I'm not sure what to make about the new security measures or even what to think about the full body scanners, though a scrambled viewing of one of them doesn't necessarily seem to me to be invasive of privacy in the way that (unscrambled) surveillance cameras following your movements all over the place clearly are. We are constantly under watch already.

I believe very strongly in the right to privacy and am even a crank on this subject. I agree that one obvious solution is to find an effective technological solution that allows a full scan without making it individually identifiable.

Put another way, if a terrorist is going to hid explosives under his nutsack, we do need a way to find it. Hopefully a machine that can sense it. Otherwise we are going to be asking security personnel to do the nutsack inspections and they aren't even unionized.

All the squawking makes me want to look up if people freaked out about metal detectors when they were rolled out.

If anything should depress us, it is that there are metal detectors at schools in the U.S. of A, lots of schools, a sign of a seriously demented society that needs these to prevent shootings.

One thing I think is complete bullshit is the weak argument that people who have fundamentalist religious concerns (Islamic, Jewish, presumably some others as well) have concerns about being viewed through this technology. The argument, made here by privacy expert Jeffrey Rosen, essentially means the decision to wear a burqa holds the rest of us hostage.

Well, Lift the nut sack you religious zealots, and keep your laws off of my body. I have no problem with anyone believing whatever they want, but if they are going to be moving through society they can also do the minimum.

I do have a graceful solution. Maybe we should just forget about terrorism and declare war on all fundamentalisms--take them all out, all fundamentalists across the board, and then essentially all of our problems could be resolved as the adults left make decisions rooted in rational thought. WWJD?

(I think my use of italics in this post officially pushes it into ranting territory)