Jaunted

What's at stake specifically are OSI Systems Inc's Rapiscan full-body scanners, dubbed nude-o-scopes on account of how they produce pictures that look like people are nude. There are 174 of them left scattered throughout the United States. They will be removed and replaced with the machines made by L-3 Communications Holdings, better known to Jaunted readers and others as gingerbread man scanners. (What's at stake even more specifically is the software that interprets whatever's coming out of the scanner in a non-invasive way—L-3 developed a successful product and OSI apparently didn't—but we're already too far into the weeds on this).

Believe it or not, OSI's stock actually increased after the announcement. The company had been trying to convince TSA that their software had privacy protections for a long time, and had said things that sounded to some members of Congress as if they might be fibs. Now everyone gets to go their separate ways. And thus does a clusterfark that never should have happened—we've emphasized again and again that technology unacceptable to the public isn't "ready" for deployment to the public—come to its inevitable conclusion.

[Photo: rapiscansystems / YouTube]