Wednesday, January 06, 2010

UK privacy concerns impede strip search machines

The Washington Post has a nice article on the UK deployment of strip search machines at airports, UK privacy concerns likely to impede body scanners.
"Ian Dowty, legal adviser to Action on Rights for Children, said he believes it would be a criminal offense to operate the scanners or to direct anyone to operate them if they are used to produce images of children under the age of 18.
"If anything produces an indecent image of anyone under 18, that is unlawful and is in fact a criminal offense," he said. "As we've seen on the Internet, these machines clearly show genitalia, that in our view must result in an indecent image by any definition."
He said any new security apparatus must comply with British law as set by Parliament and that it is up to the legislature to consider whether to change the law to allow the new generation of full body scanners to operate...
Simon Davies, director of Privacy International... said that even if Brown persuades Parliament to modify British law to make the scanners acceptable that they would still be in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, which would take precedence in this case."

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