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Digital PenetrationInvasion of the naked body scanners.

By William Saletan
Posted Saturday, March 3, 2007, at 7:32 AM ET
Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Click image to expand.

Psssst. Want to see Susan Hallowell naked? Look at the Feb. 24 New York Times. She's on Page A10.

Hallowell runs the Transportation Security Administration's research lab. Four years ago, she volunteered to be scanned by a backscatter X-ray machine, which sees through clothing. She was wearing a skirt and blazer. But in the picture, she's as good as nude.

Now it's your turn.

Last week, TSA began using backscatters at airports to screen passengers for weapons. The first machine is up and running in Phoenix. The next ones will be in New York and Los Angeles. The machines have been modified with a "privacy algorithm" to clean up what they show. But even the tempered images tell you more than you need to know about the endowments of the people seated next to you.

Are you up for this? Are you ready to get naked for your country?

This is no joke. The government needs to look under your clothes. Ceramic knives, plastic guns, and liquid explosives have made metal detectors obsolete. Carry-on bags are X-rayed, so the safest place to hide a weapon is on your body. Puffer machines can detect explosives on you, but only if you're sloppy. Backscatters are different. They can scan your whole surface, locating and identifying anything of unusual density—not just metals, which have high atomic numbers, but drugs and explosives, which have low ones.

Why isn't this technology in lots of airports already? One reason is fear of radiation. That's a needless worry. You get less radiation from a scan than from sitting on a plane for two minutes. If that's too much for you, don't fly.

The main stumbling block has been privacy. The ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have fought backscatters at every turn, calling them a "virtual strip search." It's a curious phrase. The purpose of a strip-search is the search. Stripping is just a means. Virtual inspections achieve the same end by other means. They don't extend the practice of strip-searching. They abolish it.

When the manufacturer of the backscatter machines, American Science & Engineering, introduced the technology in prisons nine years ago, the whole point was to replace strip searches. "The scan requires no physical contact between the operator and the subject, thus vastly reducing the threat of assault against law enforcement personnel and the spread of communicable diseases," the company argued. The rationale, like the machine, conveyed not an ounce of human warmth, which is why the inmates preferred it. Better to be seen than touched. Better to be depersonalized than degraded.

Thanks to terrorism, the rest of us now face the same choice. Under TSA policy, if you set off an airport metal detector or are chosen for secondary screening, you're subject to a pat-down inspection that "may include sensitive areas of the body" such as your chest and thighs. Unless, that is, you're lucky enough to be in Phoenix, where you can choose a backscatter instead.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Illustration by Rob Donnelly.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Of course, the 'experimental' and 'voluntary' use under very rigid protocols is just the proverbial camel's nose under the tent. The idea is apparently that someday everyone, without exception, will need to go through one of these to get on an airplane. Of course, once that legal justification is made, then there isn't must reason that you can't be required to go through them anywhere else. To get on a bus? To walk into a federal building? Every day at school? What about private businesses that want their own machines? To replace metal detectors at the door of your favorite club?

As they become more common, of course, the "high/strict standards" imposed will invariably crumble before the reality of the modern economic world. You may be able to have all these safeguards at the airport, but that will be an exception. And, of course, not really "everyone" will be required to suffer any indignities associated with such a check. As always, there will almost certainly be exceptions to the requirements for certain select groups of people/VIPs.

In addition, these scanning machines may very well become great devices for biometric identification. Of course, the whole task of identification will throw away the 'anonymity' argument -- but that is the next step. For now we are all quite safe...

Such scanning may or may not turn out to be a good idea. But let's not kid ourselves about this being at the airport only, and only with the rigid protocols that have been described so far. Get ready for a whole lot of scanning...

--fozzy

(To reply, click here.)

I'd greatly prefer the backscatter system to the present one. Getting on an airplane is an exercise in patience today. Taking off my shoes, taking off my belt, hell I practically have to take out my fillings to pass a checkpoint.

"Ooohh but they'll show my naked body." Who gives a crap? If it comes down between some a-hole making off with recorded images from the backscatter system and dying in a fiery airplane crash I'll accept the humiliation thank you.

But that is exactly what this will come down to - people nervous about showing their body to some stranger. Unfortunately they have real concerns above Puritanical ones. The screeners are human and therefore the danger exists for exploitation and abuse of the system. Having backscatter photos show up on the web would practically destroy the system's intent and throw us all back to taking off our shoes and wanding us again.

It's unfortunate that our own immaturity with the naked body is a real hinderance to forward progress.

--Eigenvector

(To reply, click here.)

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