These body scan machines they're considering for airport security are just remarkably awful. When we talk about privacy rights and liberty, one of the things we almost instinctively object to is the notion of strangers from the government photographing our fully naked frame, complete with dangling underpants junk.
The odds of being killed in an airborne terror attack are astronomical. One in 10,408,947 to be exact. I mean, the odds of being killed by simply falling down are 1 in 246. There have been over nine million airline flights and only four successful terrorist attacks aboard airplanes.
The only reason we fear airplane/terrorism death more than other more common ways to die is that an airplane explosion is more spectacular and dramatic. But death is death. Unless you're very, very, very, very unlucky you will not die in a terrorist attack aboard an airplane.
So taking freakish naked Shroud of Turin-ish pictures of Americans as a prerequisite to boarding an airplane is just a profound violation of liberty and privacy -- completely disproportional to the actual threat. By the way, just wait until unscrupulous or disgruntled TSA workers start leaking scans onto the web.
On the other hand, body scans will significantly increase revenue for Amtrak.