Privacy concerns aside, it is not at all clear full body scanners are worth the effort:

http://j.mp/81syDh

In summary: full body scanners are just a more convenient form of metal detector. More convenient in the sense that they can see the metal that set off the detector was you shoe, so they don't have to stop you. So they don't catch people with plastic explosives taped to their body. They are strictly nail file detectors only.

It is not at all clear that the scanning we do now is worth the effort. I was on an international flight last year that used metal cutlery, yet would have had a nail file removed from me if I were carrying one. The US "do not fly" lists are obviously a complete waste of time. And I am sure the only things those airport sniffer machines catch is recreational drug users.

Besides, it is a bit of a mystery to me why these nut cases who strap small quantities of explosives to themselves don't just take a suite case full of the stuff as travel baggage and set it off during the flight using a wireless signal. You are allowed to carry any number of wireless signal generators (phones, laptops, iPods) and power supplies onto a plane.

Which is not to say every security measure implemented after 9/11 was useless. They have done one thing that would have prevented 9/11. It is dirt cheap, inconveniences almost no one and has 0 running costs. It is the full metal door to the flight deck is now kept closed at all times.

Bronwyn, examinator, rstuart,

Perhaps we have all been too dismissive of the ability of machines ONE DAY to read our thoughts – or at least give some indication of what we are thinking. In yesterday's PLoS One scientist from Carnegie-Mellon University claim to have cracked a part of the brain's "dictionary.

See: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008622

The Carnegie-Mellon website gives a lay person's explanation.

http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2010/January/jan13_braincodesnouns.shtml

Quote:

As the researchers report today in the journal PLoS One, the three codes or factors concern basic human fundamentals: (1) how you physically interact with the object (how you hold it, kick it, twist it, etc.); (2) how it is related to eating (biting, sipping, tasting, swallowing); and (3) how it is related to shelter or enclosure. The three factors, each coded in three to five different locations in the brain, were found by a computer algorithm that searched for commonalities among brain areas in how participants responded to 60 different nouns describing physical objects. For example, the word apartment evoked high activation in the five areas that code shelter-related words.

In the case of hammer, the motor cortex was the brain area activated to code the physical interaction. "To the brain, a key part of the meaning of hammer is how you hold it, and it is the sensory-motor cortex that represents 'hammer holding,'" said Cherkassky, who has a background in both computer science and neuroscience.

The research also showed that the noun meanings were coded similarly in all of the participants' brains. "This result demonstrates that when two people think about the word 'hammer' or 'house,' their brain activation patterns are very similar. But beyond that, our results show that these three discovered brain codes capture key building blocks also shared across people," said Mitchell, head of the Machine Learning Department in the School of Computer Science.

End Quote

Steven,
I was aware of the article and perhaps I mis understood it.
However, it is still too crude to be specific, out side of a MRI and even then I doubt that the science is much more than "the sand in the hand" or "pointing the bone" credibility. If a good lawyer can challenge DNA in court and win then this would provide the same lawyer with a field day.

Notwithstanding, The anti terrorist laws in the US, according to Naomi Kline, the legal niceties might be a moot point. To that end the US has long since been a place I go to willingly. As it stands today my days of going to the states are mercifully over. Now PNG or NZ...... but then again such technology there?
Besides which we're talking Australia so long as security remains in Fed/state Police I'm not that worried.