Do Airport Body Scanners Break Child Porn Laws?

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Theunis Bates Contributor
LONDON (Dec. 5) – Since the failed bombing of a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day, officials in the United States, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands have called for new advanced full-body scanners to be used on all passengers. But privacy campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic are warning that the personnel operating these machines – which see through travelers' clothing, making it easier to identify explosives and weapons – could be charged under child pornography laws if they scan anyone under the age of 18.

Those concerns last month led British officials to abandon plans to body-scan all travelers during a 12-month trial of the technology at Manchester airport. They will only scan adults until the legal situation is clarified. U.K. authorities made that amendment after a protest by advocacy groups Action on Rights for Children and Privacy International. They claimed that these machines, if used on minors, would breach the U.K.'s 1978 Protection of Children Act, which says it is illegal to take an indecent photo or "pseudo-photograph" of a child.

The key word in the 1978 piece of legislation is "take." According to Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, "Child protection laws criminalize the taking of images of a revealing nature of young people." Even though the $150,000 scanners wipe the naked pictures after they have appeared on screen, says Davies, security staff could still be prosecuted for creating the image. "It's irrelevant how long these images are kept for," he says, "the fact that they were captured in the first place is the offense."
full-body scanner
Cynthia Boll, AP
A full-body scanner in action at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport.

It's now likely that any machines installed at British terminals – Prime Minister Gordon Brown this weekend gave the go-ahead for the technology to be rolled out across U.K. airports – will be lumbered with the same age exception. But if the government goes for that option, says Davies, the effectiveness of the technology will be undermined.

"A parent could place a substance on a child if they want to get around checks," he says, adding that the money set aside for these scanners could be spent boosting counterterrorism intelligence. "Our preferred option is to see this machinery only used on specifically targeted, risky individuals."

Similar legal problems exist in the U.S. John Verdi, senior counsel at the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, says American child pornography law is based on possession of an indecent image – the intent behind its creation is irrelevant.

"I don't think that there's any question that the images, even though they're only temporary, could still qualify as child pornography," he says. "But for me the bigger question is whether they fall in one of the exemptions under U.S. law."

Law enforcers can hold on to indecent images in a few limited cases. "These exemptions are typically used during active investigations, where police are chasing down a child pornographer, for example," says Verdi. "But that's very different from saying we're going to allow Transport Security Administration officials to possess naked images of children as part of a large, routine, mandatory screening process that has no particular target."

Verdi says concerns over child scanning are likely to grow in the coming months. Although the machines are only used in 19 American airports, where passengers can opt for a pat-down instead of a full scan, it's widely predicted that the Obama administration will soon introduce mandatory scanning of all passengers. And unless the government clears up the legal confusion around this security process, it could find itself hit with a flurry of lawsuits.

"I certainly expect that a lot of travelers will be outraged if they find out that these sort of detailed naked images are being taken of their kids," says Verdi.
Filed under: Nation, World
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Oh come on, what idiot decided to bring this "issue" up?

My wife's ex-husband is a convicted pedophile, I see the logic in the argument.

I don't really understand the big fuss about these body scanners. I really don't care if someone I'll never see or interact with ever again sees the outline of my body. My problem with them is that they're completely impractical right now. They take like 30-60 seconds so they should only be a secondary device until the technology catches up.

I don't really understand the big fuss about these body scanners. I really don't care if someone I'll never see or interact with ever again sees the outline of my body. My problem with them is that they're completely impractical right now. They take like 30-60 seconds so they should only be a secondary device until the technology catches up.

Really aren't we being alittle too paranoid when we are basicly strip searching every passenger?

Bruce Schneier
Sphere
(Jan. 7) -- In the headlong rush to "fix" security after the Underwear Bomber's unsuccessful Christmas Day attack, there's far too little discussion about what worked and what didn't, and what will and will not make us safer in the future.

The security checkpoints worked. Because we screen for obvious bombs, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab -- or, more precisely, whoever built the bomb -- had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise. Instead of using a timer or a plunger or a reliable detonation mechanism, as would any commercial user of PETN, he had to resort to an ad hoc and much more inefficient homebrew mechanism: one involving a syringe and 20 minutes in the lavatory and we don't know exactly what else. And it didn't work.

