Can someone please explain what's wrong with going through the machine? If it means not having my balls squeezed, it sounds pretty good to me.
However, because it's in an airport, none of this has happened. Maybe it is safe. Maybe it isn't. It is unproven.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bem.20208/abstrac...
The flight itself isn't even that bad, but it is worse than the scanners. You get maybe 5 mrem (50 µSv) flying from London to NYC.
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/commercialflights....
The flight radiation is something you'd want to avoid, but a single flight is almost insignificant. XKCD has a reference chart:
Flight radiation is mostly a concern for flight crew.
Yes, it should be tested for safety, if in one case it looks like a lack of due diligence, in another it looks like an excessive CYA policy with some incentive from tort cases.
Likely unsafe, more than likely useless, proven abuses (stores images), etc.
But they're really really expensive. So it's all good.
And if you complain about the profiteering, you're a terrorist, conspiracy nut, hate the children / troops / puppies.
Airport scanners played out pretty much exactly like the electronic voting machines, with online voting cued up for the next round of cronyism.
Ditto corporate K-12 education, aka charter schools. Prisons. Drug war. Etc.
The biggest danger may not come from chronic exposure, but from an acute failure of the machine or mistake made by the operator, the probability of which could not be determined in a study anyway. (Therac-25 delivered overdoses of radiation to several patients due to a software bug; Cedars-Sinai recently reported that they had accidentally delivered dozens of CT patients doses several times higher than normal; patients get killed by oxygen tanks and other objects sucked into the magnetic fields of MRIs with startling frequency.)
In any case, I think the danger posed by millimeter wave systems is significantly less than that of backscatter machines. There are plenty of studies to show that microwaves don't cause cancer, and it's hard to imagine a malfunctioning machine delivering something harmful.
First, we know they don't work, because they only work up to the epidermis, and sometimes not even that well, as lots of dangerous things have gotten through them. If you wanted to get something on a plane, put it up your butt or somehow else in your body and it will work 100% of the time. Just don't carry a gun strapped to your body. (Though that has worked too)
In addition, even when I go through the scanners (because I am a very obedient citizen) I still get a ball-hugging pat-down after going through the scanner, because they weren't sure what they were looking at. When Germany tested the millimeter wave scanners they reported around 50% false positives that required additional pat-downs.
Second, invasion of privacy. They're taking pictures of your naked body. And gross people have been caught ogling the pictures. Besides just being creepy, there are people who have been sexually assaulted and this amounts to an additional assault, and can be emotionally damaging. Not even considering how kids and their rights factor in here.
Third, we don't know how safe they are. Nobody even bothered to do a study to find out, or even do basic safety checks, before they installed them. The backscatter machines are banned completely in the EU and several prominent doctors have been urging more studies for a variety of people who may be more susceptible to the damage X-rays do to your cells. The president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements says there should be an effort to verify millimeter wave scanners are safe for frequent use [that has still not been done].
I was going to make a fourth point about Michael Chertoff (and others) making money off selling the scanners to the government, but i'll let an old guy in Congress rant instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drm9fz48mM4#t=4m1s (turns out to be a mountain out of a molehill, but the lobbying implications are there and the money is too) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/23/fear_pays_chertoff_...
Patdowns are a couple hundred orders of magnitude more of a "fuck you, citizen." Standing still on a platform with your arms raised for a few seconds does not even begin to approach getting felt up by a government agent as a condition of getting to your destination.
You'd just build up a body of images of "person 1" then cross-reference with flight records till you narrow it down to only being one possible person who had been on all those flights...
You've got head shape, hand shape, height, shoulder width, BMI, and length of every major body segment. From there you can calculate all sorts of ratios to apply to people, and I'd bet you could make a pretty good guess at gait for motion analysis.
A database like this would also be proof against facial surgery; changing bone lengths is harder. So if you get a known terrorist once, you should be able to spot them much more easily in the future. And of course you'd keep the records indefinitely, because you never know who's going to turn out to be a terrorist. Or a drug mule. Or a political protester [1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO for the historical version; http://nymag.com/news/features/nypd-demographics-unit-2013-9... for the modern one.
This technology could be plausibly misused for security purposes, and then perverted for political purposes, just like previous security technologies/bureaucracies have. That shouldn't make you upset at the people pointing it out. Instead, direct your outrage at the portions of government that have previously done exactly this sort of thing.
I think the powers of the state to spy on its citizens should be minimal and tightly controlled, because historically they always have been abused, and modern technology makes it much easier to run a surveillance state. So if you're asking how far surveillance should go, I'd say, "quite a ways back."
I'm not particularly worried about it, though, not in the US. As my links indicate, we've been through waves of this before. As long as government stays in the hands of the people, I believe this sort of thing will come out, cause outrage, and get pruned back.
My real worry is the rising Gini coefficient and the rise in intergenerational correlation in wealth and power. If we end up with something like a ruling class, then that cycle of error and correction will fail. Some would argue that the failure to punish anybody for the crimes leading up to the economic crash is a sign we're already there, but I don't believe it's true yet.
Terrorists win if they don't turn into terrorists in the first place but live normal happy lives in their countries, maintaining a mild disdain for the decadent west while admiring the nice parts, like freedom and wealth.
The radicalization surely has many roots, one of them being real and imagined pressure from the West. I propose looking into that aspect a bit more. I think we (the West) are not intentionally evil towards the arab/muslim world, but that politics happens and power is applied and these people often get the short end of the deal, leading to resentment and strengthening the crazy mullah's teachings.
It behaves like a school bully, that protect its interests by beating other kids until they hand their lunch over, and when someone ask why, he says he was hungry.
On of Osama bin Laden's stated goals was to bankrupt the US. For $1m or so in initial investment, he's gotten us to waste a trillion or so on a pointless Iraq adventure. The TSA has only cost us $100bn or so, not counting the countless hours and energy lost waiting in line and performing pointless rituals.
But more broadly, he's a terrorist. As the name suggests, the goal is to create fear. And the TSA is a giant institutionalization of that fear. It's only scared people who give up their rights. The TSA is both a response to fear and a creator of fear, and having scared this guy into compliance, they have done their job.
I think the main objection to the millimetre wave scanner is that it's a virtual strip search.