Their mention of air travel also makes me think of how the government brought in TSA checkpoints, but a company called Clear allows people to mostly bypass it for a fee. It would be nice if we didn't have these restrictions plus people finding ways to profit off of getting around them. Just get rid of both.
Clear doesn't get you past the checkpoints, it just gets you to the front of the line. Gross on a "class warfare" level, but you go through the same security everyone else does.
Now, TSA PreCheck allows you to bypass some of the stuff, like shoe removal and taking laptops out of your bag, but it's coupled with a background check.
The government brought in the TSA to take over checkpoints and relieve the air transport industry for liability for failures of and abuses at the checkpoints as part of the post-9/11 air transport industry bailout; the checkpoints had existed for a long time.
Yep, pre-911 you still had to go through a metal detector and get your stuff x-rayed. Taking off your shoes and no fluids are the only new restrictions really.
The TSA was a huge improvement over the understaffed and indifferent private contractors that used to run airport checkpoints when it first started. Things didn't get bad again until the shoe bomber.
Not that I like the millimeter wave scanners, but like the metal detectors I think they use low-energy non-ionizing radiation, so its not really a change in the kind or significance of radiation exposure.
Conventional metal detectors use electromagnets and don't emit any ionizing radiation. Backscatter scanners used in airport security screening do emit ionizing radiation but a very small amount.
