ccording to the news today (the theme one comes across by listening to any radio station in the UK), continental Europe comes to the rescue again. Here in Manchester, getting a cancer-causing scan is mandatory for boarding any plane in Manchester Airport. This is very profitable for some companies and their cronies who devised these ludicrous measured due to one guy with explosives in his underwear (an old incident whose casualties count is 0). As I have been stressing for almost a year, those machines that scan people as though they were suitcases are assured to kill (in the long run) more people than they would save by preventing explosives from going on planes through one’s breast area, crotch, etc. The whole thing is a sham and a cancer-generating pipeline that makes some industrialists rich. So anyway, the news here is that removal of all such machines has just been demanded by the authorities in the EU (probably Belgium and the surrounding aristocracy). This is good. No more will I need to confront airport staff over their stubbornness; why should they impose X-ray scans as a sort of blackmail prior to travel? What have we as a civilisation sunk to? And that’s not even delving into other issues such as the acquisition (with alleged retention) of naked pictures of every citizen who travels on a plane (via an increasing number of airports). Civil liberties — not just our health — are being jeopardised without taking simple risk calculations into account. Several months ago I did some maths related to this and came to the conclusion that unless those scanners can prevent 200 large planes from going down by detecting a passenger with explosives that cannot be detected in other means, the deaths due to the cancer will be greater. In order words, by placing those machines in the airport (lethal X-ray rebranded) they sign the death knell/sentence of many people and hardly save any lives. On numerous occasions I had discussions about this with staff who works around those machines and never could they provide a compelling explanation for why they participate in it (big brother cooperation). Perhaps the “I’ve got a mortgage to pay” is the best they can do. One persuasive method is to clarify to these people that their health too is at great risk and information about it withheld. Hopefully those machines will all get canned just lime the ID cards. Liberty and security don’t sit well together.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2011 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Opinion, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.