Invasion of the Body Scanners
The other item that has lit up Canadian politics other than the prorogation of Parliament is the government’s decision to purchase and introduce forty-four full body scanners for use in Canadian airports. The decision follows on the heels of the “undie-bomber” incident in the US, though testing of the equipment has been underway for at least the past year. The opposition parties and various civil rights groups are understandably concerned about the decision,
Canadian Civil Liberties Association general counsel Natalie Des Rosiers said she had concerns about the behavioral screening plan, which she says could be used to single out certain groups for racial profiling.
She also had concerns that while the government has portrayed the scanners as optional, security officials may change their minds and make the scans mandatory after their implementation.
Like Des Rosiers, I too have concerns about the idea that the scanners would be used as a second line of defense after behavioural cues triggered the need for scanning. But unlike Des Rosiers, I think that the way to alleviate that concern is to go ahead and make scanning policies universal and mandatory. It strikes me that more often than not, concerns about infringements of civil rights hinge on systemic concentrations of power that are utilized in an inconsistent and unfair manner by human beings. A human is supposed to make a fair and reasonable judgment about whether a situation warrants the use of heightened degrees of power over another person for a larger (generally public) good. The idea being that the vast preponderance of human beings who are charged with that task are well-equipped and able to carry out those judgments in a fashion that is acceptable.
Experience, however, often points out to us that we are anything but capable of carrying out judgements about the application of asymmetrical power relations in a fair and reasonable fashion. For a further airport case, just look at the unfortunate story of Robert Dzieka?ski (video here).
What I like about the idea of making full body scans universal and mandatory is that it could help to further remove that element of human judgment from the process by placing individuals who are viewing the images of those being scanned in another room where the scanee is out of sight, limiting the scanning to legal adults only, and requiring that all information obtained be erased following a “clean” scan. Assuming all of that is properly coordinated (perhaps a big if, I suppose), then I think that, as far as air travel goes, full body scanners could stand to improve the application of civil rights.
The other element that is worth noting is that for all my drubbing of American foreign policy, terrorist threats are real, require attention, and have demonstrably been aimed at air travel. In that regard, decisions to do what governments can in the interests of their citizens’ safety, both particularly and generally, are definitely warranted.
Of course, it says something that Israeli officials call full body scanners “ineffective”, but it would seem that the Israeli complaint has less to do with the efficacy of the technology and more to do with their predilection for the methodology I’ve called into question — at least as far as this story indicates,
Security checks at international airports are focused on finding explosives or weapons, when they should concentrate on identifying terrorists, says the head of one Israeli security consultancy.
Israel does use extensive technology, but puts more emphasis on passenger profiling and behaviour — and checkpoints and questioning begin outside airports.
At the end of the day, I know there is a significant impulse to look at full body scanners in airports and cry civil rights foul, but I also think that further inspection reveals a more nuanced situation in which technology could present more of a help than a hindrance. In a choice between machines and profiling/behavioural analysis, I’m going to opt for machines pretty much every time.
January 8, 2010 34 Comments
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