Jaunted

Remember when travelers complained about the potential cancer risks of full-body scanners? And remember when TSA officials basically said "you'd have to be a hysterical idiot to be scared of these things, since there's an expert medical consensus that they're totally safe." Not so much.

A joint investigation by the public interest group ProPublica and PBS Newshour has uncovered evidence that TSA actually brushed aside the experts who worried that full-body scanners could cause cancer. Instead they relied—if that's the right word—on a small amount of unpublished research and on spoon-fed industry information. Even the talk about "independent inspections" turns out to have been wildly misleading, since the inspections were actually being conducted by the machine manufacturers. Kind of breathtaking, isn't it?

FDA experts—so this is the FDA now, not the TSA—concluded as far back as 1998 that full-body scanners could cause cancer. Jill Lipoti, then director of New Jersey's radiation protection program, worried that "this is really a slippery slope." Her concern was echoed by Stanley Savic, then vice president for safety at a large electronics company, who said that the machines would pose "an entirely different level of public health risk" if they were forced on the "traveling public." Not to worry, the machine's creator assured the health experts at the time: the government would never think of widely deploying these in public areas. Oops!

Since the TSA is not the FDA, they got to ignore the concerned experts and go with ones who told them what they wanted to hear.

The final punchline is that government officials, throughout everything, were heavily influenced—up to and including with campaign donations—by well-funded scanner lobbies. But as Jaunted readers, you already knew that.

[Photo: niiicedave / Flickr]