While travelers focus on cheap airplane tickets, cheap vacation packages, and cheap travel, governments around the world are considering how many full body scanners to add at airports.
Unless full body scanners are added to every airport security gate both in the US and abroad, we can expect that potential terrorists will find the weakest link in airport security.
Currently there are 40 scanners in place in U.S. airports, with 150 more purchased, but not yet installed, and another 300 on order. Given there are over 2,000 security lanes at US airports alone, and many thousands more worldwide, it will cost billions to add scanners to airports across the world.
It looks like privacy concerns regarding these machines can largely be addressed by using new software that can identify hidden items while not showing as much detail of the human body.
Questions have been raised whether children should be required to go through full body scanning machines. Currently in Amsterdam anyone under the age of 18 does not get scanned.
Some are concerned that terrorists may tape explosives to children and then put them on a plane.
There remains questions about the effectiveness of these scanners. Security experts believe that explosive material placed inside a body cavity could escape detection.
Although there are no guarantees, many believe that our best protection will ultimately come from intelligence work, not machines. Of course, given how poorly our intelligence services performed in taking the Umar Farouk Abdulmuttallab threat seriously, clearly a lot of progress needs to be made in how we react to the flow of intelligence information.