Privacy International’s stance on body scanners at airports

Following a previous post on the use of body scans at airports, I have come across the PI statement on proposed deployments of these body scanners in airports.

This is taken from their website….

    PI feels that the technology raises a number of troubling issues:
    First, the scanners produce strikingly graphic images of passengers’ bodies. Those images reveal not only our private body parts, but also intimate medical details such as 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. Deployment of the technology was recently halted at Manchester Airport in Britain in part because the scanners violated child protection laws by electronically strip searching children and young people. There have also been calls in the European Parliament for a Europe-wide ban on the technology.

    Second, Privacy International is skeptical about the privacy safeguards that the US Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) is touting. The TSA say that the technology is capable of obscuring faces, but this claimed protection is just a software fix that can be undone as easily as it is applied. And obscuring faces does not hide the fact that rest of the body will be vividly displayed. This is the equivalent of asking passengers to parade their bodies in front of the screeners, but with bags over their heads.


Read more at Privacy International…

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