Add your name to the campaign against TSA “Virtual Strip Searches”
The Identity Project has joined with the Privacy Coalition in a campaign to stop “Whole Body Imaging” in U.S. airports.
The TSA is in the process of substituing these “Virtual Strip Search” machines as a replacement for, or an addiiton to, metal detectors for primary screening of all travelers. You’ll be able (at least at first) to opt out of the virtual strip search “Whole Body Imaging”, but then you’ll automatically get the full secondary screening pat-down, as though you had set off the metal detector. The “Whole Body Imaging” machines use microwaves that go through your clothes and reflect off your skin to display a detailed picture of your naked body to a TSA operator, in a back room where you can’t see who they are or what they are doing while they ogle your as-though-naked image.
Individual travelers as well as organizations can sign up until May 31, 2009 (Sunday) to endorse a joint letter (scroll ot the bottom of this page for the sign-on form) calling for on Secretary of Homeland Security Napolitano to suspend the use of “Whole Body Imaging” for primary screening.
The TSA has been extremely careful to avoid acknowledging that it conducts “searches” at all, always using the term “screening” rather than “search”, “seizure”, “detention”, or “interrogation”. Their legal authority for increasingly intrusive activities such as these, at airports and other checkpoints, is limited and largely untested. At the same time, they have been gradually moving from (somewhat) narrowly-targetted searches of travelers to a de facto claim (not yet made explicit or reviewed by any court) that airports or other public transport facilities, even for domestic travel, are more like international borders where the authority for search of travelers has been considered virtually limitless.
In the past, the legal authority of the TSA has been evaluated by the courts on the assumption that searches incident to “screening” of travelers were limited to searches necessary to detect weapons and explosives. Whether “Whole Body Imaging” is the least intrusive search necessary for this purpose, whether it is intended or will be used for wider purposes, and whether the TSA has the legal authority to conduct more intrusive searches or searches for other purposes, are all questions best addressed through at least a formal rulemaking, and preferably by Congress, prior to Whole Body Imaging deployment or use as part of primary screening, rather than as a consensual alternative to pat-down searches during secondary screening.
Your exercise of the right to travel should not be conditioned on your waiver of the right to protection against unreasonable, warrantless, suspicionless search, seizure, detention, or interrogation.
May 27th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
This is totally invasive and not likely to yield any significant improvements to safety. Let’s quit checking our common sense at the door, and put an end to this Orwellian methodoly. The terrorist are just not worth our continual erosion of freedoms and rights to privacy.
June 4th, 2009 at 7:13 am
[...] can you do? Visit StopDigitalStripSearches.org and sign the online petition endorsed by the Identity Project. More importantly, call and/or email your member of Congress today and urge them to vote FOR the [...]
June 10th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
MORE PROFILING AND MORE BORDER PROTECTION
November 6th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Today at DIA I went through the metal detctor and then was ushered into the Whole Body Imaging machine at DIA without absolutely NO notice of what the machine did, or without being asked if it was okay with me. There were NO notices posted concerning this additional screening method. I am FURIOUS that my civil liberties were violated. I would not have consented to this invasive procedure. I would like to sue.
January 5th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
It’s a little known fact (apparently) that dogs are used to detect explosives. Dogs are used almost exclusively at our borders to find drugs. Dogs are used daily by U.S. Customs to detect explosives in sealed STEEL containers!…Yet why do we never see dogs being used at the airports??? It would eliminate the ridiculous act of removing shoes, or “pat-downs”…(Not to mention the cost of dogs versus the machines)…Canine detection is almost 100% effective according to their own reports…This is all about CONTROL…What happens when someone conceals C4 in their rectum?…(you know it’s got to be next) or a lady in her vagina?…Then is it OK for a body cavity search?…(BTW, a dog would find it there)…Will it be a “minor inconvenience” when they tell you to “bend over, and spread ‘em”… We all need to boycott this B.S. now!….It’s completely obvious that the latest “terrorist” boarded an aircraft due to gov’t incompetence, plain and simple!…..They have changed their “official” story SIX (6) times,…So far.
January 8th, 2010 at 10:28 am
The radiation is just more assault to our well being. How can this be healthy for people to who fly a lot . Radiation at any level adds up in a life time . This is wrong and we must make a stand to this
March 7th, 2010 at 11:05 pm
very good, thank youu
April 20th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Privacy please, so they want to keep taking our rights away!
June 13th, 2010 at 6:36 pm
Im down, where do I sign. i hate being molested in airports as is.
June 29th, 2010 at 8:43 am
Where do you sign? If airports are going to do this I refuse to fly.
July 6th, 2010 at 11:02 am
[...] year the Identity Project was one of more than 30 organizations that filed a joint petition with the DHS requesting a formal rulemaking on use of virtual [...]
August 10th, 2010 at 5:46 am
I had a horrifying experience on 5/6 flying out of Boston–was not told I had a choice re the full body scanner, was treated as a threat when I asked if I had to go through it, and was loudly sent to another area with the announcement to all that I had “refused”. I was treated like a criminal by the security agent–a man–and thought I was going to be thrown off my flight! I was then subjected to an especially violating pat down in which every part of my body was touched. I am now very anxious about having to fly again soon. I am a 64 yr old American born woman and cancer survivor, who has been told by my oncologist that the radiation in these machines is dangerous for me. I also believe strongly that my 4th amendment right to freedom from unreasonable search is violated by these machines.
August 11th, 2010 at 9:15 am
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