Survey by: Yasin
Created on Tuesday 9th March 2010
Survey Taken 210 times

Airport 'Nude' Body Scanners - An Outrage

Manchester and London Heathrow Airport introduced full 'naked' body scanners also known as Advanced Imaging Technology which caused an outrage amongst everyone aware of its true functionality and purpose.

The Department of Transport (DfT) have set interim guidelines ensuring the privacy and safety of the scanned. However, researching this technology further has brought me to the conclusion that the scanners do not fulfil their purpose and making it compulsory for only selected people was incriminating and shameful.

UK Transport Secretary Lord Adonis said last week that the images produced by the scanners were deleted “immediately” and airport staff carrying out the procedure are fully trained and supervised.

“It is very important to stress that the images which are captured by body scanners are immediately deleted after the passenger has gone through the body scanner,” Adonis told the London Evening Standard.

How much training does a person require to view naked images of the body? What exactly does full trained mean when it comes to viewing naked images of women?

While there are many who believe that it is a "small" price to pay for security however there are concerns that the machines will not detect all weapons.

Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation that fills the slot in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes , paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and "frisk" people at distance.

Airport body scanners would be "unlikely" to detect many of the explosive devices used by terrorist groups, a Tory MP has warned. Ben Wallace, who used to work at defence firm QinetiQ, one of the companies making the technology, warned it was not a "big silver bullet". (The BBC)

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has also warned that these machines may be illegal and in breach of Human Rights and their rights to privacy.

It surprises me that the government did not think this through. Why would anyone concealing a weapon step into the scanner? Why is it compulsory if it's only selected at random?

There have also been many concerns about the harms of the radiation omitted from the scanners. Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they've found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That's a jaw dropping conclusion. (MIT, Technology Review)

While there are many more reasons to reject this technology on grounds or morality, dignity, human rights, privacy and simply because it does not fully ensure security, there are still people who agree with this. A survey has been drawn up below to get a rough idea of the people's say.