The 60ies are back, and so is getting naked at protests The Pirate Party in Berlin has just protested the intrusiveness of planned scanning technology at the Tegel Airport, with the motto “No need to scan we are already naked”. Here is the video:

There is a very serious need to put the terrorist threat back into perspective and laugh a little. As argued very cogently in the recent Register article “Trouser-bomb clown attacks – how much should we laugh?” there is no need to respond any further with security increase to such attacks. All that has been done is done. There is nothing more one can do. Life is fundamentally insecure. According to John Baker, you are “8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist“. When one responds to a crisis one has to keep the relative dangers in perspective, and deal with the most important ones first. And it is not completely unthinkable that the threat of government intrusion into our private lives is just simply a much bigger danger than terrorism right now.

This recent article in Wired “Airport Scanners Can Store, Transmit Images” details the power of these new scanners that the German government plans to introduce as an attempted response to the underpants bomber. If you accept that, then why not just go all the way and make nudist (FKK in German) planes available, as the Pirate Party demonstrators cheekily suggest.

Beyond airport security, which has so clearly now gotten completely out of hand, the demonstration is aimed to wake citizens out of the slumber which has allowed us all to give one part of society – the “security” services – completely disproportionate power over the rest of society.
As Mr Security shows so well, there is no reason we should not set limits to their action, by allowing us, citizens to monitor them too, by re-establishing our rights in public spaces, and by not just accepting any irrational request for security increase, and intrusions into the private sphere.

And speaking of intrusions into the private space, we should also be careful to trust our privacy to large firms: see the recent ReadWrite web article “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over“. Privacy like freedom, is something one has to fight for to keep.

Other links:

• Prof Daniel J. Solove’s of the George Washington University Law School wrote in 2007 the very clear essay “‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy“.
• Article in The Local, german news in english: “Pirate Party protests ‘naked’ scanners in their underpants“
• The Wall Street Journal “From Granny to Nearly Nude Germans, Everyone’s Raising Cane at the Airport” has a picture of the demo, but gets completely side tracked on a minor issue of people who go on board of airlines with swords in their canes that they did not know about.
• The New York Times “Mixed Signals on Airport Scanners” with more information on the scanners and their deployment in the US.

 
Google a déposé un brevet qui va certainement faire parler de lui, en bien comme en mal…