Comment: 'Naked' Scanners on Trial

There's a good post at SpyBlog on the news of Manchester Airport's trial of Rapiscan's 'Naked' Body Scanners. The post makes a number of claims:

• There's no 'safe' amount of ionising radiation.
• The fact that the 'viewer' is hidden in another room, a measure designed to make the process less invasive, raises some new problems. If you can't see them, for one thing there's no way the public can know whether they're being 'examined' by a man or a woman: for some people that is going to be a big deal, and may be particularly problematic for certain cultural or religious minorities.
  
• Defenders say no copies can be made of the 'naked' images (this has been repeated in a series of articles that have then illustrated the story with a digital camera screen grab). The system runs on a computer, so it seems inescapable that anyone with maintenance access has access to the images. Also, if the viewers are going to be in a separate room, how are they going to be prevented from taking pictures with a camera or mobile phone? Further surveillance, perhaps with CCTV cameras? I think setting up a system which is sufficiently thorough to rule out this sort of abuse without itself transmitting a further copy of the scanned passenger's picture is going to be difficult.
• The use of these machines on children may actually be a violation of the 'draconian, inflexible and often bureaucratically misinterpreted Protection of Children Act 1978'. I don't know whether this interpretation of the law is correct (the wikipedia article linked to lists 'prevention, detection or investigation of crime' as a legitimate defence). Regardless, it is striking that the law should be so intensely relaxed about children's naked bodies being on display as soon as the word 'security' is mentioned.