TSA Opts-Out of Nakie Scanning, At Least for the Holiday Weekend

The TSA has been trumpeting the fact that National Opt-Out Day didn't seem to have an effect on the security lines at the airport. They'd love for you to believe it's because nobody participated, but there didn't seem to be any reason to participate since the nakie scanners were turned off in even our most high profile airports. Pejman Yousefzadeh adds this:

Apparently, the backscatter machines were turned off in lots of locales. Why? Because of National Opt-Out Day; turning off the backscatter machines meant that there was no need to opt out, which meant that people didn’t opt out or report legions of opt-out incidents, which meant that the TSA was spared a public relations embarrassment. As Gizmodo notes, turning off the backscatter machines on one of the busiest travel days of the year was crazy, given the many security concerns that the TSA has cited . . . unless, of course, the backscatter machines, and the patdowns that one gets if one opts out were never all that important to begin with. It’s a no-lose (if cynical) ploy by the TSA, since “if there was some sort of attack today because the backscatters were turned off, then it’s ‘See? We TOLD you so.’”

If these machines were so terribly vital to airline security, as the TSA has been telling us, there's no way they could have justified shutting them off as millions of people were traveling. It's clear now that these machines are just an expensive part of the security kabuki we go through at the airport to pretend that we're stopping terrorism. It also assumes that the terrorists are one-trick ponies who will always go after airlines, but as we saw in Oregon last night, all it takes is one lone jihadist with a dream to turn even a simple Christmas tree lighting into a potential nightmare.