The U.S. Transportation Security Administration will remove airport body scanners that privacy advocates likened to strip searches after OSI Systems Inc. (OSIS) couldn’t write software to make passenger images less revealing…
The agency removed 76 of the machines from busier U.S. airports last year. It will now get rid of the remaining 174 Rapiscan machines, with the company absorbing the cost, said Karen Shelton Waters, the agency’s assistant administrator for acquisitions.
The scanner-manufacturing company couldn’t meet a congressional requirement to make the images more generic—which would presumably have shown everything except details of your swimsuit area. Working for TSA just isn’t what it used to be. (Via Gizmodo.)
Thank God. No more kiddy porn for those asshole.
Will they still get to feel my balls if I opt-out? (Wait, will I need to opt-out?)
Now when I ask them “how ya like my dong?” it will make less sense. I will still ask them though. One needs to elicit feedback from time to time.
And if your company manufactures a product whose name could easily be read as “Rapey-scan,” you’re probably in a bad profession.
The scanners at PDX are millimeter wave scanners (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millimeter_wa… ), not the backscatter x-ray Rapiscan machines. Only the Rapiscan machines are being phased out. While the millimeter wave scanners don’t have the same health concerns, they do have the same privacy issues.
They were called Rapiscan machines? Seriously? Why wasn’t that word in, like, every headline?