Oppose the Porno-Scanners. Write a Letter (But Not to Washington).

         

I have a friend – very non-political – who loves to travel. But even she, who basically trusts government to do the right thing, was nervous about the porno-scanners now being deployed for the benefit of the security industry and peeping Toms in the TSA.

Somehow this topic came up while she and I were on a long drive Friday. She said she longed to return to her favorite country in Asia but “didn’t want anybody looking at my boobs hanging halfway down to my waist.” But! Then she recently saw a news item on TV that included video footage of the scans. “Oh. Not so bad!” she thought. “Those don’t show anything too awful. Just vague fuzzy shapes with no details.”

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I had to tell her that she was seeing doctored images, and that the real scans were so clear that TSA porno-peepers could, for instance, tell if a man was circumcised. Her face fell as far as the boobs she was so worried about.

On a roll (and having recently written an article on the subject), I went on about the TSA’s other lies – about the machines not having the capacity to store or transmit images, about possible health problems.I talked about being singled out for extra screening the one and only time I’ve flown in the last 13 years, and how stupid the criteria were. I told her I probably wouldn’t be flying again. Not if I could help it.

Then she asked me one of those put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is questions: “Well, did you speak up when they made you go through extra screening?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t think it would do any good.” (All I did was make a flippant remark. They chose me for extra screening because I was wearing loose cotton pants with baggy pockets. Baggy pockets are apparently inherently suspicious, even though in my case the fabric was so light that the single mint I carried visibly weighed one of them down.)

“Well have you written letters to people in charge telling them you object to the scanners?”

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October 27, 2010