UK says air passengers may not opt out of body scans | Hacker News Reader

UK says air passengers may not opt out of body scans

reuters.com

5 pointsglenngillen4 comments

Thought it was worth highlighting this quote re the public consultation:

"Feedback from the consultation released on Monday showed there were just 12 refusals out of more than one million scans."

If this "consultation" was the limited trial across the UK including Heathrow Terminal 3, then I was randomly selected on 2 occasions and told that under absolutely no circumstances could I refuse the scan and board my flight. If I refused, I'd be escorted from the airport immediately.

Note that this might be illegal insofar as it's in explicit contradiction of a recent EU directive on scanners that requires an opt-out alternative to be offered. It's not clear yet whether the new regs carry the full weight of an EC Directive, but if they do, the UK will eventually have to comply and provide an opt-out.

http://www.airport-int.com/news/eu-airport-body-scanner-guid...

> Greening said the development of new scanner software meant images captured by scanning machines would not be copied, saved, transmitted or viewed by human operators in the future.

So, this is what's puzzling me. How does this work? Does the magic scanner black box just give a thumbs up or down? If it gives me a thumbs down, what happens next? Am I searched? Disallowed from boarding? Placed on a list?

Hey, that's bloody brilliant, really. If nobody can see the pictures, it means they don't actually have to work. Your error rate drops to whatever passes for necessary theater--just enough false positives to keep the baddies out. Decades later when the scared public shows up with cancer lawsuits, the device manufacturers stage the grand reveal: it was just a proximity sensor, prng, blinking light and siren. I mean since the "real" devices are so easily circumvented by a determined traveler, why bother. Best. state. secret. ever.

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