From my experience full body scanners are much faster and more convenient compared to traditional system when you take off your shoes and go through metal detector. If you are unlucky an airport worker additionally scans you with a hand metal scanner. With full body scanner you just enter the cabin and voila! The scan takes 3 seconds.
1776: "Then it's agreed, gentlemen, in order to secure our rights as a free people, we will risk embarrassment, imprisonment, expropriation, bankruptcy, bodily harm, exile and hanging."
2010: "Of course I'll waive my rights. I don't want to miss my connecting flight."
At SFO, my only experience with them, one still has to doff ones shoes, and walk through a metal detector. As such, the only choice you get is between a firm pat-down or an electronic strip search.
I choose the former. It annoys them and I get to make at least one TSA agent uncomfortable.
Yes, she certainly can and she will (she's certainly made of sterner stuff than I am), but I consider it my privilege to serve as an outer "bumper" to the real world for my family.
It's not even the nudity that bothers me, personally. It's the radiation. I didn't sign up for unshielded exposure to dangerous levels of radiation when I bought my airplane ticket.
Ultimately, I think a public health angle would have been a far more effective tact to take in the lawsuit or in the arguments against these scanners. It's the trump card. Privacy always loses an argument to fear and "security" in our post-9/11 national discourse. Sad to say, but that's true. Health, though? That's a different matter.
The Health Physics Society (HPS) reports that a person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.05 μSv (or 0.005 mrems) of radiation; American Science and Engineering Inc. reports 0.09 μSv (0.009 mrems). At the high altitudes typical of commercial flights, naturally occurring cosmic radiation is considerably higher than at ground level. The radiation dose for a six hour flight is 20 μSv (2 mrems) - 200 to 400 times larger than a backscatter scan. According to U.S. regulatory agencies, "1 mrem per year is a negligible dose of radiation, and 25 mrem per year from a single source is the upper limit of safe radiation exposure".
The radiation exposure with Backscatter X-Ray's is really a non-issue.
IMO its much more damning to bring on the "think of the children"/"The Chinese government can hack your wife's nude pics" angle to convince the public against these machines.
"However, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have argued that the amount of radiation is higher than claimed by the TSA and body scanner manufacturers because the doses were calculated as if distributed throughout the whole body, but the radiation from backscatter x-ray scanners is focused on just the skin and surrounding tissues"
"Furthermore, other scientists claim the health effects are backscatter are well understood whereas those from millimeter wave scanners are not"
Some of the machines being deployed by the TSA are millimeter wave scanners, BTW.
> The radiation exposure with Backscatter X-Ray's is really a non-issue.
Unfortunately that's not the case.
"David Brenner, the head of Columbia University’s Centre for Radiological Research, says the concentration on the skin – one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the body – means the radiation dose is actually 20 times higher than the official estimate."
The two issues are that 1) the energy is absorbed by the surface of the body instead of throughout the volume, so the effective dose to affected tissues is much higher, and 2) that the dose is received in seconds, instead of over a period of hours.
For a frequent traveler flying about once a week, ~100 departures per year, if scanned every time that adds a non-trivial 10-20 mrem.
And that's assuming that the cited dose is correct and not a significant under-estimate; where's the independent testing?
Here's a long post with numerous references regarding this general topic:
It doesn't matter if it's actually dangerous. All you need is a CNN headline to whip people into a frenzy: "Could Airport Body Scanners Give You [Cancer|AIDS|Herpes|Athletes Foot]?"
If this procedure causes 800 cancers per year then the flights themselves would be causing nearly a hundred thousand cancer cases per year. The radiation from the scanner is far, far safer than the exposure you receive during the flight that caused you to get scanned in the first place.
Also, we should keep in mind that the health effects of radiation may not be something you can linearly extrapolate to low doses, and there is evidence to suggest that they aren't.
That's not been my observation: queues are longer, and people have to take more stuff out of their pockets for the full body scanners. The scanner also takes longer: you have to be stationary for a bit, while you just walk through the metal detectors. The speed of the metal detector queues is limited by the speed of the hand-luggage x-ray machine, not by the speed of the metal detector.
FWIW, it's only in US airports that I've had to take off my shoes for the past year or so.
That's because the person in the other room can stare and share your image for quite some time after it's taken. 3 seconds for you, but as long as they want for them.
