Technology Slice Blog

TSA Protests Against Full Body Scanners A Non Event - Was the media's coverage of the threat of protests over the Transportation Security Agency's use of body scanners and more-intimate pat-down searches overblown? Judging by what happened on Wednesday at Lambert-St. Louis International and other airports around the nation, you might say yes. Ken Leiser of the Post-Dispatch reported in Thursday's edition that despite the 10-day barrage of television, radio and print stories warning of the possibility of bottlenecks at the security stations at the nation's airports on Wednesday, the busiest travel day of the year, everything went pretty smoothly at Lambert. And the Associated Press reported that bad weather, not protests, caused the most problems on Wednesday. This countered what was expected, based on stories leading up to Wednesday. The issue was that some people believed the new body scanners' technology would give passengers dosages of radiation they ...

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 Interna...