Since airport security is already so quick, hassle-free and safe from the looming threat of nail clippers and safety pins, the Transportation Security Administration has decided to make it a little more exciting by requiring airports to install body scanners in place of metal detectors.
Well, in addition to taking full-color, high-resolution photos of your naked body, apparently these scanners will take five times longer per passenger than traditional metal detectors and are so large that a lot of airports will have a hard time finding room for them.
Why are we putting up with this? Going through one of these scans is effectively the same as a strip-search, only the latter requires probable cause.
There’s a good reason for this — being systematically stripped down in front of another person is invasive and embarrassing. We should only subject people to this with an extremely good reason.
It’s shocking the TSA thinks a three-dimensional photo is any less of a privacy violation. Even if the images are not stored or the scan operator doesn’t see the passenger afterward, it’s still disturbing and degrading to force the millions of people who fly every year to go through something like this every time they get on a plane.
Especially since it’s not going to work. Not completely.
This new technology might stop a few people from hiding explosives in their underpants, but it’s idiotic to expect airports to stop every single crazy person who walks through the doors. They can’t. Even the most intensive, thorough, time-consuming security anyone can come up with is not going to catch everything.
For example, even if airports somehow manage to squeeze these giant body scanners into already overcrowded airports, the machines wouldn’t detect an explosive if someone, say, swallowed it. Are we going to scan people’s internal organs next?
Maybe. The U.N. suggested it.
I’m not saying national security is something that should ever be taken lightly. Not at all. Every time people are hurt when a bomb goes off at a bus station or an office worker receives biological weapons in the mail, it’s an awful, horrible tragedy and we should do everything within reason to prevent such events from happening.
Instead of spending countless billions of dollars implementing ever more extreme and unconstitutional security measures, we should spend this money gathering the intelligence to stop terrorist groups and individuals from ever making it to the airport.
It is critical for this country to draw the line between national security and paranoia. You could live in a world where your phone calls were constantly monitored and you were finger-printed and cavity-searched every time you went to work. You’d have to surrender every ounce of dignity you had, but you’d be a lot safer.
I don’t want to live like that. There are awful people in the world who are going to do awful things, but if we let our fear of what they might do scare us into giving up our right not to feel like a criminal in our everyday lives, we have more serious problems than terrorists.
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kenschnauzer 2 years, 3 months ago
I just hope you’re not one of many people who whine, moan and complain about having your freedoms impinged upon, and then when something happens you scream and yell that the government should have done more to stop it!
People can't have it both ways, and if the idiots out there would quit trying to "test" the system, or try to sneek things through the screening checkpoint because they are either too lazy, ignorant or deem themselves as being special, maybe the rules would not be as difficult as they are today.