Comments on: Ban Whole Body Imaging

By: allan

allan — Fri, 08 May 2009 08:10:55 +0000

It seems to me that this needs to be Bork’d.
Recall that the leak of Judge Bork’s video rental record revealed little of prurient value, but congress panicked for fear of their own privacy.[1] We need to find an intrepid reporter who will spread the rumor that they have images from the whole-body scanning machines of a few key party leaders. Make it convincing–find out what airports they’ve tested it in and choose from those districts.
It seems that we’d get a hearing on this fairly quickly.
[1] Unfortunately, this strategy is less useful today for large databases like medical records because it’s easier to set up a celebrity-based access control system than an real one.

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:19:01 +0000

Well done Jason Chaffetz — on both counts!

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 07 May 2009 11:34:36 +0000

Chaffetz may have done something sensible in this instance, but he’s not exactly a defender of privacy rights. The D.C. city council took a vote to recognize legal same-sex marriages performed in other states, and the honorable Mr. Chaffetz (a Utah Republican) was quoted in the Post thusly:
“Some things are worth fighting for, and this is one of them,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah), the ranking Republican on a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee that oversees the District. “It’s not something I can let go softly into the night. . . . I recognize the Democrats are in the majority, but I represent the majority of Americans on this issue.”
As a matter of fact, he is dead wrong. The majority of Americans support marriage equality. In any case, equality before the law is not something about which a plebiscite needs to be conducted.