Out of interest, will First Class passengers get scanned? They often get fast tracked.

It may interest you to know that the flight crew get a more thorough security investigation than the passengers at many airports. How ridiculous is that?

Having seen Singapore air hostesses, I would understand:


"Its just a personal body search dearie..."

"Are you security staff?"

"Not actually, No".

Can't say I have noticed.

Maybe they could use the google streetview technology that fuzzes the face to fuzz the naughty bits. The could go one step further and put artificial bikinis and budgies on people. Maybe you could select what you "wear". You could have novelty elephant trunks for example.

On another note. Have they come up with the technology yet to work out whether the approaching plane has its wheels down. I know they used to do this with binoculars not that long ago.

Did you see that customs show on tv last night where a guy tried to bring in thousands of cigarettes to the UK. Turned out he was flying on an airline staff ticket!

Do you think they will scan the Queen when she goes on hols?

This is the thin edge of the wedge. Deancm's comment also reminded me of an essay I did for my Business & Finance Diploma some 18 years ago; there was a lot of noise about a couple of credit card companies at the time and Tescos had also recently introduced their loyalty card. The lecturer wanted us to write about the advantages having cards such as these could have for the banks and shops and also the customer.

I wrote that the data gathered with Tescos loyalty card could be used for individualised marketing based on the shopper's buying history (subsequently proven to be true). I also hypothesised that the (at that time) emerging chipped credit cards could be used as a form of identification as the technology could be read by scanners in doorways of shops and purchase history data could be fed directly to the shop's till. The scanners could also be used for age checks for pubs and even as a method to search for criminals and, for banks, loan defaulters. The scanners would alert local bounty hunters (for want of a better term) who could take the defaulter into custody on behalf of the bank.

I got a B- and a comment about my 'totalitist police state mentality'. But isn't it strange how we are moving inexorably towards this! People can be traced using their vehicles and mobile phones, and this technology is now available for parents to keep a tab on their children (via their phones). Body scanners are, imo, a natural step towards the 'safety of the state'.

Whilst the War on Terror might not have increased the speed of the development of this technology, it has made it a damn sight easier to get it put in place.

Does it matter?

Not if you've already sold your soul to Google.

The sheer fact that we post on this site, for all the world to see, rather negates some of the argument.

I once chastised a girl for making a stupid sex related post on a chat site. She had boasted of paying a Jimboran cowboy for sex in Bali. She said: “no one will ever know who I am”.

I clipped her IP address. That led me to other sites, and her real email address.

By that afternoon I had her work address, mobile, CV, college records from the USA and some of her friends contact details. I had the name of her boyfriend, and I her photos off flicker, Facebook and Friendster. I even had her wedding photos from 2000.

We place our lives on the internet.

I thought that the last line of that post was going to be "and now I'm married to her"...

what an anti-climax!

And now she's buried under the patio

Getting back to the subject, I don't give a damn about being scanned, any more than I do about being frisked or asked whether the "purpose of my visit to the United States is to assassinate the President".

I am all in favour of civil liberties, but the erosion of our rights to move about freely began with Leila Khaled, the PLO and other assorted terrorists, not with elected governments.

Many of the so-called security measures are pretty ineffective and were instigated purely as political face-saving devices (seen-to-be-doing-somethings.) However, full body scanning *does* seem to me to be an order or two more effective than basic metal detectors.

El Al style profiling has to be the way to go while these creeps are around: that, and much more spent (effectively) on intelligence, which is where the real results come from.

What I do - change (offset) just enough/all/some of the detail....from time to time. You certainly never post a number, road, suburb, email. It's not so much people eventually finding you - it's having no direct reference.

Ie. Say you lived in Hampshire when you lived in Sussex. Say you migrated when you were 33 when in fact it was 37. Talk about France when you lived in Belgium. Neither of those are true about me lol.

No lies - just offset stuff. That's what I do.