Received My First Body Scan and I Am Okay With It

How can anyone trust any component of the Administration when it has been revealed that they have in effect a "Star Chamber"? These people are only looking for ways around the Constitution and if that's not possible they seem to just ignore it.

MMW with ATR might be harmless but as has been stated it is still a strip search without cause. So far no answer to the Backscatter devices and we for sure don't know how much x-ray exposure those things toss out but we do know you can see bone in some public images. Adding ATR to Backscatter is a non-starter for me.

The only solution is to return airport/aircraft security back over to the owners of that property. If they insist on using Backscatter, and they could, then we have the choice to not fly with that company or through that airport if other options are available elsewhere. Government should have never been brought in to this area of security.

 

mike, wtmd is going through your clothes and body, no?

 

Great analogy! LOL. How sad this is closer to the truth than anyone would ever have guessed.

 

I know that this was not directed at me, but I feel compelled to respond. While I acknowledge your point, I personally think that being probed by the magnetic field of a metal detector is not as invasive as having an image taken of the body through the clothes, which is what the AIT scanner is doing, ATR or not. Yes, with ATR that image is not displayed for any human being to see (so we are told), but it is being generated all the same. I just am not entirely comfortable with that, whereas I am OK with the metal detector, or with other through-the-clothes detectors that might be used such as some type of chemical or material sensor. Human beings are visually oriented creatures and I think that psychologically we will have a stronger aversion to imaging-based techniques than to non-imaging alternatives.

 

The jury is still out on the MM wave system as some initial research has pointed to MM waves as being capable of unzipping DNA (not good probably). The x-ray driven machines? Bad news all around. You are given a whole body dosage by a machine that is not regulated by any responsible government agency. The x-ray machine used to examine your dog has more oversight than does the machines used by TSA to possible detect something they don't like.

A good question is why TSA prohibits their employees from wearing a dosimeter.

 

Metal detectors also go under your clothes. They even detect metal inside your body. Do you object just as strongly to those devices? I agree that the 4th amendment should prohibit all such searches at least without explicit consent, but the 4th amendment is often ignored or interpreted out of existence these days in many areas. Short of an armed revolt large enough to take on most of the US armed forces, forcing the government to obey the 4th amendment as it was actually intended seems pretty impractical these days. It's just not going to happen. Keep in mind that the 9th amendment should also prohibit such searches, but all mention of the 9th amendment is pretty much laughed at nowadays. Only Libertarians seem to remember that the 9th amendment is every bit as real and important, if not more so, than the commonly cited 2nd, 4th, and 5th amendments.

What if it were the airlines themselves and not the government who made you agree to such searches in order to get on their aircraft? In which case there may or may not be airlines without any security at all depending on market demand and profitability. And there might be Paranoid Airlines which does not allow any carry-on luggage at all and requires you to fly naked and only after a full cavity search which includes a colonoscopy at no additional charge.

Non-ionizing EM radiation has always been considered benign and there has been no real evidence to indicate otherwise. RF radiation is such a ubiquitous part of our daily lives that it seems likely that we would have noticed if it were dangerous. Keep in mind that every fluorescent light is actually a UV source which is a known source of skin cancer and eye damage. The UV light is mostly shielded by the phosphor coating on the glass, but all you need is a slight imperfection in the coating for some to leak through. I realize that the government is not requiring you to use fluorescent lights in order to travel freely, but the point is that very few things have been proven 100% safe. Based on human experience with microwave radiation in general, the mmw devices are very likely to be safe.

Having said all that, something just occured to me. Do we know what kind of device is actually generating the 30 Ghz waves? A gyrotron, traveling wave tube (TWT), or even a klystron might be reasonable guesses. All of these devices use a velocity modulated electron beam. Unless properly shielded these devices can actually emit x-rays. So some independent testing of the machines for x-ray radiation leakage might be in order if L3 does in fact use an electron beam device. In fact you would probably want to test every mmw NoS for manufacturing defects that might affect the x-ray shielding.

 

Addressing just one point of your questions from above.

If airlines as a private enterprise provided their own security then they could set limits and use any method they believed to be needed. That would be tempered with cost, threat, and what the public would find acceptable.

I fully believe that airport/airline security should be the business of the property owners and government should have a limited role for collecting and supplying intelligence information to the airlines.

 

Once the government removes itself from the loop and stops committing assaults and unlawful detentions under color of law, it's a different story.

I've got little quarrel with businesses setting up security procedures which are adjusted by the usual market forces. That's entirely Constitutional. I don't think many people will be flying naked air as a consequence.

Like most people, I once say no issues with the deployment of metal detectors in at the entrances of some public buildings and at airports. Now I see the error in my thinking. The Nanny State is incessantly working to affect the incremental elimination of individual rights. They are fascist scum whose bleeding-heart rhetoric only thinly conceals their arrogant contempt for individual rights. Give them a mm and they'll take it all.

