Opposition is growing to the use of full body, see –through-your-clothes scans at airports, brought to you courtesy of our US Office of Homeland Security.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a petitition for review and motion for an emergency stay, urging the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to suspend the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) full body scanner program.
I've always thought that requiring every passenger in the country to remove their shoes and belts in order to get on a plane was humiliating, stupid and the equivalent of reactive legislating, especially considering the fact that our intelligence community has a backlog of hundreds of thousands of intercepted phone conversations ( as of 2004!) that need to be translated, due to a lack of Arabic translators.
In late September 2004 , a U.S. Justice Department audit revealed that the FBI has a backlog of hundreds of thousands of untranslated audio recordings from terror and espionage investigations. The backlog existed even though money for the FBI's language services had increased from $21.5 million in fiscal year 2001 to about $70 million in 2004. The number of linguists had risen from 883 to 1,214 over that period, Glenn Fine, the agency's inspector general said.
Let’s play the resource game. Again. Hmmm.. Where should we prioritize our time, money and efforts? Should we…
Play peek a boo with every air passenger in the country, in the hopes we’ll catch one out of a million nutjobs with a shoe bomb?
Or- find, hire (with our taxpayer money) and put to work some Arabic translators to figure out what the heck those people in the hundreds of thousands of intercepted recordings have up their sleeves?
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