TSA Promises Privacy For Subjects Of Clothing-Penetrating Scans

[seafan]

Source: InformationWeek

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration today promised to protect air travelers' privacy as TSA personnel peer through their clothes.
The TSA has begun testing a millimeter wave scanning system at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport as an alternative to pat-downs performed by security personnel when secondary screening is deemed appropriate. The technology can see through clothing to detect weapons, explosives, and other objects.

The TSA said that energy emitted by millimeter wave technology -- 10,000 times less than a cell phone -- is safe, that the technology is intended to keep passengers safe, and that it will keep the potentially embarrassing images safe. .....
Not everyone finds such assurances credible. In a statement, Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program, spelled out three objections to the TSA's plans.

"First, this technology produces strikingly graphic images of passengers' bodies," Steinhardt said. "Those images reveal not only our private body parts, but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags. That degree of examination amounts to a significant -- and for some people humiliating -- assault on the essential dignity of passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate."

Steinhardt also expressed doubt that such screenings could really be considered voluntary if passengers did not understand the invasiveness of the images and that the program would remain voluntary in the future. Finally, he voiced skepticism of the TSA's privacy safeguards. "They say that they are obscuring faces, but that is just a software fix that can be undone as easily as it is applied," he said. "And obscuring faces does not hide the fact that rest of the body will be vividly displayed."

Read more: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202401630

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And coming soon to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport and at Los Angeles International Airport...


In creeping,yet frightening increments, we are losing our privacy, civil liberties and a sense of identity as Americans under this rogue administration.

Have we yet reached critical mass?