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US Congress Tries To Cut Body Scanner Funding

Posted by Soulskill on from the bin-laden-is-dead-so-terrorism-is-over-right dept.

OverTheGeicoE writes "The Electronic Privacy Information Center reports that the US House of Representatives is trying to cut funding for new airport body scanners from next year's budget. This would prevent the TSA from installing 275 new scanners in airports in FY 2012, at a cost of $76 million."

7 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Excellent by Igorod · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm contacting my representatives offices tonight to ask that they support this. If you can't beat them with logic and reason, beat them with funding.

    1. Re:Excellent by dgatwood · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Or send it with a crooked employee who doesn't have to go through those scans, or toss it over the fence into the sterile area where it can be picked up by an employee who does have to go through those scans, or pack the fun bits inside the metal tubes of a piece of luggage, inside a bunch of film containers, inside a prosthetic metal leg, inside the metal tube of a cane or a pair of crutches, or in any of the other top 100 places to smuggle explosives onto a plane.

      I mean, I think it's absolutely hilarious that we spent all these billions of dollars on something that only protects one relatively tiny attack surface, does so relatively poorly, invades people's civil liberties in a truly horrific way, and in spite of that, is still provably orders of magnitude less effective than bomb sniffing dogs. If you ever needed proof of why government cannot be trusted to protect its citizens, there you go. Just follow the trail of money from the manufacturers back to the crooked politicians who support this absurdity. It can't be all that hard to prove that bribes were involved. Unless, of course, they're really that dumb, in which case we're in bigger trouble than I thought.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  2. Prevent the TSA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why don't they do the RIGHT thing and DISMANTLE the god damn TSA?

    1. Re:Prevent the TSA? by Normal+Dan · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I've aways felt laws, government programs and things of this sort should all have a time limit associated with them. Once they expire, they have to be debated and voted in again as if they never existed in the first place. This will also keep congress from passing too many pointless new laws, as they will be too busy maintaining the old ones.

      --
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    2. Re:Prevent the TSA? by houghi · · Score: 5, Informative

      The beginning? This is not even the end. The moment Bin Laden was killed, it was told that retaliations were to be expected and things will get worse.

      Remember: this is not about fighting some enemy, this is about controlling you. If this "enemy" is gone, another will be invented.

      Once communism was the worst that could happen. The war on that was won and did it bring peace? Not, just the next "enemy".

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  3. I hope this passes by yog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hate those machines. I travel a lot, and I'm worried that (1) the radiation levels are higher than the manufacturer claims, and (2) it does nothing to protect us from terrorism.

    Machines can only go so far. You have to have intelligent, well trained and highly motivated people on the scene.

    A friend who was traveling in China recently told me that when he went through airport security there, it felt like he was in a modern, free country. Then when he came back to American airports, it felt like he was in a backward dictatorship.

    The fact that they won't let us bring a 4 oz. or 6oz. yogurt, or a bottle of pure water, or a tube of what is obviously toothpaste, does not make us safer. It inconveniences us. I love yogurt and it's ridiculous that it can't be carried through security. Go ahead, open it, sniff it. It's milk, not nitroglycerine, or a binary explosive. Water is water. Toothpaste is toothpaste.

    I also miss traveling with my little flat Swiss card which contains a one inch knife and a scissors and a tweezers. It was so convenient and I used it all the time. They confiscated the knife twice, because I forgot to remove it from my backpack before traveling. So I just stopped carrying it at all.

    They blanket ban these things because they don't trust their employees to be intelligent enough to recognize the difference between a dangerous weapon and a bottle of shampoo or Coke. We're not safer, we're just angrier and hungrier as a result.

    Ok I'm getting off my soap box now :(

    --
    it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
  4. Re:Hrm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually we can't do behavioral profiling because idiots like you don't understand that it's not the same thing as racial profiling.

    Racial profiling: "That guy is black but he's driving an expensive car. He probably stole the car."

    Behavioral profiling: "That guy is driving conspicuously slow and it's 2:00am on a Saturday night, there's a good chance he's drunk."