Recipe For Abuse

by digby

But they assured us that this couldn’t possibly happen:

Full-body scanning machines may reveal a little too much, if an incident of workplace violence this week among Transportation Security Administration screeners is any indication.

A TSA worker at Miami International Airport in Florida was arrested for allegedly assaulting a co-worker who had repeatedly teased him about the size of his genitals.

The insults stemmed from an X-ray of the accused captured during a training exercise with the airport’s full-body scanning machines, the report said.

[…]

The incident puts the spotlight back on technology some privacy advocates liken to a virtual strip search.

“As far as I’m concerned, this really demonstrates exactly how detailed the images are, exactly how invasive the search is,” said John Verdi, senior counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research center specializing in civil liberties and privacy issues. It receives much of its funding from private foundations.

Verdi said the Miami incident “… also demonstrates that this technology, and the way it’s being implemented by TSA, is ripe for abuse.”

The TSA screener scuffle is not the only recent case of workplace tension involving the technology. A security worker at London’s Heathrow Airport allegedly made lewd comments about a female colleague who mistakenly entered a scanner, according to the UK’s Press Association. The accused worker was given a police warning for harassment.

[…]

The alternative pat-down, which U.S. passengers may opt for instead of body scanning, has to be very intrusive to be effective, and studies show people are less tolerant of physical intrusion than of intrusive technology, Laird said.

While advanced imaging technology doesn’t involve direct physical contact, the screener training incident in Miami highlights some travelers’ reservations about full-body scans.

“I really think it would give a lot of folks pause if they thought that TSA employees were mocking naked body scans of American air travelers,” Verdi said.

Yeah.

I don’t know what the alternatives are here. It seems as if would-be terrorists really are so unimaginative that they are still hung up on airplanes, so ever more intrusive security is going to be necessary. Chalk one up for the bad guys on that. So I suppose these body scans are better than strip searches. But it’s also inevitable that these scans are going to be of prurient interest to the people who look at them and there are likely to be other breaches of personal privacy.

Me, I’m just going to fly as little as possible. It’s become such a nightmare on so many levels that it’s hardly worth it.

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