The Guardian Reports that New scanners break child porn laws… among a host of other complaints. Convenient that an attack would happen as the technology rolls out like that. $$$$
Brown gives go-ahead for full-body scanners at Britain’s airports | Politics | The Guardian
The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.
Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.
Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.
They also face demands from civil liberties groups for safeguards to ensure that images from the £80,000 scanners, including those of celebrities, do not end up on the internet. The Department for Transport confirmed that the "child porn" problem was among the "legal and operational issues" now under discussion in Whitehall after Gordon Brown’s announcement on Sunday that he wanted to see their "gradual" introduction at British airports.
A 12-month trial at Manchester airport of scanners which reveal naked images of passengers including their genitalia and breast enlargements, only went ahead last month after under-18s were exempted.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/04/new-scanners-child-porn-laws
Not to also state the obvious that this is utter rubbish! How many more hours of delay and headaches are these grotesque voyeur scanners going to cause?
The Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit has shown exactly how ineffective most of the post-September 11 security measures have been in providing actual security, even as passengers flying in its aftermath experience even more stringent security theater.
“The system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days,” Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday in media interviews. “In many ways, this system has worked.”
Today she backed off of those assertions. “Our system did not work in this instance,” she told NBC. “No one is happy with that.”
http://www.homelandstupidity.us – Aviation security failed to prevent Christmas Day attack
I hope that the scanner’s future sees darkly…