On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced the acceleration of the body scanner program with full body scanners to start operating at 11 United States airports including LAX and Boston Logan.
This could be creating civil liberties issues and there are signs it's already happening.
In England, two Muslim women have been barred from flying to Pakistan after refusing body scans at Manchester airport. One refused on religious grounds, her companion cited medical reasons. The problem is that while the X-ray machines allow security officials to check for concealed weapons, they also show clear outlines of passengers' genitals.
Then Pakistan lawmakers cut short a visit to the US after refusing to undergo body scanning at a US airport.
The body scanning announcements have been condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU says that before any government introduces invasive search techniques, you need to have laws and regulations in place to protect people's privacy. And in any case, it says, there are no guarantees these techniques would protect the public and not just a knee jerk response.
Laura Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office says: "Before these body scanners become the status quo at America's airports, we need to ensure new security technologies are genuinely effective, rather than merely creating a false sense of security. It is far from clear whether this technology would have been able to foil the attempted Christmas Day attack and every resource we put into using these machines is a resource not spent on intelligence analysis or other law enforcement activity."
The ethics of body scanning is a sleeper and it's likely to become a big issue in the months ahead
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