Feds green light naked scanners

justinmb

Nominee Member
Oct 21, 2009
50
1
8
winnipeg
I was just scanning the news and came across this and found it interesting.
I travel to Germany every year for the past 5 with my wife to visit my in laws and each time we go to France Switzerland Italy and within the EU there are no borders and the Border between Switzerland is a pleasure to go through if driving and if taking the train there I have never been stopped.
my point is in the last hundred years there have been two major wars yet they have been able to put this aside and work together and yet we are all treated like terrorist to go to the States I personally think its not worth the hassle and there are many in Europe and probably the world who think the same. Although I am sure we will have to be scanned no matter where we go now look out for Big Brother.


Read it for yourself and chime in I think in the coming weeks this will cause a lot of discussion





OTTAWA – The federal government will purchase 44 virtual strip-search scanners for Canada's major airports, Transport Minister John Baird announced Tuesday.
The $250,000-a-piece full-body scanners will be placed in some airports, including Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Halifax, as early as next week.
The Conservative government's announcement comes on the heels of Britain and the Netherlands saying they will also begin using the scanners in response to the failed Christmas Day bombing of a US aircraft on route to Detroit.
Junior Transport Minister Rob Merrifield says the scanners would have detected explosives strapped to
Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) had announced plans to purchase a few scanners last spring, after it implemented a pilot study at the Kelowna International airport in 2007 and 2008.




The government rushed its order after the Christmas Day scare.
The full body scanners see through passengers’ clothing and have privacy advocates alarmed.
"It sees through fabric. It can see your genitals," said Micheal Vonn, the policy director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.
The government said children under 18 won't be subject to the search.
Merrifield said privacy concerns will be mitigated because naked images will be viewed by an isolated officer and won't be kept or transferred.
The government decided not to purchase genital blurring technologies because it defeats the purpose, a CATSA spokesman said.
The plan right now is to deploy the machines as a mandatory secondary alternative for all U.S. bound passengers, Transport Canada spokesman Patrick Charette said.
Charette said travellers will be allowed to choose between a pat-down or going through the virtual strip search.
 

Kakato

Time Out
Jun 10, 2009
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I dont have a problem with them if it makes the skys safe from cowards that want to kill innocent people in the name of their god because were considered infidels in their religion.
 

shadowshiv

Dark Overlord
May 29, 2007
17,545
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No surprise here. It was only a matter of time before this became implemented everywhere(or in the majority of airports). I would rather be subjected to this(as embarrassing as it would be) than get blown up while flying to wherever it is that I am going.
 

justinmb

Nominee Member
Oct 21, 2009
50
1
8
winnipeg
I personally am not to worried about being blown up it is kind of like being worried I will be hit by a car or shot randomly in the street (which there is a better chance of) I cannot change the out come and i find it more worrisome that the media or government has so many people so scared that they can implement such blatant privacy invasion and we actually think its a good idea next thing you know they will put them in bars/ hotels and all public buildings the Gestapo used to invade privacy like that in the begining and then it turned ugly I am not comparing our government to Nazies but one can see the similar tactics fear mongering and the stepping on of civil liberties.

It is a slippery slope we tread.
 

gerryh

Time Out
Nov 21, 2004
25,756
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anybody know who makes these scanners? just wondering who is profiting from the continued paranoia.
 

SirJosephPorter

Time Out
Nov 7, 2008
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Ontario
We had a heated discussion about this very subject a while ago.

http://forums.canadiancontent.net/news/87668-airport-see-thru-scanners.html

At that time the general tenor of the discussion seemed to be that full body scanners were going too far, it is an unwarranted intrusion of peoples’ privacy. I was one of the few arguing in their favor (but then I often enjoy taking a contrarian view).

Now the tenor of this tread seems to be totally different, majority of posters seem to be in favor of it. There is noting like a terrorist attack to focus peoples’ minds.
 
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Dexter Sinister

Unspecified Specialist
Oct 1, 2004
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Regina, SK
Idiotic.

Has ANY terrorist been caught by scanners of ANY type.....I don't think so.

Idiotic.
Absolutely right. These security technologies are always designed to catch the previous terrorist, not the next one. Those people know how they're going to be scanned and they find ways around it. You can hang a long list of nasty labels on them, but stupid isn't one of them.
 

Cliffy

Standing Member
Nov 19, 2008
44,850
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Nakusp, BC
I'm with Colpy on this one. It is just plain stupid. Big Brother has already won. Line up for your tracking chip implants. Getting out of bed in the morning could be hazardous to life and limb. You can be killed any number of ways during any given day but you don't think about that either. What difference does it make if you get run over or blown up? Its just another chip away at your freedom. It is going fast. Be the first one on your block to be Big Brother's little bum boy.
 

SirJosephPorter

Time Out
Nov 7, 2008
11,956
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Ontario
Absolutely right. These security technologies are always designed to catch the previous terrorist, not the next one. Those people know how they're going to be scanned and they find ways around it. You can hang a long list of nasty labels on them, but stupid isn't one of them.

But that is all we can do, Dexter. We have to be reactive in this matter, we can’t be proactive. We can only respond to threats as they arise.

If we try to imagine what kind of threat the terrorist will pose in the future and try to take preemptive action, there are several problems associated with that. For one, it will be very difficult to justify spending millions or billions of dollars on some preventive technology when there isn’t a threat, people won’t go for it. Now that there has been a terrorist attempt, people will support the introduction of body scanners, but before the terrorist attempt, the support for body scanners was a lot less.

Another problem would be that governments will have to outline what kind of threat they are anticipating, in order to take preventive actions. That by itself may give terrorists ideas, whereas before they did not think in those terms, when government unleashed its preventive apparatus, that may get terrorists thinking along those directions.

We can only be reactive. It is an unending game. Terrorists come up with some threat, in response governments round the world take action, then terrorists think up a way of circumventing those measures, in response to that, governments take further measures and so on.
 

TenPenny

Hall of Fame Member
Jun 9, 2004
17,466
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Location, Location
But that is all we can do, Dexter. We have to be reactive in this matter, we can’t be proactive. We can only respond to threats as they arise.


Okay, let's be reactive.

Let's react to the idea that his father reported him as suspicious to US authorities, but nothing happened.
Let's react to the idea that apparently, his name was supposed to be on a no-fly list, but if it was, nothing happened.
Let's react to the idea that he obviously wasn't screened or searched very well.

And let's react to that by implementing another layer of expensive, intrusive security.

It's like the Liberal's solution to everything: just add another layer of bureaucracy.