What WILL people put up with? Just wrote the other day about how a number of airports are getting those HORRIBLE backscatter machines and DFW Airport is one of them. New article from the DMN has another PHOTO of what YOU look like getting frisked by a machine.

Now... just LOOK at that picture, above. It isn't only that it's totally creepy, like the kind of decorations you put out at Halloween, or even that the person taking those pics may get some joillies from looking at you, but LOOK AT THE HANDS UP. Sheesh. It makes me think of "HANDS UP AND LEAN AGAINST THE CAR, MO-FO!". Do YOU really like being treated as a criminal when you go somewhere? Unless people start speaking up AGAINST these intrusive measures, they're not only going to continue but get worse when the next person dreams up another way to invade your personal space.

You have to read the article. If you go through that machine because you refuse to get patted down, and the person sitting in a remote area of the building STILL can't tell if you look suspicious, you'll get patted down anyway.

Privacy safeguards

The screener who views the image is in a remote location and has no direct contact with the passengers. According to the TSA, images are "not equivalent to photography and do not present sufficient details that the image could be used for personal identification." A blur appears over the face as the front of the rotating image comes into view. Although the equipment can collect and store images, those functions have been disabled by the manufacturer and images will remain on screen only as long as it takes to resolve suspicious objects. Policy dictates that screeners in the remote viewing area will be prohibited from using recording devices such as cellphone cameras.

Oh. Okay. I guess there must have been a concern that the screener MIGHT surreptitiously take some photos for jollies later.

ACLU concerns

Despite the TSA's precautions, the American Civil Liberties Union calls the implementation of the imaging technology at airports a troubling development.

According to Barry Steinhardt, director of ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, the technology "produces strikingly graphic images of passengers' bodies. 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."

Other concerns raised by Steinhardt: Passengers may not understand what they're consenting to; software safeguards like obscuring the face can be undone as easily as they are applied; pressure to pull images of "a celebrity like George Clooney or someone with an unusual or freakish body" may be too much for some employees to resist.

People being what they are, of course. TELL TSA WHAT YOU THINK OF THIS. And Tell your CONGRESSPERSON, too. Sheeesh.