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Full Body Scanners Continue To Cause Controversy

Full Body Scanners Continue To Cause Controversy - As full-body scanners come into more widespread use in American airports (they will be phased in soon at the three major airports in the New York City metro region), they are also coming under more frequent criticism.

The objections are coming from many different quarters:

Unions representing American Airlines and US Airways, citing concerns about radiation, have asked their pilots to bypass the scanning machines and instead opt for a pat-down.
Bipartisan groups of legislators in New Jersey and Idaho are working to ban the use of such systems in their states.

Some widely read bloggers spanning different parts of the political spectrum — like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing, and Patrick Smith of Salon (who is a commercial airline pilot) — have been highly critical of the new procedures.
A California man named John Tyner who wrote about — and videotaped — his experience at San Diego International Airport, in which he claimed to have been threatened with a $10,000 fine for refusing a pat-down even after he decided not to board his flight, received more than 4,000 comments to his blog, the vast majority of them sympathetic.

Another blogger has called for Wednesday, Nov. 24th — among the busiest travel days of the year — to be “national opt-out day,” encouraging people to submit to a pat-down (and to have it done in full view of other passengers) rather than go through the body-scanning machines.

Full Body Scanners Continue To Cause Controversy
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