Using Me!

UK Airport Scanners and Liberty

I’m a bit late to the party on this but I thought the vitriol and fury being vented about the new scanners at UK airports was a bit on an over-reaction – or at least the reaction was for all the wrong reasons.

The first story I read that made me think to write about them was some time ago on the BBC. I seem to be in a fair minority but I don’t have a problem with the kinds of images that it produces. It’s not the sort of image I would choose to have made of me but then I’m not intending to post it on my facebook profile. And do you seriously think that the person viewing the images – hundreds or thousands of them in a shift – is going to actually care that you have a little penis or a slightly chubby arse, digitally rendered in slightly vague greyscale? They don’t have a photo of you to go along with it. It’s not like some pervy bloke is going to be sat there looking for fit girls so he can see what they look like under their clothes.

I’m sure some people must have brought up “oh but the poor children!” and probably even “oh but what about the pedos!”. Most likely these are the same people who let their kids go butt-naked on the beach. Most likely they’re the same people who think that a Pedophile is the same thing as a Pediatrician. Did you notice that one of the finalists in Masterchef (UK) this year was a ‘Children’s Doctor’? In the first round his caption actually said “Pediatrician” but we dumbed it down so as not to confuse the witless.

It is worth noting that the scanners used in the US are able to store and offload the images which we were assured they could not do. I am not aware of any reason to believe the UK or Dutch scanners can do the same.

I haven’t actually taken a flight since these scanners were introduced in the UK. They should remove the need for people to remove coats, belts etc, although shoes will probably have to come off still as the picture angle is horizontal and can’t really scan the shoes’s soles properly. But when I went through a US airport last they STILL made us take all that stuff off. That is just bloody stupid. It’s utterly unnecessary and it would really help people accept them more readily if it alleviated a lot of the hassle (and bottleneck) in getting through those controls.

Has anyone been through the new scanners yet in the UK? Has it improved transit speeds through there?

Anyway, despite the fact that I’m not really bothered by the images these scanners make what does annoy me enormously is the two-facedness and hypocrisy of the government. In 2008 the EU Parliament refused to support the EU Commission’s desire to implement the scanners across Europe because:

In MEPs’ opinion, the measure is “equivalent to a virtual strip search” and “has a serious impact on the right to privacy…and personal dignity”. British Conservative Philip Bradbourn MEP said that such scans “were a grave violation of the right of privacy and a degrading measure”.

Then late last year they suddenly started getting trialed in Manchester. In 18 months all the ‘grave violations’ of people’s rights were no longer a concern. Now we were being told that it’ll help us get through the security checks faster and therefore it’s fine to have a trial. The public were outraged and it would seem that any government who actually cared about PR would just let the trial end and drop them.

But…

On Boxing Day 2009 a man attempted to blow up a plane traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit. And suddenly the scanners were a ‘proportionate reaction’ to the threat. The scanners were suddenly implemented everywhere.

Perhaps I missed something here? Perhaps you did to? This man boarded a plane in Amsterdam – which started using these body scanners in 2007. Yet they didn’t see fit to scan passengers transferring from a flight from a country as ‘interesting’ as Nigeria to a flight to the US. In fact I’ve flown through Schiphol airport numerous times since 2007 and I’ve never been scanned once. I haven’t even seen the machines.

You might also notice that the article states that the millimetre wavelength radiation used bounces off the skin and nothing is absorbed. Referring to the article about the Manchester Trial again the head of the airport’s “Customer Experience” team says:

“Passengers can go through this machine 5,000 times a year each without worrying. The amount of radiation transmitted is tiny.”

So is it tiny or is it nothing? It might be trivial compared to a day in the sun or a minor x-ray but there is a difference between something and nothing. I certainly would not want my pregnant wife to go through the scanner – just because that’s how you treat pregnant women! It may well be irrational but it’s also an evolutionary imperative to protect them!

Refer back to the Manchester Trial again. It specifically states that people will be able to decline the scan and be patted down instead. But of course this only applied to the trial. Anyone who refuses now is turned away and not allowed to pass through the security checks.

You might also notice this:

The scanners, made by RapiScan Systems, have already been tried at Heathrow Airport from 2004 to 2008.

Well I went through Heathrow at least a dozen times in that period and I wasn’t scanned once. So it seems to me that the trials were shams. The Manchester one appears to have been genuinely implemented but the others I have serious doubts about. It really looks like we were being conditioned to accept something that the government(s) knew we would rail against.

Did you also know that the EU Parliament bought six of these machines at enormous tax-payer expense to protect the parliamentary buildings in Brussels and Strasbourg? Well the MEP’s decided they didn’t want to be scanned. And they still don’t want to be scanned. So they’ve been trying to sell them and trying again. No luck though!

So is the threat any greater than it was before the Boxing Day bombing attempt? Was there some new intelligence that made these scanners a proportionate reaction? After all, these scanners were rushed in as a response to the attempt but they have no legitimate place if the danger is not higher. Nor do they have any legitimacy if the use of them is a sufficient invasion of privacy that does not offset their benefit. As I said at the top I wouldn’t care if they just said “hey these will get you through security quicker and we promise never to allow the pictures to be stored or offloaded” and they were right on both counts.

I don’t recall the terror alert status getting any higher. It was definitely higher nearer 9/11 and it must have been really high around the time of the Iraq invasion and the start of the Afghanistan operations. How is it that one more failed attempt at bombing a plane means the threat is now higher? One would actually think it’s lower. One more would-be bomber is out of circulation and every other would-be bomber has been reminded yet again how difficult it is to pull it off.

So are we actually any safer with these things installed? The head of InterPol doesn’t think so and on German TV they have demonstrated how the machines can’t even detect the kinds of materials that a bomber might use these days.

All we have is a greater perception of a threat because we see measures like these implemented. All we have achieved is to increase the fear that people live under. This is not a fair game to play. If every time something gets past security we decrease people’s liberties and/or privacies to counteract it then we will be in a permanently escalating state of deprivation. There will always be someone who gets past security and we have to accept that. In fact I think the vast majority of people do accept it. But the government use the perception that it is an acceptable game to play to put us further and further under the thumb. Maybe, as some of my friends believe, it is a deliberate choice made to deprive us of our liberty whilst getting us to agree to and accept it. Maybe, as I more moderately believe, politicians honestly think that these apparently positive actions serve to protect us and to get them votes. Either way I think the game is up and people won’t stand for much more of it. The level of risk that people are prepared to live with if it preserves their liberty is much higher than it is now and it applies to many many more areas of our lives than just airport scanners. CCTV’s, the Police, ID Cards, RFID Tags in everything, teacher’s rights to censure pupils, even the right of a parent to smack a child. The last years of government legislation has really revolved around finding a liberty that COULD be abused and then taking that liberty away from everyone just in case someone abuses it, even when there is a law that already prohibits them from abusing it.

The only problem is, do we have enough liberty left to reclaim what we’ve lost?

Benjamin Franklin said it first and he said it best:

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.