Posted on 11/17/2010 7:17:58 AM PST by a fool in paradise
A screenshot of one of the images obtained by Gizmodo.
The website Gizmodo has published 100 pictures of body scans taken at an Orlando Federal Courthouse. The scans are not from the "naked scan" machines that the Department of Homeland Security announced were going into 28 airports in the country, earlier this year. Instead, they are much more pixelated and less embarrassing.
Still Gizmodo points to TSA's Advanced Imaging Technology's privacy policy, which states that the machines "cannot store, print, transmit or save the" images and that they are "automatically deleted from the system after it is cleared by the remotely located security officer."
Gizmodo attained the images by filing a Freedom of Information Act request. The images were among the 35,000 that U.S. Marshals at the Orlando courthouse admitted to saving.
Gizmodo, which blurred the faces in the photographs, explains their reasoning for publishing them:
The leaking of these photographs demonstrates the security limitations of not just this particular machine, but millimeter wave and x-ray backscatter body scanners operated by federal employees in our courthouses and by TSA officers in airports across the country. That we can see these images today almost guarantees that others will be seeing similar images in the future. If you're lucky, it might even be a picture of you or your family.
A poll released by CBS, yesterday, asked Americans if airports should use full-body x-rays. A whopping 81 percent of them said yes and it didn't matter their gender, age or political persuasion.
Earlier, today, Nate Silver of the New York Times' Five Thirty Eight analyzed how accurate those polls might be, considering that a wide range of them were conducted after terror threats and that most of them polled Americans who had never been through the machines. He found the numbers are pretty accurate:
My guess is that a majority of such passengers will still approve of them: Americans are willing to tolerate a great number of things at the airport that they would never stand for in other parts of their lives.
How about you? Where do you stand on the debate after seeing the published pictures?
It stretches back even farther than that.
In the 1980s, the policy began of requiring a driver's license to board an airplane ("in the name of security"). The real reason the airlines wanted it was to prohibit the resale of an unused ticket from a roundtrip purchase (roundtrip tickets could be a lower combined fare than 2 one way tickets or maybe even just a single one way fare).
Driver's licenses did not prevent the 9-11 attacks and since 9-11-2001, corrupt employees at driver's license bureaus have been caught selling valid driver's licenses to middle eastern illegal aliens who have presented falsified information. Not just a case of the employee "not knowing", but the employee knowing and wanting a kickback for "approving" the license.
Require an internally recognized passport or no photo ID at all.
And contraband includes things like "more than 2 beanie babies" when you are entering America as well as bootleg concert cds. Not necessarily drugs, weapons, or agricultural products.
From the website..
As we reported yesterday, claims that the body scanners did not provide details of genitals were disproven after a London Guardian journalist who was present at a trial for the machines earlier this week reported that the devices produce an image which make “genitals eerily visible.” German Security advisor Hans-Detlef Dau, a representative for a company that sells the scanners, admits that the machines, “show intimate piercings, catheters and the form of breasts and penises”....
A report from October 2008, when the naked body scanners were first being introduced at Melbourne Airport in Australia, detailed how the X-ray backscatter devices don’t work properly unless the genitals of people going through them are visible.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/inverted-body-scanner-image-shows-naked-body-in-full-living-color.html
sorry
I’m really glad you did this and showed a woman’s intimate details. The media spin here is to assist in the imposition of tyranny through obfuscation and lies.
That statist fiend Hannity yesterday started arguing with the guy who is being harassed by the TSA, asking him what the big deal was about a scanner, and equating it to his wife seeing him naked. That spoke volumes about what an elitist statist type Hannity is.
“Not exactly the pornography that some were itching about..”
Remember, these are only 100 photos of 35,000 that are kept. I have seen other photos that do show ... uh... anatomy. The government shows us what they want to show us and when they want to show us.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.