Body Scanners for the London Underground

Ronald Dumsfeld writes "In a report in the TimesOnline, it is alleged that those lovely see-through-your-clothes scanners are to be installed in London's Tube stations. Part of the UK's Military-industrial complex, QinetiQ stands to make £150,000 to £2 million per station ($260,000 - $3.4 million) with their Millimetre Wave Imagers."

Comments

Re:woot

[turgid]

WOOT! Hot nekkid ch1cks!1.

You can already see those for free as in beer on the Intarweb.

What you can't do, in either case, is touch.

So please explain how this is progress?

Re:The perception of security

[Alioth]

The trouble is the screeners CAN'T make an exception for you. The moment they make exceptions for soldiers, the terrorists will dress as soldiers and carry forged government documents. The terrorists aren't all brown skinned with long beards - remember Timothy McVeigh? I believe he used to be a soldier who served in the first Gulf War.

Even so, US screening goes far beyond the pale - it does a lot of things that are inconvenient and expensive to make it LOOK secure when in fact it doesn't do much at all.

And you're right; it is a game of whack-a-mole. Just like the terrorists probably won't use a plane in the US again, they probably won't use a tube train in London again. Once you have airport style screening on trains, they will move onto something else until everything we do is screened and sanitized and there's no freedom left at all. That's exactly what they want. Putting intrusive screening on the London Underground means the terrorists won that round; they have succeeded in terrorizing.

Fortunately, I did hear a politician on Radio 4 after it happened rejecting screening on trains as impractical, and essentially giving the line that vigilance is much better (the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, I think he understood this).