Yes, the Amsterdam screeners allowed Abdulmutallab onto the plane with PETN sewn into his underwear, but that's not a failure either. There is no security checkpoint, run by any government anywhere in the world, designed to catch this. It isn't a new threat; it's more than a decade old. Nor is it unexpected; anyone who says otherwise simply isn't paying attention. But PETN is hard to explode, as we saw on Christmas Day.

Additionally, the passengers on the airplane worked. For years I've said that exactly two things have made us safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door and convincing passengers that they need to fight back. It was the second of these that, on Christmas Day, quickly subdued Abdulmutallab after he set his pants on fire.

To the extent security failed, it failed before Abdulmutallab even got to the airport. Why was he issued an American visa? Why didn't anyone follow up on his father's tip? While I'm sure there are things to be improved and fixed, remember that everything is obvious in hindsight. After the fact, it's easy to point to the bits of evidence and claim that someone should have "connected the dots." But before the fact, when there millions of dots -- some important but the vast majority unimportant -- uncovering plots is a lot harder.

Despite this, the proposed fixes focus on the details of the plot rather than the broad threat. We're going to install full-body scanners, even though there are lots of ways to hide PETN -- stuff it in a body cavity, spread it thin on a garment -- from the machines. We're going to profile people traveling from 14 countries, even though it's easy for a terrorist to travel from a different country. Seating requirements for the last hour of flight were the most ridiculous example.

The problem with all these measures is that they're only effective if we guess the plot correctly. Defending against a particular tactic or target makes sense if tactics and targets are few. But there are hundreds of tactics and millions of targets, so all these measures will do is force the terrorists to make a minor modification to their plot.

It's magical thinking: If we defend against what the terrorists did last time, we'll somehow defend against what they do one time. Of course this doesn't work. We take away guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We take away box cutters and corkscrews, and the terrorists hide explosives in their shoes. We screen shoes, they use liquids. We limit liquids, they sew PETN into their underwear. We implement full-body scanners, and they're going to do something else. This is a stupid game; we should stop playing it.

But we can't help it. As a species we're hardwired to fear specific stories -- terrorists with PETN underwear, terrorists on subways, terrorists with crop dusters -- and we want to feel secure against those stories. So we implement security theater against the stories, while ignoring the broad threats.

What we need is security that's effective even if we can't guess the next plot: intelligence, investigation and emergency response. Our foiling of the liquid bombers demonstrates this. They were arrested in London, before they got to the airport. It didn't matter if they were using liquids -- which they chose precisely because we weren't screening for them -- or solids or powders. It didn't matter if they were targeting airplanes or shopping malls or crowded movie theaters. They were arrested, and the plot was foiled. That's effective security.

Finally, we need to be indomitable. The real security failure on Christmas Day was in our reaction. We're reacting out of fear, wasting money on the story rather than securing ourselves against the threat. Abdulmutallab succeeded in causing terror even though his attack failed.

If we refuse to be terrorized, if we refuse to implement security theater and remember that we can never completely eliminate the risk of terrorism, then the terrorists fail even if their attacks succeed.
________________
Bruce Schneier is a security technologist, and author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World." You can read more of his writing at www.schneier.com.
Filed under: Opinion, Only On Sphere

But we can't help it. As a species we're hardwired to fear specific stories -- terrorists with PETN underwear, terrorists on subways, terrorists with crop dusters -- and we want to feel secure against those stories. So we implement security theater against the stories, while ignoring the broad threats.

To the extent security failed, it failed before Abdulmutallab even got to the airport. Why was he issued an American visa? Why didn't anyone follow up on his father's tip? While I'm sure there are things to be improved and fixed, remember that everything is obvious in hindsight. After the fact, it's easy to point to the bits of evidence and claim that someone should have "connected the dots." But before the fact, when there millions of dots -- some important but the vast majority unimportant -- uncovering plots is a lot harder.