the timboucher experience

I’d heard about this x-ray spec technology a while back, but didn’t know it had been implemented anywhere. London’s Heathrow airport now has the ability to use a low-dose x-ray scanner which can see through the clothes of passengers, creating an anatomically detailed black and white image of the body underneath. Supposedly, the machines do not store these images, and they are same sex operated, plus the person who sees the image never sees the actual person whose image it is.

And those are the only safeguards against abuse of this “security” technology. Otherwise, it’s a veritable free-for-all. Some groups in Britain are (understandably) upset about it according to this article. But rather than focusing on the controversy surrounding this machine, this Reuters news article instead spends the majority of it’s time trying to show how people seem to not mind having the ultimate invasion of privacy in the name of “security”…

Randomly picked passengers are asked if they will volunteer to be scanned by the machine.

“I stood in front of the screen and they took three pictures in different positions,” said passenger Pernille Nielsen.

“I don’t mind if the pictures are a little more personal as long as I’m safe in air—that’s what matters,” she told Reuters.

Another passenger, Maria Love, said: “It’s all about being safe, and I really have no problem with it.”

A spokeswoman for BAA Heathrow said 98 percent of participants gave positive feedback.

That section is right at the beginning of the article. Right after that, they have a big advertisement/links section, to give you the subliminal cue that there is no more to be read in this article. If you do scroll down, you’re treated to only a few sentences from people opposing this technology, and then the article closes with more hollow assurances about how its safe, and there’s no potential for embarrassment or abuse. This article is really a textbook example of how very real and important controversies can be rendered in such a way by news media that they don’t seem dangerous or negative. Who needs censorship when you can just spin spin spin.

And while we’re on the subject, have you heard about how a US Marine murdered an unarmed injured Iraqi civilian on video while a reporter from NBC was watching? No? Well maybe that’s because instead of using that as a headline, MSNBC is instead using: “U.S. probes shooting at Fallujah mosque“. That’s it? “Probes?” “Shooting?” I mean, they even have the video… The fucking headline here should be extremely clear cut:

US Marine Murders Unarmed Injured Iraqi Civilian on NBC Video

UPDATE!

I was just browsing on somebody’s blog about all these different ways you can “support our troops.” I was going to leave a comment that said something about sending them bullets and camcorders so they can document more of their murders, but I decided I didn’t want to get embroiled in the firestorm such a comment would have brought me.

FURTHERMORE

Whatever happened to those Iraq prison abuse videos which the congressional & senate committees supposedly saw in closed session where prisoners were not only tortured, but raped and even murdered in some instances? Everybody sure fucking stopped talking about that shit really fast all of a sudden several months ago.

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