And why shouldn't flightcrews be subject to the same search? Unless certain things happen, flightcrews should absolutely be subjected to the same search as everybody else. To me, your position on this shows that you really don't understand the issues here. The pilot who started this media storm by refusing the TSA at Memphis last month did it not for the himself, but for everybody else. Being a flightcrew merely allows us some leverage and maybe some leadership in fighting the TSA on this issue. Even though it may seem as though the flightcrews won something, this is far from over.I hope you at least care about your daughter's rights to her body. Honestly, does it really not bother you that the TSA is going to feel her labia just beause she bought a plane ticket? Again, it doesn't bother me that they touch my penis, but it does bother me that they would do that to my father and mother, and that they are doing it to other innocent people who are going to be bothered by it.It has nothing to do with whether one flies everyday or every ten years. An overstep of bounds and a violation of your body is wrong, period. And their strategy is that people will see this as something they have to put up with once every so often, so they will just take the easy way out, and let go of the fact that they are out there violating strip search laws everyday on somebody else. Anyways, you keep hiding from things that are out there.

Of course I care about my daughter. And I feel your comments are out of line. All she has to do is go through the scanner and be done with it. I hide from nothing. As a white American Christian, I know that there are people out there that want to kill me. And kill everyone I know. Real steps need to be taken to stop this. What is your alternative?Bob

So why did they spend a half billion dollars on these machines that will do nothing against the next forseable threat, that humiliates the general population, and the legality of their use is questionable?

Look in Canada we get sensors installed all the time. We have sensors that people don't even have a clue what they do. And they detect important things like SARS outbreaks. Do I question the authority of the airport or do I say thanks for the free checkup. After all if I'm genuinely sick some doctor is there for legal "authority".

Of course I care about my daughter. And I feel your comments are out of line. All she has to do is go through the scanner and be done with it. I hide from nothing. As a white American Christian, I know that there are people out there that want to kill me. And kill everyone I know. Real steps need to be taken to stop this. What is your alternative?Bob

Out of line. Exactly. The government is completely out of line by doing this to all of us. The anger that you feel towards me for saying what I just said, is the exact anger I feel at the government for doing this to all of us. The truth is ugly and it is out of line. Just because you don't get to see the results of the scanning in front of you like the results of a patdown right in front of you, does not mean that are no results, that your daughter's most intimate and private knowledge is not exposed to a stranger. If it weren't, then why would the alternative to the scanner be so overtly intimate and private? If the pat down is more thorough than the scanner, then shouldn't everybody be patted down? After all, there are people out to kill you and I. Do your part for safety's sake. Better yet, take your head out of the sand.Alternatives? That's easy to answer.1. Behavior profiling. Stop wasting time and resources treating everybody as a terrorist and focus your energies on people who would be likely to blow up an airplane. Hire some people who have brains so that they can be entrusted to make a decision about who is a threat instead of building a system where no one has to make any decisions.2. Replace the people in intelligence with people who are intelligent. How dumb did the US look when a wealthy African banker calls the authorities with a warning that his son wants to bomb a plane and the intel community ignores it. And now all the citizens of the US have to pay the price for that mistake by giving up their dignity, their expectation of privacy that comes with clothing, all because a few highly paid federal employees failed to do their jobs.3. Get the bad guys in their homelands before they get here. Step up cooperative and covert efforts in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc. to neutralize the sources of threats before they can act here.What you give up in terms of your convenience, privacy, dignity, and civil rights is merely the cost of you, the law abiding citizen, picking up the slack of our government's ineptitude at properly protecting the country and fighting terrorism. It is nothing patriotic or contributory to safety. This object based approach will not work. I guarantee you the next terrorist act that succeeds will be nothing that these scanners could have stopped, but something that could have been stopped if the people charged with our safety were able to follow the clues that they already have and put the dots together. By accepting what they do now, it is merely allowing the government to take the easy way out of truly protecting you.

Look in Canada we get sensors installed all the time. We have sensors that people don't even have a clue what they do. And they detect important things like SARS outbreaks. Do I question the authority of the airport or do I say thanks for the free checkup. After all if I'm genuinely sick some doctor is there for legal "authority".

Welcome to 1984. Welcome to what we derisively call the "Nanny State." You may find that acceptable in Canada. We don't find it acceptable in the US. We will take our risks and live free. We like to think that we try to take personal responsibility for our actions in exchange for that freedom. If I am sick, I will see a doctor and avoid other people. I don't go about like nothing is wrong until I am nabbed by somebody from the government for being sick and a danger to others."We have sensors that people don't even have a clue what they do." - Really? And you accept that. That boggles the mind. Wow.

I'd say it's pretty high tech stuff and saved lives.... Have you actually read 1984? Last time I checked the airport was the airport, not my house.

What happened to those Puffer sensor machines, that detect explosive material that is not an invasive search, and at least would provide probable cause if a more invasive search is warranted. Performing these searches wholesale without legal probable cause out of fear, is giving in to the terrorists, who want to change of way of life and ultimately is against the 4th amendment of the Constitution. Which clearly states"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."We've come so far technologically that we only ask can we do it, instead of should we do it. The ultimate test of whether we should do it, should be, what our founding fathers would do in the same situation. I know one Ben Franklin who wrote "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." wouldn't think so!

