Farewell, then, Rapiscan machines at airports. It's been genuinely horrible to know you (or rather to not know you, hidden TSA agents in back rooms). If we see invasive public technology of your kind in a hundred years, it'll be too soon.
After quietly removing many Rapiscans late last year, the TSA admitted Friday it was junking all 174 of them, $40 million worth of machinery, from airports around the U.S.
The agency made it clear it wasn't doing so voluntarily. Rapiscan was set to miss a deadline to turn all its scanners into ones that use generic cartoon images of bodies, a deadline mandated by Congress. (No, that isn't a typo: Congress did something right.)
The agency is keeping its L-3 Communications machines, the ones that use radio waves instead of X-rays. These scanners don't show you; they show a stick figure. Areas of the figure's body light up if the radio waves detect a suspicious object in any area.
No, they may not be the best solution, and they warrant further investigation, but at least everything's above board with the L-3s. You can see the stick figure for yourself when you leave the machine. Functionally, it's the same as using a "point to where the problem is" doll.
Rapiscans (was there ever a more darkly appropriate name?) were the machines that transmitted a naked image — a far from generic one of you, with your true outline and skin folds — to a back room. There, low-paid agents probed the fleshy X-rays for anything that looked like suspicious equipment. Personnel were supposed to give warning before leaving or entering the room, thus no supervisor was allowed to barge in on them.
What could possibly go wrong?
Anything and everything, as it turned out. Despite the TSA's best efforts to soothe us (see the head of the agency's labs who volunteered for one of the early press images, above) it was the TSA itself that was at the forefront of letting us know what was going wrong.
An anonymous ex-TSA agent reportedly wrote this blog post detailing what went on behind the scenes — in clouds of vapor smoke from e-cigarettes agents made crude remarks about the bodies they were seeing. And yes, occasionally they would step outside where they could see passengers who'd just walked through the Rapiscans.
No wonder legal experts doubted the scanners were constitutional under the Fourth Amendment — especially given possible adverse health effects from the X-Rays.
It got worse. In 2011, a Dallas-Fort Worth TSA agent was able to carry a handgun through Rapiscan scanners multiple times without the weapon being detected. In that case, the screening agent wasn't paying attention. But it didn't seem to matter if they were.
Look no further than the videos of blogger Jonathan Corbett, who detailed how he'd been able to strap sidearm-like metal objects to the side of his body that weren't detected because of the white-on-black nature of the image:
So the scanners were creepy, privacy violating, possibly unconstitutional and useless. How did they make their way into our airports in the first place? Because of powerful lobbyists — most notably former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, whose Chertoff Group represented Rapiscan Systems. You don't really need to connect too many dots here.
Let the Rapiscans, then, be the high water mark. Let this stand as a warning for generations.
The TSA shouldn't send the old machines back; they should be placed in museums so we never forget this disreputable chunk of our history.
The TSA shouldn't send the old machines back; they should be placed in museums so we never forget this disreputable chunk of our history. Let children be told: This was how bad things got for a few years in the 2000s, when we were so afraid we forgot about fearing fear itself. But we decided en masse that it was unacceptable, dehumanizing, and we never did it again.
Photo via Scott Olson/Getty Images
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario