New Airport Body Scanners Troubling to ACLU Privacy Expert

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/1011-07.htm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 11, 2007
3:40 PM


CONTACT: ACLU
[e-mail]

New Airport Body Scanners Troubling to ACLU Privacy Expert


WASHINGTON, DC - October 11 – The Active Millimeter Wave body scanners that Homeland Security has announced raise troubling questions about passenger privacy and ultimately their utility as a security measure.

We very much appreciate the fact that Transportation Security Administration Administrator Kip Hawley met with us yesterday and briefed us about the agency’s plans. But we are not convinced that it is the right thing for America.

First, this technology produces strikingly graphic images of passengers’ bodies. Those images reveal not only our private body parts, but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags. That degree of examination amounts to a significant – and for some people humiliating – assault on the essential dignity of passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate.

Second, we question the supposed voluntary nature of this scan – TSA’s assumption that the people who "consent" to this body scan really understand what they’re consenting to, and that it will long remain something over which passengers will be allowed to exercise any choice at all.

Third, we are skeptical of the privacy safeguards that the TSA is touting. They say that they are obscuring faces, but that is just a software fix that can be undone as easily as it is applied. And obscuring faces does not hide the fact that rest of the body will be vividly displayed.

They also say they are not keeping the images. That protection would certainly be a vital step for such a potentially invasive system, but given the irresistible pull that images created by this system will create on some employees (for example when a celebrity like George Clooney or someone with an unusual or "freakish" body goes through the system), our attitude is one of ‘trust but verify.’ We would like to see strong independent and legally binding assurance that the policy will be enforced and unchanged.

We question whether TSA, which has still not addressed many very basic problems with transportation security such as cargo screening, should be spending large sums of money on these very expensive devices.

Finally, we wonder how many of the people who submit to this bodyscan will end up having to do a pat-down search anyway because of limits in the technology’s ability to definitively identify suspected threats. Our impression is that a very high percentage of the passengers who opt for a scan will still wind up being physically searched because TSA officials will have trouble distinguishing threatening objects from ordinary ones like a wallet.

We urge TSA to reconsider using this detection system and to consider others that are less invasive, less costly and less damaging to privacy.

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[gateley]

1. Yeah, they're troubling ME, too! Have you seen photos? TOTAL invasion of privacy. nt

[WinkyDink]

2. And yet, unscanned luggage gets through.......

[Swamp Rat]

3. Just wait until the body scans hit the porno sites.

:nuke:

[Javaman]

4. And they will...nt

[Trillo]

5. And yet it's illegal to walk down the street buck naked. nt

[ThomCat]

6. Those things will become mandatory if the TSA can get them

implemented. Their idea of "voluntary" is that you either get scanned or you don't fly.

And there is no way they will not have a way of keeping those images. They're digitial images. It's just too easy to store them. They will manufacture some excuse for why "some" images must be kept, and then that exception will be expanded until all images are kept on file.

And, yes, celebrities and people with beautiful or grotesque bodies will definitely be the first people who's images will be kept and put online.

When you hear people talk about a slippery slope, this is it. TSA will do whatever they need to do to get this pushed through, and then they'll push us down that slope very deliberately.