This week, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano is pressing countries around the world to use “strip-search machines,” low-power x‑ray and radio wave scanning devices that reveal what is underneath travelers’ clothes. The machines provide a small margin of security at a high risk to privacy.
And those privacy risks are manifesting themselves overseas. On AllAfrica.com, news service This Day reports on how strip-search machines have been used to peep at travelers as nudes in Lagos, Nigeria:
[D]uring off-peak periods, the aviation security officials, who are trained on the use of the scanners, usually stroll from the cubicle located in a hidden corner on the right side of the screening area where the 3D full-body scanner monitors are located. They do so to catch a glimpse of some of the passengers entering the machine and immediately go back to view the naked images, in order to match the faces with the images since the faces are blurred on the monitors while passengers are inside the machine.
The report notes that one of the “conventional scanners”—a magnetometer, most likely—was put out of service to corral people into the strip-search machine.
Italy has abandoned strip-search machines after a six-month test, due both to privacy issues and “because they are slow.” This is the sleeper issue that may soon wake as more machines show up in our airports: Strip-search machines take a very long time compared to magnetometers.
There are more than half a billion enplanements in the United States each year. If each traveler is delayed by 10 seconds, strip-search machines would waste nearly 1.4 million hours of Americans’ time directly—much more if you include the schedule-padding that all fliers would have to practice to avert strip-search machine delays.
The margin of security provided by these machines is small. In an interview on Fox’s local affiliate in D.C. last night, I said, “If we go down the strip-search machine route, there’s going to be more methods of concealment, and we certainly don’t want the TSA looking there.”
Hopefully, my poor grammar distracts you from the full import of that line.
