The hassle, the invasion of privacy, and the potential for abuse and embarrassment ... what's to like about the full body scanner at airports? Plenty, according to the American Association for Nude Recreation (maybe NSFW, mind you), the oldest and largest group representing nudists in northern America:
“Put this issue in its proper perspective,” recommends AANR Executive Director Erich Schuttauf. “A trained security professional in a remote monitoring station takes a few seconds discreetly screening passengers to be sure they’re only bringing what nature gave them aboard. In exchange for safer skies, AANR believes it’s completely worth it. But you don’t have to be a nudist to agree these measures are based on common sense.”
Adds Schuttauf, “Polls regularly show that about one in five North Americans have skinny-dipped in mixed company already. So if travelers just think of the screen as a virtual skinny dip, something regarded as American as apple pie since before Norman Rockwell, everyone wins in the name of better air travel security. And as an added bonus, you can add the experience to your ‘bucket list’ as a virtual dipping of one’s toe into taking a Nakation – that’s a nudist vacation!”
Thanks Carolyn Hawkins!
Taking current stats, you are 50 times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be on a plane that suffers a terrorist incident.
This is just yet more privacy invasion in the interests of "security" which is largely there for show, and designed to make flying as intolerable as possible.
As soon as this becomes mandatory, I will, sadly, not be able to see my family (1,200 miles away) as often as I do now, because I will not fly. I firmly do not believe that some stranger should be allowed to see me naked (essentially) just so that those less modest than myself can have the false sense of security that this measure will make us "safer." It will not.
but also who cares. this is moronic compared to the compromises to human rights which have already been permitted in the name of homeland security.
so many murders.
This is another example of losing your personal freedoms for the extremely remote possibility of actually catching a terrorist.
The naked thing doesn't bother me so much as the obnoxious no-brain security guards who will be paid to view it. If you've ever been through a US airport, you know the sort. They just creep me out when they ask me to take off my shoes.
I really don't understand the roots of where that point of view comes from. How is letting someone feel you up looking for something let you keep your dignity, while someone looking at an outline of your "naughty bits" is taking away your rights? Can you explain, because it confuses the heck out of me.
@Ratz
That’s probably one of the only genuine arguments I've heard against these, since we get bombarded with enough X-rays in our lifetime already.
Great logic.
If we tried to do the things that our government does, we'd be executed for it.
How does that analogy fit into this?
The willing submission to what is effectively a strip search in order to take a trip to Disneyland is a spectacular affront to the basic idea of civil liberty that the United States was founded on.
Thank you, bedwetting American public, for destroying our freedoms so the terrorists don't have to.
Anyway: Listen, nudists, not all of us care to have some schlubby stranger in airport security see us in all our nekkid glory, 'kay?
Spot on. Measures of this kind are indeed for show and indeed designed to make flying intolerable. The purpose of the latter is to make the public cowed into accepting more and more restictions on liberty and invasions of privacy. In the UK and the USA, we are seeing the step-by-step construction of a police state at least as invasive as those run in Eastern Europe during the period of Soviet regional dominance. Having lived in Poland in the early 1990s, none of the fresh tales of Communist times relayed to me by friends included reference to pervasive CCTV, confiscation of cameras for photographing public buildings or anything akin to this madness at airports - and it IS madeness. How else can one account for the inconsisencies. Why do I have to remove my shoes at some UK airports and not others? Why must I take my laptop out of its bag at some UK airports and not others? Shoes and laptops are either a genuine risk to security or they are not. It can't be both. Also fresh in my memory are the charming people at Miami Intl. Airport who insisted that my wife walk through the metal detector WITHOUT our then-year old son, who crawled out of her sight and into the line of waiting passengers. How delightful that in the name of American national security my wife was physically prevented from retrieving our son by passing back through the arch.
This is just yet more privacy invasion in the interests of “security” which is largely there for show, and designed to make flying as intolerable as possible.