Translation: “I don’t believe it, Mom! You’re on the cover! You’re a star!”
Heathrow Airport is installing them, France and The Netherlands have agreed to buy them, and Italy has pledged to have them installed within three months, but the upper levels of the European Union (EU) bureaucracy is having second thoughts about full-body scanners. The word from the top is, “Not so fast.” The EU has no European-wide policy at this point.
Earlier this week, Viviane Reding, the EU’s justice commissioner-designate, said, in issues such as the scanners, the EU should find better balance between protecting against terrorist attacks and respecting privacy.
Belgium, Spain and Germany are waiting for a European Parliament hearing before deciding whether to install these controversial strip-search machines.
The debate is contentious. The security side of the bureaucracy is siding with the pro-scanner groups and the justice department seems to be shifting to a type of search that offers more dignity.
… the EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove said he was in favour of using the devices across the EU and asked for swift EU regulation of their use.
Kerchove said the latest generation of the devices offered better privacy protection by blurring some body images. “There are tools to avoid hurting a person’s dignity,” he said.
Besides the concerns about privacy, questions have been raised about the effectiveness of these scanners and about the health risks of exposure to the rays used to produce the body scans.
In spite of the furor over the recent bomber who boarded a Delta/Northwest flight in Amsterdam for Detroit with explosives in his underware, the EU commissioners are not moving forward with a knee-jerk response of simply installing these whole-body scanners.
Reding said, “Human beings have dignity and every measure has to be clarified first. Does it respect human dignity, does it respect privacy and does it respect health?”
This issue has already been voted down in Europe back in 2008. Some of the European Parliament members at that time saw these machines as a “virtual strip search.”
The European Parliament is scheduled to vote on the issue on January 26th. There are also other privacy issues that have to do with banking privacy that are being considered at the same time. So far, the EU has not seemed to be rolling over officially for the U.S. on either of these issues.
Cartoon from Vloggerheads.com
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
