Huzzah, now you can get naked at the airport without having to take off your clothes! Intrigued? Don't be! Super-expensive new "whole-body imaging" robots are also invading your privacy while they're busy looking at your under-theres.
For many years, the Transportation Security Administration has been looking for ways to inconvenience a maximum number of travelers while exacting a minimum of real effect on their safety. This has led to such precautionary measures as making mothers drink bottles of their own breast milk, banning all but a few precious drops of liquid shampoo from entering a person's carry-on luggage, and forcing people to bare their bunioned feet to the world while waiting to go through the beepy thing that reminds them they forgot to take the change out of their pockets.
These are all important measures for freedom, because it shows the terrorists that we will stop at nothing to make travel as tedious and unpleasant as possible...even for our own law-abiding citizens.
The sexy new $170,000 body-scanning machines being tested in 19 airports around the country are, in this sense, a great departure from the norm, because they don't take very long to go through at all, and they feature fun technologies.
The downside: the security personnel running the scans don't get to see the scans; that important job is left to other security workers in some room somewhere, so as to minimize the chances of unprofessional public leering.
The upside is that people who used to set off metal detectors all the time, like folks with titanium skeletons, will now get to go through yet another step of scanning before they can get on their planes.
Meanwhile, the terrorists with the knives and the bombs will just go to an airport that doesn't have fancy nude scanners. Safety first!
Frequent flier Sara K. Smith writes for NBC and Wonkette.
