“Clean…clean…pistol…Uzi…two kids posing as an adult…” – Springfield Nuclear Power Plant Security Guard
News came this week that security at the Phoenix airport will soon be using a new type of scanner. It looks like something Bill & Ted’s kids might use to travel through time and employs invisible beams of energy to peer through clothing and detect foreign objects a would be terrorist might’ve taped to his body. McPaper has a quick and dirty write up of the whole thing.
I’ve written before about what a pitiable charade airport security has become and this new machine is exactly the kind of thing I loathe. It’s a new technology that is expensive and invasive but doesn’t seem to address any specific or pressing need. It’s added complexity for the sake of complexity.
The ACLU and other privacy advocates are raising objections on the grounds that airport security is going to see all kinds of embarrassing details on our flabby, broken bodies. USA Today and the other articles on-line have been too prim to spell out just what this means, but I feel no such constraints. The poor TSA people are going to see, in strange ghosted outline, nipples of various lengths surrounded by areolas of various diameters, penises (large and small, cut and uncut), and all manner of labia. And let’s remember that this is a country with an obesity problem so most of the people that pass through this apparatus are not going to be the kind you’d want to see naked. The term being used is “virtual strip-search” and that seems entirely accurate to me.
Those icky details and the privacy implications that come with the use of a functional x-ray specs machine have raised objections, which in turn have been addressed in a theater-of-the-absurd kind of way. You see, it’s all going to be okay because the security people watching the display are put in a separate location so they cannot identify specific passengers and snicker at them for having small dicks and sagging tits. The scanner cannot store images and, you’ll be glad to know, cell phones will be banned from the control room to prevent other images being taken. I feel better already, don’t you?
Even with those goofy precautions it’s still inevitable that some embarrassing stories will eventually shake loose. Sooner or later erections are going to enter the machine, either old guys are going to have taken their Cialis a little too recently or fifteen year old boys’ thoughts will stray. Wherever erections go, off color jokes follow. Or suppose some bored male screener, knowing his buddy is working the booth, diverts the attractive women to the machine as a prank. Some kind of humiliating story will come out in the press and the reputation of airport screening, and by extension the federal efforts against terrorism in general, will sink a little further.
More importantly, I haven’t yet seen any real justification for these machines other than that they basically seem neat and futuristic. Are people with concealed items in their clothes really a problem we’re not already addressing? Can this thing see items hidden in rectal or vaginal cavities? If so, what items? What are we defending against here? The TSA has so far bought eight of these things for a cool $1.7 million. That’s more than two-hundred grand per machine and doesn’t cover whatever ongoing maintenance will be required. Think of all the FBI and CIA agents that could learn Arabic or Pashto for $1.7 million.
New and better scanners at the airports are not going to secure the planes. (I suspect that the manufacturers of the scanners have eyes on markets beyond airports, e.g. schools, prisons, etc, but that’s for another time.) There will always be a way to either defeat the scanner or simply go around it. A friend of mine works maintenance at a major American airport and he’s related to me how slipshod the security is for employees. Sometimes he gets the full grilling just to return from lunch and other times he and his whole truck get waved right past the gate without a second glance. It is physically impossible, legally impossible, technologically impossible and socially impossible to secure an operation as complex as an airport. It couldn’t be done even if we implanted tracking devices in everyone and shredded the Constitution even worse than we already have.
Machines like the one going in at the Phoenix airport do not make flying any more secure, they merely look cool and make the feds seem like they know what they’re doing. At the same time they also make air travel that much less appealing and more intimidating. Nobody wins except whoever is invoicing the feds.
