About Those Body Scanners

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they're viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded."

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.(1)

If this only affected the poor and working class then any complaints would pretty much be ignored. But scanners will probably end up pissing off too many people in the meritocracy and lower elite; there will eventually be a lawsuit or multiple lawsuits with an army of well-heeled lawyers. No one wants to take their child through one as some drooling TSA thug surveys the screen.

1'Feds admit storing checkpoint body scan images' - CNET; McCullagh