I'd say it's pretty high tech stuff and saved lives.... Have you actually read 1984? Last time I checked the airport was the airport, not my house.

And that is exactly why a line must be drawn. Why not place a security checkpoint in front of everybody's front door? After all, once you leave your house, who is to say you are not carrying something dangerous with the intent of doing harm to other people. In the name of public safety, everybody should be stripped and cavity searched by the government before leaving a private residence and entering any sort of public area, such as a street, a supermarket, anywhere where there can be other people. Public safety should be priority number one.

The security solution is simple and as old as Ellis Island. Merely set up quarantine stations where every one is held for 30 days to see if they have a bomb in their underwear! Perhaps operation of these stations could be contracted out to Hilton or Princess Cruises. The economic boost might be enough to lift the world out of the financial doldrums!It worked OK a hundred years ago to detect typhus hidden internally - which is still NOT detectable with scanners!Alex Reid(More seriously- it may yet prove that disease transmission is a greater threat than aviation bomb terrorism.)

Further to my previous post- today's news carries a report of a Cholera case in Florida believed brought there by a woman returning from Haiti.One might assume she flew (rather than swam) to Florida.Alex Reid

Out of line. Exactly. The government is completely out of line by doing this to all of us. The anger that you feel towards me for saying what I just said, is the exact anger I feel at the government for doing this to all of us. The truth is ugly and it is out of line. Just because you don't get to see the results of the scanning in front of you like the results of a patdown right in front of you, does not mean that are no results, that your daughter's most intimate and private knowledge is not exposed to a stranger. If it weren't, then why would the alternative to the scanner be so overtly intimate and private? If the pat down is more thorough than the scanner, then shouldn't everybody be patted down? After all, there are people out to kill you and I. Do your part for safety's sake. Better yet, take your head out of the sand.Alternatives? That's easy to answer.1. Behavior profiling. Stop wasting time and resources treating everybody as a terrorist and focus your energies on people who would be likely to blow up an airplane. Hire some people who have brains so that they can be entrusted to make a decision about who is a threat instead of building a system where no one has to make any decisions.2. Replace the people in intelligence with people who are intelligent. How dumb did the US look when a wealthy African banker calls the authorities with a warning that his son wants to bomb a plane and the intel community ignores it. And now all the citizens of the US have to pay the price for that mistake by giving up their dignity, their expectation of privacy that comes with clothing, all because a few highly paid federal employees failed to do their jobs.3. Get the bad guys in their homelands before they get here. Step up cooperative and covert efforts in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc. to neutralize the sources of threats before they can act here.What you give up in terms of your convenience, privacy, dignity, and civil rights is merely the cost of you, the law abiding citizen, picking up the slack of our government's ineptitude at properly protecting the country and fighting terrorism. It is nothing patriotic or contributory to safety. This object based approach will not work. I guarantee you the next terrorist act that succeeds will be nothing that these scanners could have stopped, but something that could have been stopped if the people charged with our safety were able to follow the clues that they already have and put the dots together. By accepting what they do now, it is merely allowing the government to take the easy way out of truly protecting you.

Kev, Kev Kev...I'm not angry at you. You make me laugh. However, I am confused by whatever code of ethics you claim, that allows you to freely and graphically talk about my daughters' private parts(something you don't allow the government to do, and something that is absolutely none of your business) all in the name of truth. Truth is something, I fear, you don't understand. In civil, public discussions, you can not say whatever you want. There are limits. You have overstepped those limits. Personally, I don't care what you talk about at all. But some folks might. Your alternitives...1. Many folks hate profiling. I don't care either way(don't forget, I only care about myself). You claim to care about others. What about all the innocent people who resent profiling, and don't feel the government has a right to do it. I am not likely to be profiled(are you?), though I have had my shoes run through an explosives scanner. I guess I am being profiled, and just too dump to not know it.2. What about all the cases where plots were foiled. Too easy to concentrate on mistakes. 3. Part of the reason that terrorists hate us so much is because we have meddled in their countries so much already. Besides, what you suggest is already going on.In the end, you are not going to change my mind, and I am not going to change yours. May I suggest we just move on.Bob

Kev, Kev Kev...I'm not angry at you. You make me laugh. However, I am confused by whatever code of ethics you claim, that allows you to freely and graphically talk about my daughters' private parts(something you don't allow the government to do, and something that is absolutely none of your business) all in the name of truth. Truth is something, I fear, you don't understand. In civil, public discussions, you can not say whatever you want. There are limits. You have overstepped those limits. Personally, I don't care what you talk about at all. But some folks might. Your alternitives...1. Many folks hate profiling. I don't care either way(don't forget, I only care about myself). You claim to care about others. What about all the innocent people who resent profiling, and don't feel the government has a right to do it. I am not likely to be profiled(are you?), though I have had my shoes run through an explosives scanner. I guess I am being profiled, and just too dump to not know it.2. What about all the cases where plots were foiled. Too easy to concentrate on mistakes. 3. Part of the reason that terrorists hate us so much is because we have meddled in their countries so much already. Besides, what you suggest is already going on.In the end, you are not going to change my mind, and I am not going to change yours. May I suggest we just move on.Bob

Just make sure you look away the next time you send your daughter off to the airport. It might burst you bubble of serenity. And next time, be honest with yourself and others, don't keep insisting on juries being out and having an open mind when you already know that no one is going to change your mind. Have a good night, Bob.

