Airport screenings a necessary evil

Airport security measures have been making headlines this holiday traveling season. The choice between full-body scanners and pat-downs has some feeling that personal privacy is being sacrificed for the general public's safety. Although, would it really be better if public safety were sacrificed for personal privacy? In an era when suicide bombers board planes with explosives in their underwear, I believe the heightened security measures aren't really all that unreasonable.

According to abcnews.com, a packet of powder was found in the underwear of attempted suicide bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab close to a year ago. Fortunately, in this instance, the explosive device malfunctioned and tragedy was averted.

In direct response to the "underwear bomber," the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is now introducing new advanced imaging technology to airports across the nation to prevent suicide bombers using similar techniques from ever stepping on a plane.

As stated on the TSA website, the scanners screen passengers for metallic weapons as well as nonmetallic threats — more than what is possible with basic metal detectors. These scanners produce black-and-white images that can view objects beneath a person's clothes. The images are screened in a separate room by security personal that never see the passenger in person, but can communicate with interactive officers if something is seen.

There have been complaints comparing the security images to nude photography, however, in looking at image examples on the TSA website, it is virtually impossible to identify specific identities from the image. Names are not displayed with the images and faces are automatically blurred out, so even if the photos were made public, no one would be identifiable.

Health concerns over the minuscule amounts of radiation emitted during the scans have caused many to fear the machines. The imaging technology used, however, meets all national health and safety standards. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) each find the amount of exposure from the scanners to be less than two minutes of any given flight. It doesn't exactly seem sensible to complain about the amount of radiation exposure from the scans if you are willing to be exposed for hours during the flight itself.

Even frequent fliers shouldn't worry too much if their doctors could potentionally expose them to higher levels of radiation. Passengers would need to make 5,000 trips through the scanners to reach the amount of radiation exposure emitted in just one chest X-ray, according to an LAtimes.com article.

Still, if passengers aren't comfortable with the supposed nude photography and radiation exposure elements, they do always have the option to be felt up. As an alternative, passengers can forgo the full-body scan in favor of the newly aggressive pat-downs. Pat-down procedures have become more invasive by using the palm of the hand and new hand-sliding motions that glide from head to toe — including the breasts, buttocks and groin areas.

Over this past Thanksgiving holiday, a protest campaign was led encouraging fliers to opt-out of the body scanner screenings and choose the more time-consuming pat-downs on one of the busiest traveling days of the year.

A NYtimes.com article stated that protesters even went so far as to show up in only a swimsuit. Essentially, they protested against the body scanner privacy invasion by voluntarily showing more skin to more people. Sure, that makes sense.

According to the same article, involvement fell quite short of what protesters had hoped. It seems more people wanted to actually make their flights to see friends and relatives over the holiday instead of wasting time in an airport. Shocker.

Despite the privacy issues and health concerns, four in five people support the use of the full-body scanners, according to a CBS news poll. I'd prefer the body scan over the groping any day, but really any heightened security method would be worth it to prevent even just one tragedy.

No one wants to be felt up by a stranger; but no one wants to have a bomb go off during a flight either.