Thursday, January 03, 2013

What happens to those naked scanner images of air passengers

A story posted on the Daily Mail site just before Christmas - the headline "Revealed: How TSA agents 'laugh at travelers' naked scanner images in backrooms while flirting with each other" reveals it is aimed firmly at the US market - takes us to a post on Taking Sense Away.

This appears to be an anonymous blog written by someone who used to work for the US Transpiration Security Administration.

A reader had asked:
“Tell us, please, what really happens in that private room and why the TSA does not want it seen in public nor recorded.”
And the blog replied:
Personally, in the I.O. room, I witnessed light sexual play among officers, a lot of e-cigarette vaping, and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images, dear passengers. Things like this are what happen (at the very least) when you put people who are often fresh out of high school or a GED program (although there are actually a few TSA screeners with PhDs, which I guess is sad on so, so many levels) with minimal training and even less professionalism, into the position of being in charge of analyzing nude images of people in a hermetically sealed room.
More damningly, he goes on to say:
The most ridiculous thing is that these I.O. rooms even exist, to begin with. The backscatter machines are useless, as I and many, many others have previously pointed out. They should never have been put into use to begin with; TSA officers should never have been viewing nude, radiation-rendered images of passengers in those private rooms, period. That’s why there are federal lawsuits pending against TSA (Ralph Nader, Bruce Schneier, et al) and why TSA is trying to backpedal and sweep the radiation scanners under the rug away from oversight committees and the public at large, as quickly as possible, right now. The entire thing was, as usual, a hare-brained, tax payer money-wasting, disaster of an idea.

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