TSA Targets Women with Body Scanners – Tech Thursday

Any new technology can be abused and misused out side of it's intended use. I can give you a billion examples of this, but I am focusing on a new one. Give some one a new toy and they'll figure it out all on their own. That's what seems to be going on with the TSA. They are having women step through the body scanners multiple times, to see their "naughty bits" on a computer screen.

These Millimeter Wave scanners have been a big controversy for a couple years now. The details of the scans of these, basically show you naked on a computer screen. And it has rightfully caused an uproar. When someone complains about it, the TSA seems to downplay or out right deny it. Well, now they have some new ones to deny. In Dallas a woman was asked to go through the body scanner 3 times because they people in the other room looking at the screens "didn't get the picture". But the way it all went down, with an agent saying she had a "cute figure". Plus according to the story, the passenger could hear the radio chatter between the TSA agent doing the scanning, and the people in the monitoring room. And the talk sound like someone was getting their jollies. After the third go around, the TSA screener, started to show frustration saying into her radio, "Guys, it's not blurry, I'm letting her go through."

But this is not just on one passenger's word. A Dallas TV station did an investigation and found 500 complaints filed with TSA, from women for the same thing. The screeners singled out women for the body scanner, some were in line right behind another women chosen for the "random" screening. Another fact I discovered while looking at this story, is that when you get a pat down at the air port, male passenger get male screeners for the pat down and women get women. But the screeners for the body scanner images have no rules like that. So guys are looking at those scans of women.

Now the TSA says that this can't happen, because privacy filters are applied to the images so you can't see anything. Just like when they said images weren't able to be saved, yet it was discovered that U.S. Marshals were saving images. Will all this just get swept under the rug? Or will something actually come out of it. Sooner or later there will be a tipping point and we'll see a big change in all this. Till then, throw a bag of popcorn in the microwave, sit back and watch how the TSA gets out of this one. It's almost like they have their own sitcom.

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