QuakerInfo.com Forum

[Speckled Pots]

Article A Muslim woman is thought to have become the first passenger to be stopped from boarding a flight after refusing to go through a full body scanner for religious reasons. Article contains NSFW scans (depending on your viewpoint) scans:

Article-women refused new body scan

More on the new Airport scanners

I can see both sides. It seems to bring up a grey area of search and seizure laws. I have received “security scans” in various buildings. Some of these scans went berserk after my Amish Hair pins set off the alarm. In all cases, the guards have been very accommodating/respectful and simply requested that I step to the side and gave me a “sweep” using some kind of long metal hand held device. But none requested anything this invasive or required that I take off my head covering. Security in the cases of the buildings I entered was understandable.

I can also understand security for airplanes however, these particular scans seem awfully intrusive. According to one of the articles it is referred to as the peeper and/or digital equivalent of a strip search The TSA says the images are not “stored” however, for security reasons I can’t see how they could not be--especially if something happens and the images are needed for criminal investigations. CNN has already shown that the images are stored
Images can be stored and sent

Some Orthodox Jewish Rabbis are already protesting: protests and solutions They suggest a possible solution: Men scan men and women scan women.


Any opinions on this? Would you walk through them? What are your ideas? Would you go through them if they were divided by gender? Would you consider it a violation of religious freedoms? (i.e. concerns for Modesty in some Christian faiths)
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Frieden mit Ihnen

[Kiahanie]

I'm not fond of the TSA's job to begin with. Too much attention and money devoted to doing too little. Wew should pay more attention to removing the causes of terrorism, rather than being cointent with catching terrorists after they are created.

If I needed to fly, I would submit to the scanning regardless of the gender or sexual preference of the security personnel.

Religiously-based "modesty" issues do not personally concern me, but I can see how some folks might feel exposed. I'll let them speak for themselves.
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"There is a field out beyond right and wrong. I'll meet you there." --Jellaludin Rumi

[Speckled Pots]

[Gracie]

I'm with you, Pots. If they want to see me nekkid that much, they can buy me dinner.
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http://sowingmildoats.wordpress.com

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
Eleanore Roosevelt

[james]

So we know more or less what we're talking about here:

http://www.reappropriate.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/TSA-Release-Images-2-050808-726403.jpg

Like Kiahanie, I would allow the scan if I needed to fly. Personally, I think there are far more important sorts of privacy being infringed upon than the privacy of the unidentifiable outline of my genitals. I'm not crazy about the idea but I'm not deeply offended, either.

I don't think religiously based objections should be given greater weight in public policy than secular or personal objections, but I do think people's feelings about these things matter and need to be considered.

In general, I support reasonable and smart efforts to catch people who want to blow up or hijack planes, but I think it's a mistake to suggest that there is any foolproof way to prevent this, or that absolutely no expense should be spared. Life inevitably involves a certain amount of risk, and a life dedicated above all to avoiding risk is hardly worth living. I think we worry about safety to an unhealthy degree, in more ways than I can count.

It's also important in any such public policy discussion to look at who is getting rich from a particular decision, and to seriously question the evidence those people are putting forth. These machines may be far more expensive than the safety benefit they are likely to provide.

[kevin roberts]

How private is it under my clothing? Is it a different degree or type of privacy? If I were to publicly call a security guard rude names based on his skin color, he might make some sort of response to being publicly slurred. Of course, he would have no right to react if I just thought rude things.

But what if I cut out letters in aluminum foil and glued them to my belly, and when the guard X-rayed me he could read the rude names under my clothing, but nobody else would know they were there, nor would I have been able to predict that someone of his skin color would detect my innermost thoughts. Nothing would have been done publicly, and so he would have no right to complain. Or would he? I wasn't saying anything to him, merely using aluminum foil privately, to express my innermost personal opinions.

If he reacted, and was supported by his colleagues in doing so, then my insulting belly under my clothes would have to be considered public, I think. Given that, a Muslim woman would be correct in not wanting her own belly to be public either, even though she was still dressed.

I'm curious about this, because on the rare occasions when I travel in airplanes I am always taken aside and searched and wanded, while everybody else moves steadily through the lines. Every time, so far. When I look to the sides, I notice that all the plain Mennonites are being searched, too.

How many Mennonites does it take to blow up a plane? Would a mad bomber dress like a Mennonite?

Just wondering.

[Speckled Pots]

[kevin roberts]

I crossed the Canadian border last year with a Quebecois. He was carrying a 60,000 pound forklift. I had the 10,000 pound weight for it. He left Ontario hours before I did, and I said, "I'll see you in Connecticutt when I finally get there."

He said, "Mais non! Lookit these," pointing to his biker tatoos. "Eet weel take me at leest six houres to get across le bordeur."

Sure enough, I breezed through customs at Buffalo, even driving the wrong way down the search-and-X-ray traffic lane. His truck was parked over by the body search building, where I found out later they were asking him for six hours whether he stilled owned a motorcyclette.

So zere is precedent, vous comprenez, pour cette behaviour mal et authoritarian. It may be free speech, but profiling will get around it. nobody said he couldn't have a tatoo, they were just saying it made him a different kind of citizen, meriting different treatment. Now if he had come across in drag, with a hajib, who knows.

I'm making fun of this, but creeping totalitarianism is no joke, in the eend.

Added:
Is speech protected? What about hate speech? We already have hate crimes, where it merits a greater penalty to punch one person than another. The punch isn't being disproportionately punished, rather it's the personal beliefs of the puncher that are being criminalized.

[Speckled Pots]

[Gracie]

Another scan article with a disturbing development:

http://newscastdaily.com/technology/negative-image-of-airport-security-body-scan

As one woman said, I’m not an enemy combatant – not a combatant of any kind, not an enemy of any kind – and I won’t allow myself to be treated like a prisoner in my own country."
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http://sowingmildoats.wordpress.com

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
Eleanore Roosevelt

[Speckled Pots]

[Speckled Pots]

Here's a scanner Im ok with....it's from a movie called "Total Recall". Skeleton fine. Actual naked pictures, no way.




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Frieden mit Ihnen

[michaeldavidjay]

i dont like flying either... but, i doubt there is a search and siesure issue -- unless the sup. court is asleep as the wheel.


i might add the problem with a war on terror is that it can nevever end. any time that is an excuse to remove rights or privicy, they are gone until no one uses dynamite, or guns
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Do Friends speak to today's condition, or are we only a historical footnote?

[Gracie]

Whoops! the "near-porn" images are a hoax. From my source:

"Update Two commenters point out that the supposed inversion of a body-scan image was a hoax. My bad.

The original source of the hoax seems to have been Drudge, which apparently has never retracted; the link, with a photo, is still up on the original date but the link goes nowhere. (Or maybe Drudge stole it, unsourced, from News Cast Daily; NCD claims originality, and has never retracted. It was then reposted on Gizmodo; one of the commenters there caught it, but the item itself is still up, unchanged. Of course I already knew never to believe Drudge; too bad to have to add Gizmodo to the same list.

That leaves the question whether the actual, lower-res images are still a problem. I think Kelly has that one right; for most men, they aren’t, but for some (many? most?) women they are."
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http://sowingmildoats.wordpress.com

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
Eleanore Roosevelt

[james]

Here's are negative and positive images of the real deal, which I reversed from actual scans posted online:

http://downloads.riemermann.com/reversed_scan.jpg

Another possibility of people's feelings on the issue might be: for most men and most women they are not a problem, women are somewhat more likely to object.

Again, from what I've read of these scans I'm highly skeptical about them providing much more safety than we have now. Beyond that I think *any* sort of electronic scan is far less humiliating than being groped or required to strip by a security guard, which happens right now to some people who arouse greater than usual suspicion. So the big difference with these scans is not a greater invasion of privacy, but a lesser invasion of more people.

This conversation raises some of the issues in the sexuality thread on this forum--people are far more sensitive about anything involving sexuality (and its close cousin nakedness) than almost any topic. The fact that most people object far more strongly to images of sex than images of great violence, is a pretty powerful clue.
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James Riemermann
www.nontheistfriends.org
www.liberalquakers.org