Airport Porn

I can see the ads for new TSA personnel now: “Voyeurs - who love looking for weapons -wanted. See more people naked than any Internet site imaginable. Applicants must be willing to peer endlessly at naked human shapes for hours, eye stamina required.” There are government pervs out there who could not be more grateful to al Qaeda, shoe and crotch bombers, for providing paid voyeur entertainment, with full government job security and benefits.

“Bottom” line, having full body scanners at just about every U.S. airport (and a whole host of airports overseas – the Dutch have “embraced” the technology, and Israel adds super-expert, psychological profilers to their “scanning” system) is going to be just another ordinary fact of life for American travelers. Will this deter anyone from traveling, further tanking the fragile balance sheets of teetering airline stocks? Guess! But think of the positive impact on air pollution emission – those “wide-bodied” craft suck down tons of jet fuel.

For the curious (and those seeking where to invest a buck or two), there are two predominant systems: Millimeter-wave (which uses a radar-like bounce-back wave transmission that creates a computer image of your body) and Backscatter x-ray (which uses an ultra-mild x-ray that bounces off your body and the objects you are carrying to define an image). We are assured that neither of these systems creates any toxicity; but they both use fairly harmless radiation.

The December 30^th FastCompany.com tells us the ugly truth about this intrusion into our privacy: “Then there's the awkward bit: While these things do certainly reveal your weapons...they also reveal your body. In detail. Down to the furry bits. And, given that they're going to have to be human-operated (with some computer assistance, for sure, but still man-in-the-loop) like the baggage machines, that means you're effectively going to be taking your clothes off for a TSA guy/gal (and how long before there's a law suit about there being no TSA girls on duty to scan women for a particular flight?) Yup--that's a stranger, a government employee. And one who's almost certainly empowered to arrange for you to be thrown in jail if you object or are, in these stupidly super-sensitive times, deemed as being ‘uncooperative.’

“The privacy implications of all this have worried individuals and pressure groups for ages, and since the machines are also being trialed for use in situations other than airports, a new lawsuit ... has just been brought against the Department of Justice concerning the illegal strip-search nature of the technology.” If our government is in the business of promoting transparency, these puppies deliver! “Hey, buddy, I can see right through you,” has an entirely new meaning. Wives, mothers, sisters and girlfriends all on display! Now if only the government could create a scanner that could work on Wall Street, an arena capable of inflicting trillions of dollars of damage to the American system!

The most recent “fomenter of seemingly justifiable profound intrusion by government” is 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is accused of trying to blow up a plane descending into Detroit on Christmas Day in the name of Al Qaeda. He added explosive crotch covers to shoe soles into the panoply of “weird places to hide bad stuff.” He will be able to sit (after healing) in his prison cell, an unwelcome guest of U.S. taxpayers, and contemplate how his actions have further, and seemingly permanently, disrupted the lives of ordinary Americans taking ordinary trips… those fat cats in private jets, well, life is always different at the top.

So for anyone old enough or who has looked at the history of the era, picture the reaction of all those civil libertarians of the 1960s who, sometimes with reason, feared excessive government intrusion into our privacy. Imagine dropping one of those dudes into a 2010 modern international airport in the U.S. Yeah, they’d be taken away in handcuffs, and litigation – creating needed jobs for unemployed lawyers – would proliferate.

The fact is, when you look at the routine bombings in Baghdad, the seemingly unchecked success of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the free range that folks like al Qaeda’s “never caught” fugitive leader, Osama bin Laden, seem to enjoy and how our daily lives – from airport travel to huge federal budget deficits – have changed for the worse, it’s hard to say that we are winning the war against these terrorists. They seem to have the consistent upper hand. It just goes to show how, in a modern world, it just doesn’t take that many desperate and violent people to create massive hardship and tremendous economic costs. But if every time there is an “incident,” exactly how far do we really want to go to change our lives for the worse? When is enough… enough?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.