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Over the past year and certainly over the last few months, fears about the effects of radiation on passengers passing through whole-body scanners have been splashed across newspaper headlines. The bottom line from researchers: Its OK. It would take something like 1,000 screenings per individual per year to exceed radiation standards. We are safe! Radiation won’t kill us. But, what about all of those TSA screeners?
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Where are our Congressional watchdogs these days? When it comes to counter-terrorism issues, they are all hiding. No one wants to seem to be soft on terror even as our pockets are being picked by misdirected spending and millions of Americans are facing more and more travels hassles.
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What we have here, based on fairly basic research, is an expensive new whole-body scanner technology being deployed nationwide by TSA over the howls of numerous privacy groups, without independent testing, using the manufacturers’ claims, all being lead by the former head of the Department of Homeland Security saying, basically, trust us.
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The Obama Administration announced their fiscal year 2010 budget proposal today. Under the administration’s proposal for DHS appropriations, the TSA’s annual budget would increase by more than a billion dollars from 2009 to 2011, with most of that going toward the purchase of “up to 1,000″ new virtual strip-search (”Whole Body Imaging” or, in the latest euphemistic language of the budget, “Advanced Imaging Technology”) machines.
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Green 787, more secure and less healthy, more flights and more fees in 2010
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A collection of videos about airport security. A naked (almost) protest in Berlin, a new Canadian security system and the way it used to be when it came to airport stripping.
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Heathrow is installing them, France and The Netherlands have agreed to buy them, and Italy has pledged to have them installed within three months, but the upper levels of the European Union (EU) bureaucracy is having second thoughts about full-body scanners. The word from the top is, “Not so fast.” The EU has no European-wide policy at this point.
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Already this week the TSA was caught in a lie about what it likes to call whole body imaging (virtual strip search) machines, when the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) obtained documents showing that, despite TSA claims that “this state-of-the-art technology cannot store, print, transmit or save the image,” the TSA actually requires all of these capabilities — image storage, printing, and transmission — as part of the contract specifications for the body scanners.
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I listened attentively to President Obama’s presentation and the discussions with Janet Napolitano, Director of Homeland Security, yesterday and sadly, I heard no different rhetoric. This speech by President Obama could have been delivered by President Bush, however, Bush would have thrown the word “terrorism” into the mix.
Americans have heard the same speeches coupled with the same knee-jerk band-aid responses that won’t make anyone safer, but will complicate travel.
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I can hear the masses beginning to beat the drum of whole-body scanners. TSA and other law enforcement groups surely must be pleased to see this yearning to be scanned spread by the uninformed knee-jerk media, liability-averse airport operators and pliant politicians. I have three words for American citizens — don’t believe them.
This technology will not save you.
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