Have you heard about these new airport security x-ray machines which produce images stripped of your clothing?  It’s like those creepy novelty devices you find in those Smith, Johnson and Company catalouges, more commonly those Smith, Johnson and Company ads in the back of old comic books.

I am getting conflicting information about the nature of the x-rays.  For example,

The Transportation Security Administration said it has found a way to refine the machine’s images so that the normally graphic pictures can be blurred in certain areas while still being effective in detecting bombs and other threats., which is to say the images are now of generic bathroom-sign pictures.

My conflicting accounts come with the items available by the news sources.

Stomache flattened, curves gone, private area placed behind black bar — something, incidentally, I imagine can easily be removed… should… somebody… desire it… be… removed.

Every minor curve of the body is shown, not placed on the equivalent of a generic bathroom sign image.  Useful for medical purposes, I suppose, and not exactly a Playboy stance, but I would be uncomfortable with its existence nonetheless.

Fret not.  There is some great news to alleviate your concerns of privacy.  For, you see:

At first, the new technology will only be used for passengers who need extra screening or are randomly selected. Those people will be allowed to choose either a pat-down from a TSA official or a scan from the machine, which will photograph them from the front and the back. 

You can either be frisked and groped at or have your naked image available for somebody’s personal collection, or if hard copies are sealed off simple momentary bliss.

Nay.  The images are to be destroyed.  There is no possibility that they will be smuggled out of work by any creep-azoid.  Just like the OJ Books that had been freighted off to book-stores’s warehouses and cannot and may never be available to be sold for inflated prices on ebay.

I wonder if in the future supposed bodily defects revealed via x-ray will be used as part of the security risk calculations used in a security risk database.  Start with the assumption of fighting the War on Terror.  Weed out the undesirables.

Actually that is implausible.  I have always wondered what the matrices are supposed to be for a Security Database of this type.  Listening to right-wing talk-radio and even permeating into the voices of various elected officials, it has always been simply a collection of Middle East surnames and/or membership in any anti-war or otherwise anti-administration organization, fringe-ish or otherwise.  I have a better grasp on the matrices involved in calculating credit scores, which I suppose would be useful to airlines in stopping people who may not be purchasing anything on the airplane, which as airlines continue to declare bankruptcy may increase in priority as a revenue stream, from getting on the plane.

A chilling look at a paranoid future, and I will leave it at that.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.