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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?"

“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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