Papers, Please!

Even as the TSA continues to claim that virtual strip-search machines (body scanners, “whole body imaging”, or in the latest TSA euphemism “advanced imaging technology”)  at airport and other checkpoints don’t reveal excessively intimate physical detail of subjects’ bodies, and that the images can’t be captured, and less than two months after similar scanners were introduced in the UK, a screener at Heathrow Airport in London was spotted taking a photo of a scanner image and overheard talking about the detail it revealed of the woman’s breasts.

I’m sure you’ll all be reassured to hear that the screener has been “warned” by the police and might be (but hasn’t yet been) fired.

Ironically, the screener was caught only because his victim was a fellow airport worker.  An ordinary traveler probably wouldn’t have been in position to see or overhear what had happened, or have realized what it meant.

The TSA says that the capability to store and transmit images, which the TSA has required to be built into the scanners, is “disabled” on the scanners when they are in use.  But the TSA has declined to comment on whether these TSA-required features are disabled in hardware or software, what would be needed to re-enable them, who is authorized to re-enable them, or how those authorizations are carried out or controlled.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 at 8:31 am and is filed under Surveillance State. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.