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I’m giving up on airline travel. The humiliating process of going through airport security — exposing your ugly toenails, walking barefoot on filthy floors, stripping belts and jackets, collecting all those nasty fluids into transparent plastic bags — is getting even worse.

For those who missed it, the Transportation Security Administration announced last week that those little portals that travelers step through at security gates are going to produce intimate body scans outlining the nude contours of passengers’ bodies.

Using what’s called millimeter wave technology, 3-D images of the body, as if it were nude, is projected to a separate security screening area where a TSA employee views the monitor to see if you have a knife, explosives, metallic weapons or other objects attached to your back or elsewhere on — or in — your body. It’s tantamount to a virtual strip search; they can see body cavities and all.

According to the TSA, the scans will be voluntary. Travelers would be given a choice of a pat-down or a body scan. The L3 Pro Image machines, as they’re called, have been tested for the past few months at 10 airports across the country where they have been used as an alternative to the pat- down search and as a secondary screening procedure.

Well, these friendly machines are now being deployed in 21 airports across the country, including one in Chicago. According to the TSA, “the millimeter wave unit will also be positioned in secondary screening as a voluntary alternative to a pat-down.”

Supposedly, the traveler’s face is blurred to remove identifying features. TSA says the personnel at the security checkpoint with the travelers will not see the images, and they say the images are not stored and cannot be printed by the employee viewing the image in a separate location. If the traveler is clean, a green light will signal to the security checkpoint to let the traveler pass.

There are many problems with this. First, this is a massive invasion of privacy that is not warranted even by national security standards. What my body looks like under my clothes is nobody’s business.

Secondly, this invasion of privacy will affect the handicapped and elderly the most. As someone who wore a foot cast for nine months, I can attest to being a “security risk.” Every time I went through an airport, I was labeled as needing a special security search. Every time, I had to remove the plastic knee-high boot from my leg to prove there was nothing under there. Just imagine what all those people in wheelchairs, with canes, with staples in hips and feet, knees and other body parts will have to go through.

Third, I don’t believe them — not for a millisecond — when they say the images are not stored. Those images, should they find the one in 1 million persons carrying something contraband, would be evidence in a court of law. So, of course, if there’s something out of the ordinary, that image is going to be stored.

I’d like to see what the Supreme Court has to say about this. The American Civil Liberties Union is already on it. Past court decisions always look to see if there are less extreme measures that can be used for the government’s purpose, and I, for one, think this is too extreme. The current system is working fine. And doesn’t each state have to pass a law to allow something like this? Or have our legislators already signed over our bodies in the name of national security? I, for one, have not. I would rather have a pat-down than this.

Contact Jo Anne Killeen at joanne.killeen@lee.net or (608) 786-6816.