There has been some stir recently over a new airport passenger scanning technology that supposedly reveals the naked body (in false color) many airline passengers keep concealed beneath their clothing. I thought about it while waiting for 20 minutes to slowly run all of my belongings through an x-ray machine and step through a metal detector at the Portland airport (Port of Portland, motto: “Because coffee beans don’t grow in Oregon”).
It’s a privacy worry for many, these new magic x-ray glasses.
Privacy. It’s not about having something to hide, it’s about not having someone look at every single thing you do, naked or otherwise. I wonder though, is the technology really the problem? Sure, the machines make it easier to observe you, but the truth is, there has been plenty of technology for a long time that allows interested parties to learn whatever they want about you. Before Google had access to all your searching habits and the contents of your email, before grocery stores gave you discount cards in exchange for tracking every single purchase you make, before the cops could watch you through your own walls with infra-red cameras, before the mailman could see what mail you got from who, before the social security number became a de-factor national ID number the faceless Federal Bureaucrats could use to track you… sorry, when I started that sentence, I thought I could go back in time to a point when privacy was not a tenuous concept at constant threat from technology, but I can’t.
The point is, if people want to know, they will probably be able to find out, new technology or not. Real privacy, immunity to snooping, has always been difficult, its price is paranoia and the sacrifice of interaction with the public sphere – not a price most are willing to pay. The tools exist. Cameras, scanners, credit cards and the EasyPass are only part of the equation, just as good old fashioned spying was long before the ubiquity of technology. The other major factor has always been Society, and its oft errant offspring the Law.
I posit that at any time in the history of this country, the privacy of any individual was solely defined by the legality and commercial value of spying on them. Not the technology, not the cameras. Tools have always been there, always in an arms race with the counter-tools of privacy-loving paranoiacs, but never inadequate for the job. (Keep in mind the most basic tool has always been with us, plain old human nature.)
Just as security theater does not make us safer, the new scanner will not take more of our privacy – the laws that prescribe its use, our willingness to accept the scanning, and the forces that are sustained by that security theater, those are the things that make everything most personal to us public.
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