 

That study has been discredited by a later one.

 

The jury is still out.

That's a red herring. The subject under discussion is strip searches, real & virtual.

 

Have you actually read the study I am referring to? It seems pretty conclusive to me. The first study was flawed and frankly wasn't even really science. It was just a mathematical model.

 

You seem intent on missing the point -- for most of us here the overriding issues are privacy and unconstitutional search. However you rationalize the safety of the scanners is of little consequence.

With regard to the scanners, one study might discredit another, but none will really prove that MMW scanners are truly "safe". If they're still in use in 20-30 years & the tort attorneys aren't queuing up to put L3 out of business, at that point we might start to conclude that they're safe.

 

I don't disagree with the principle behind your thinking. It is for me a distasteful compromise. I'm actually more bothered by the stance you have to take in the d*mned things, spreading your legs and holding your hands up like some perp. I'm not really sure if I want to submit to that, and might just continue to opt out. The ATR scanner per se doesn't bother me as much because it is simply extremely unlikely that someone is looking at the images. Simply too expensive, too time consuming, and the PR cost would be terribly high when it was found out that they were looking at people naked under false pretenses or collecting the images. They simply don't need it. As a practical matter, the localized "patdown" upon false ATR alarm does not seem to be too much of a problem at least it hasn't generated a lot of bad press--yet. It is still too early to tell for sure whether that is going to be a problem.

I think the move to ATR has to be taken as the victory it is. If people had not objected so vociferously, we would not now have it. So accept the victory and move on. There are other battles to win, the random groping, any groping of private areas without cause, etc. Being sexually molested due to bad ETD protocols. People like SATTSO, like Bart, like TSORon, their bosses, all have jailer mentalities and would really have no more visceral objection to a full strip search of passengers than they would if they were working in a prison. Just bodies to be processed, what's the fuss, afraid of someone looking at you, etc. They will never see this issue as we do. They will never see things as we do. They are not one of us. That is the sad thing. A separate class of people staffing this entire agency, vetted for their ability to treat their fellow citizens as prisoners in a jail.

 

Because I'm bored and none of you are awake, I feel the need to share the conversation I overheard yesterday in regards to scanners, as once again it shows what we are up against.

I was flying back to Germany and the person behind me was flying US-XXX-Germany-XXX. He was quite the loud knowitall, and was telling his party that security outside the US is so bad because they don't have the scanners. He then went on to explain that Chertoff had managed to push the scanners through before he left his position with DHS and how good that was.

The final point to his explanation was that Americans should stop whinging about the scanner because 'anyone going to Israel or entering an airport in Israel even just to work in the terminal is strip searched, every single time, by hand'.

Thankfully he was 'invited' out of the F line and into the economy line at that point. But he is not alone; I have read many such things on the internet and we have all heard and read such things from random people.

On a somewhat related note, I am happy to announce that I just brought an Obatzda through airport security so dinner tonight will be Laugenstange with Obatzda. (And no planes have fallen out of the sky as a result of my bringing a soft Bavarian cheese spread through....)

 

I wonder how long he's been a TSA employee. I can't think of any other group that vocally stupid.

 

Did somebody let Michael Moore out of the country?

 

The highlighted part is probably what bothers me the most. It is so totally indicative of the TSA mindset that every traveler is a terrorist until proven otherwise - and even then they don't accept that "proof" as evidenced by gate searches.

 

I briefly looked at some of David Parker Brown's other stories (Airline Livery of the Week!) and thought to myself, this guy is just another airline fanboy posting from his mom's basement. Okay, so sometimes I'm harsh, and maybe David really is a seasoned airline insider.

But then I saw this.

 

My objection to the scanners began long before anybody was talking about safety. My objection was then and is now that I am not a criminal. And I hate even using that analogy because I don't think criminals should be treated the way we treat them in this country. But for now it will have to suffice. I am not a criminal, and I won't stand in a stupid-(expletive deleted) machine that assumes I am one, I won't put my arms up in the air for the state to examine me, I won't f**king acquiesce.

It's about acquiescing, it's about buckling under, to every new boneheaded "security" procedure that comes down the pike, one step at a time, one "oh, it's nothing" increment at a time, one relinquishing of liberty at a time.

I started agitating about these things as soon as I learned they were implemented, in January 2010, and I knew nothing about the safety then. Now the safety issue is, of course, also relevant. But for me, the paramount issue is still the fact that damnit, I won't acquiesce. Because, as I predicted (and I know I'm not alone), those scanners presaged more invasive procedures. Et voilà.

 

I've been through 4 European checkpoints this week and each time the WTMD alarmed - my shoes I'm sure, so I was subjected to a 10 second-fingertip-patdown and sent on my way AND no planes fell from the sky. Why can't TSA take a page from the EU and get over themselves?