Replace, Don't Reform, Airport Security
• http://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/4989Earlier this month, the House of Representatives voted 310-118
to keep the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from
strip-searching passengers with millimeter-wave scanners at airport
checkpoints.
Screeners will grope us instead.
Millimeter-waves function like Superman’s X-ray vision, peering through
your clothing to the body beneath. You don’t undress; the scanner does
that for you. Meanwhile, screeners leering at the monitor and
ostensibly checking for weapons can check you out instead.
Prisons have used millimeter-wave and similar technologies for years.
No wonder the TSA, which frequently confuses passengers with prisoners,
has tried since its beginnings in 2002 to push us into these
pornographic scanners. But public outrage always stymied those efforts;
there’s something unutterably creepy about government agents inspecting
naked citizens. Michael Chertoff, then Secretary of the Department of
Homeland Security, finally growl
