looking at body scanners

In an opinion piece in the newspaper De Standaard Paul De Hert asserts that surveillance technologies such as body scanners, if applied in a privacy-sensitive way and not implemented haphazardly, need not necessarily mean a violation of our rights (Opinion De Standaard, Jan 06, 2010). Mark Salter, a Canadian expert in airport security, even claims that body scanners actually enhance your privacy! (Opinion in the Globe and Mail, Jan. 06, 2010).
However the privacy discussion tends to overshadow other issues. In some cases these issues can even be the result of privacy-protecting measures. Firstly children (younger than 18 years) are not allowed to be scanned as child protection laws in several countries state that it “is illegal to create an indecent image or a pseudo-image of a child”; one of the consequences of this is that the suicide bombers might get younger.
Another issue that arises with body scanners is, that to protect the privacy of passengers, not everyone will be scanned; people can opt-out, except those who are deemed suspicious on the basis of certain characteristics such as religion and ethnicity. In other words the problem of body scanners implemented as such becomes a problem of profiling, which has its own privacy issues and tends to result in additional social sorting.
Both issues have been overlooked in recent discussions about body scanners.

Rosamunde van Brakel