I've heard alot of people prefer the scanners because it's quicker and more convenient.I do agree on the site though with the statement "You should never have to explain to your children, "Remember that no stranger can touch or see your private area, unless it's a government employee, then it's OK.""

What happened to those Puffer sensor machines, that detect explosive material that is not an invasive search, and at least would provide probable cause if a more invasive search is warranted.

Trouble with relying on those is that not all explosives give off a vapour which can be detected, and even if they do, there are ways around it which terrorists are only too aware of. Theoretically, an explosive such as the good old terrorist's favourite - Semtex-H - should have detection taggants impregnated into it, which serves two purposes: it gives off that vapour to enable sniffer dogs and machines to detect it, and it leaves a signature which can be used to aid an investigation into a bombing to help determine the source of the explosive's manufacture, although in reality, small trace metals are often impregnated in PEs to aid in such post-detonation investigations. All well and good, but...Semtex has only been manufactured with a taggant since 1990, prior to that it was completely without such a safeguard, and although Semtex theoretically has a guaranteed shelf life of only about five years, there's no guarantee that it won't still be effective after a lot longer than that if stored carefully (for example, the original shelf life was stated to be ten years by it's manufacturer). So that means there could be tons of the stuff still around which is not detectable by sniffers and which is still a viable explosive material for use in a terrorist bomb. At least 700 tons of Semtex is known to have been exported to Libya between 1975 and 1981, and it is pretty much known that some of that was used to destroy Pan Am Flight 103, and lots of that Semtex has been offloaded on terrorists around the world, who probably still have stacks of the stuff.To give you an idea of how frightening a statistic that is, you can completely level an average house with less than 100 grams of Semtex, and you can fit that amount inside a mobile phone casing or MP3 player and still have it work well enough to operate as a timer, so you can imagine what that would do to a pressurised airliner up in the thin atmosphere at 35,000 feet. i.e. it would probably blast the thing damn-near in half and almost certainly shred all the control wiring to ribbons. So you'd be looking at a total fatality.Worse than that, PETN (another terrorist's favourite), which is the main explosive ingredient of plastic explosives such as C4, Semtex and PE4, which are created by adding a plasticizer to PETN to create a moldable clay, is not prone to giving off a detectable vapour when on its own, it's only when it gets fairly warm that detectable amounts of vapour comes off it at all. And if any explosive is in a sealed airtight container of some description, then of course it won't give off any detectable vapour, which is why they started checking people to see if they had bottled stuff when boarding aircraft.So if it's a choice between having a quick scan to see if I've got a bottle of PETN shoved up my &@($* wired up to a cheap timex and a detonator, or not having one and instead risking being blown out of the sky by some loony tune with a grudge against the world, then I say scan my &@($*. Twice.Al

This is such a delicate topic… I applaud pilots that take a stand. So Kevin I agree with you and appreciate your action – IMO it’s the right thing. I really believe the objective of terror is to force us to institute these kinds of measures and worse...and not the bombs directly. The more measures cost, the more they choke transportation and skew our values the better. So IMO we play into their hand. Their triumph is a fear that’s entirely disproportionate to the threat. That doesn’t mean the threat isn’t real, it’s real...suicidal dim-witts are real. The reason this scanner is just window dressing is the real vulnerabilities are always elsewhere. When we fix those...they’ll find others. Safety is an illusion, there’s no such thing. So submit to a cavity search if it makes you feel better…it doesn’t make you safe. Sept 11 tactics won’t work - the hardened doors and primed passengers fixed that. But Lockerbie and Air India tactics still work. FedEx Flight 705 was an attempted suicide attack by one of the crew. Today he might be armed. Whatever, I’m not in favor of these scanners, and it has nothing to do with X-rays. I don’t like the invasion, and I don’t like the illusion they make us safer.

If the govt wasn't doing this and I was on a flight and some yahoo stands up and pulls an explosive device out of his tighty whities or has a stick of TNT shoved up his kazoo and says he's going to blow the plane up, I would certainly be sitting in my seat thinking I wish they had scanned or x-rayed that guy before he got on the plane, and I am sure that those that are against it would probably feel the same if they were in that situation.Does this mean that I like it? Not really, but I would rather be safe or safer than sorry, even if it means getting the scan or patdown.As far as the kids go, I dont have any, but if I did I would explain to them in advance of what they are going to have to go thru. If they told me that they felt uncomfortable with either the scan or patdown, then I would find another mode of transportation to my destination, simple as that for me.Personally, I dont think its that big of a deal and I have always erred on the side of caution rather than just hoping things would be fine. If this new method prevents even one incident or one plane getting blown up, then I would think it served its purpose to save the lives of many in the air and even on the ground.It's too bad that we have gotten to the point we are today, but it is what it is.