Body Scanners Increase Privacy, Says Corporate Media

Having a fat TSA thug in a back room ogle your naked daughter “enhances privacy,” according to Mark Salter – down is the new up, the sky is green and the grass is blue

With the resistance to naked body scanners in airports building, the corporate media is now claiming that technology which allows fat TSA thugs sitting in back rooms to ogle your naked daughter actually “enhances privacy”.

In our Orwellian brave new world where down is the new up, University of Ottawa professor Mark Salter gushes over the virtual strip searches with a gusto that makes you wonder whether he’s on the same payroll as people like Michael Chertoff, who have been aggressively promoting the scanners they are invested in as a solution to the underwear bomber threat, no matter that such scanners would not even have stopped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding Flight 253.

In his Globe and Mail article, Salter doesn’t try to deny that the scanner produces a crisp image of your naked body, indeed, he ends his piece by asking, “Will Canadians be willing to fly naked?”

“Let me be controversial by saying the millimetre-wave scanner actually enhances privacy,” Salter ludicrously claims, arguing that everything is kosher because the government has promised to keep the strip search anonymous and not store the details in a database – and you can really trust them – after all, governments never keep illegal databases of our information do they? They haven’t been caught doing exactly that on almost every front since 9/11.

Salter isn’t really concerned about how a man with no passport who was on a terror watchlist and who was aided by a sharp-dressed man after his own father had warned U.S. intelligence that he was a threat was allowed to board a plane. No, that pales into insignificance, what’s really important is that brow-beaten Americans and Canadians, who are already treated like criminals and ordered around like prisoners by airport gestapo, are forced to undergo yet more humiliation by being routinely strip-searched, just as the Nazis did to the populations that they conquered during world war two.

Salter is also unperturbed by the fact that the body scanners fire ionizing radiation at the body which penetrates a few centimeters into the flesh and unzips DNA, increasing the risk of cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

He is similarly unflustered at the fact that the body scanners violate laws against child pornography because they produce indecent images of children, meaning airports will become the primary peddlers of child porn.

Salter couldn’t care less that top civil liberties groups in Canada have publicly attacked the scanners as a violation of human dignity.

Salter thinks that thugs in uniforms who have made getting into America a worse experience than entering East Berlin sitting alone in back rooms enjoying naked images of your children is a good thing, because apparently being alone in a private room while staring at people’s genitals all day is sure to encourage nothing but the utmost professionalism, I’m sure.

Since Salter’s enthusiasm to see the invasion of the body scanners become a reality is so effusively boundless, he’ll doubtless also welcome the next wave of tyranny being prepared for travelers – mandatory taser bracelets that allow officials to electric shock passengers on a whim, passive brain scanners that pick up brain waves in order to sense the behavior of travelers, as well as surveillance cameras on every seat providing a big brother babysitter for every potentially disobedient slave.

People like Salter and others in the establishment press who are pushing naked body scanners certainly know which side their bread is buttered on. Since the corporate media is owned by the very military-industrial complex making a windfall from the orders for thousands of scanners now being made, as well as the shot in the arm for the fraudulent war on terror helpfully provided by the underwear bomber, it’s unsurprising that we’re seeing such ceaseless propaganda in favor of the scanners.

But an outraged hardcore of Americans, Canadians and people from around the world are standing up and saying enough is enough – with boycotts, lawsuits and mass protests in the pipeline as part of a growing resistance against the latest manifestation of the prison planet being constructed around free humanity.