A former Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Agent confesses… that what you experience in airports is nothing but security theater. The TSA agent reveals how the body scanners don’t work:
Our instructor [on the Rapiscan Systems full body scanner] was a balding middle-aged man who shrugged his shoulders after everything he said, as though in apology. At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines.
“They’re shit,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket.
We quickly found out the trainer was not kidding: Officers discovered that the machines were good at detecting just about everything besides cleverly hidden explosives and guns. The only thing more absurd than how poorly the full-body scanners performed was the incredible amount of time the machines wasted for everyone.
Remember, radiation-generating scanners and aggressive body groping are only a small price to pay for the illusion of security.