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Surprising Science

In Defense of Full-Body Scans

“How worried should one be about [full body scans in airports]? Are they truly a grave threat to individual privacy, as civil libertarians contend?”
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“The actual threat to privacy posed by these scanners has been inflated using sensationalistic imagery. In order to illustrate how intrusive this ‘strip-search’ is, civil liberties advocates often display a rather graphic image obtained from a scanner. Yet they neglect to mention that the image is not of an airline passenger but of a TSA employee who volunteered to test the machine. … To wit, there is virtually no evidence that body scanners have actually harmed Americans. Indeed, civil liberties advocates generally do a poor job of explaining precisely what kind of harm the scanners are supposed to cause.”

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