayers about $170,000 each.

The issue has been a popular subject for some months over at Nader.org. Ralph Nader has already devoted quite a bit of effort in our time to the improvement of airline travel. His lawsuit against Allegheny Airlines in the early '70s forced the airlines to begin compensating disenfranchised passengers when flights are overbooked and reservations have to be canceled. He has advocated for the creation of an airline passenger association, a passenger "Bill of Rights," and one of his consumer groups lobbied for years to force the airlines to install impenetrable cockpit doors on commercial planes. The airlines successfully fought that demand, of course, because of its price tag, and then after the mass deaths of September 11th, they got the American taxpayers to foot the bill instead.

Somebody's getting rich on these x-ray machines too. Never forget that important consideration on any issue such as this.

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As a tribute to the late Leslie Nielsen, HuffPost posted 10 ways this week that Nielsen's epic 1980 film, "Airplane!", anticipated the TSA silliness with which we're forced to deal. After the first two, it gets to be kind of stretch, but it's worth a look.

posted by CM @ 6:05 PM