A blog post on the website TSA Out of our Pants! has just made the infamous nude body scanners (known by their technical name “backscatter scanner”) obsolete.
That’s right. $1 Billion (that’s Billion, with a B) worth of scanners are now useful only as paperweights. Actually, that’s not entirely true. They are useless even as paperweights, since they are so enormously large.
The video on the above blog post (which I will embed at the end of this post as well) demonstrates how to get something through the body scanners you’ll find at every airport throughout the US. Just so there’s no confusion, I do not advocate attempting to do this for nefarious purposes. I only report on this, as did the original poster, to spread awareness.
You’ll recall it was not that long ago (Christmas day, 2009) that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound jetliner. It was after this that the TSA announced they would be implementing these nude scanners across the board. Never mind that there is a decent amount of evidence that raises a lot of suspicions about this entire episode, or that these nude body scanners likely would not have caught the underwear bomber to begin with.