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"Those who sacrifice their own liberty for safety deserve neither." – Ben Franklin
No.
Just my not-so-humble opinion. B)
No liberty being sacrificed here, so what have you to hide?
I think it can be, if you don't request it.
That would have caught the "Underwear Bomber" before he even got to the plane. So that would not have been a good thing?
And why would he have requested a full body scan?
If you want safe air travel, ya gotta put up with the scans.
Just my opinion. B)
This just make it easier for well endowed men to join the mile high club with a stewardess who watches the scanner
Best invasion of privacy ever.
Yes and no. Yes, because you are surrendering your privacy for "safe" passage along an airline, and no, because you are using a public form of transportation, so it is expected to lose some privacy. People seem to forget that it is a privilege to enter a privately owned vehicle or establishment. People assume it is their right to be allowed into stores or on planes, when in reality, if they are unhappy with body scans, they can drive or take a boat.
It actually would not have caught Abdulmutallab. The system doesn't work on the current explosives being used in the manner they are using them. A British company that makes them even said as much openly, though obviously nobody has listened to them.
It also wouldn't have caught Richard Reid.
You are conflating public transportation with a privately owned business here. It is also true that we are accommodating the owners of the planes/business, but it's the government paying for and doing the scanning and screening.
Under a true form of security for the convenience of the owner, we would be paying extra ticket prices to pay for this security rather than through the invisible taxes and spending of government and could choose those businesses which conducted the security screening necessary to board a plane in the cheapest, most efficient, or most secure manner at our preference and could express this preference through the price mechanism and the open market. What I am describing does not exist, and you will find that most other countries or private companies do without many of our ridiculous screening methods because they are simply not worth the price to prevent the possibility of a terrorist incident.
As we saw again, the most effective security deterrent was an alert passenger. That costs the taxpayers very little (particularly since this guy was Dutch) in the form of some risks which we are made adverse toward, and costs the private company nothing at all.
I don't have much issue with the privacy concerns either here (I'm not sure how often the stewardess is watching the scanner instead of some double digit IQ TSA guy however).
But I'd also like to know that we're doing more than just providing some men and women with some airplane hookups (which are made harder still by the airline's increasingly ridiculous security concerns about when you can get out of your seat, as though that has much of anything to do with terrorism or criminal acts) and are actually providing some baseline improvement in actual physical security of passengers and planes. Which, to the best of my knowledge, these things don't do.