Is TSA Holding Back Its Report on Scanner Radiation Safety?

February 18, 2011 at 9:04 AM | by Omri | Comments (0)

As with all bureaucracies that sometimes fib to save their own skins, it's always difficult to tell if TSA shadiness is intentional or just comes from incompetence. Sometimes the agency wants to do something that's kind of sketchy, and so they unblinkingly mislead the public about what's going on. Other times they're just bad at their jobs, like when the White House got "frustrated" with complaints over useless security theater during the same week that Mythbusters badly exposed TSA's useless security theater. Sometimes it's both, like when the agency published confidential information in the dumbest way possible and then turned around and tried to convince Americans that it was no big deal.

So which one—deception or incompetence—is going on with TSA's perennially-delayed report on whether their full-body scanners are giving us all cancer? The report that's now two months overdue and really starting to piss off Congress, and this at a time when there are already Congressional efforts afoot to regulate and ban the machines? Tough to say.

The agency insists that their officials are still vetting the document to make sure it's been cleansed of classified information, which is another way of saying that they couldn't get it done on time. Critics are worried that something else is going on, and that we're in for another bait-and-switch like when we were assured that the scanners couldn't store photographs, until it turned out that the scanners could totally store photographs.

The problem is that it's so hard to choose. To guess one way or another you'd have to settle on whether TSA is more bumbling than it is dishonest, or more dishonest than it is bumbling. In these cases we prefer to err on the side of caution, assume they're telling the truth, and let them take the extra week to fully cleanse the documents of sensitive information. It'd be nice if they could do things correctly and efficiently, like ordinary people are expected to do when they go to work. But let's not get crazy.

[Photo: TSA]

Related Stories:
· 'Inexcusable' delay on TSA body-scanner safety reports [USA Today]
· Airport Security [Jaunted]
· Politics Travel [Jaunted]

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