Update: Privacy, What Privacy?

Open Thread:

• When is enough, enough? A new full-body x-ray machine to be tested this month at a US airport has raised concerns about privacy issues with some rights advocates saying the technology amounts to a virtual strip search, reports AFP.
  
  The "Backscatter" machine to be used at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona will enable screeners to detect non-metallic devices and objects as well as weapons on a person's body, authorities say.
  
  But critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, say the machine can display graphic images of nude bodies and its use will pave the way to widespread abuse of the images taken, with some possibly being posted or traded on the Internet.
  
  The danger in this kind of screening is in how easy the process could move from testing to standard procedure. Similarly, it may easy for authorities to dismiss individual resistance to this kind of privacy invasion by offering an alternative: simply travel in something other than an airliner. Is that reasonable?

• Folks who whined about the NSA eavesdropping on foreign calls should really have a fit over new federal rules that go into effect Friday that require U.S. companies to keep track of all the e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees.
  
  AP reports the rules, approved by the Supreme Court in April, require companies and other entities involved in federal litigation to produce "electronically stored information" as part of the discovery process, when evidence is shared by both sides before a trial.
  
  The change makes it more important for companies to know what electronic information they have and where. Under the new rules, an information technology employee who routinely copies over a backup computer tape could be committing the equivalent of "virtual shredding," said Alvin F. Lindsay, a partner at Hogan & Hartson LLP and expert on technology and litigation.

• Also sure to cause a spell of teeth gnashing is the news from AP that without notifying the public, federal agents for the past four years have assigned millions of international travelers, including Americans, computer-generated scores rating the risk they pose of being terrorists or criminals.
  The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years.
  
  The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.

• Sky Harbor International Airport here will test a new federal screening system that takes X-rays of passenger's bodies to detect concealed explosives and other weapons, according to AP.
  
  The Transportation Security Administration said it has found a way to refine the machine's images so that the normally graphic pictures can be blurred in certain areas while still being effective in detecting bombs and other threats.

Tags: Decline and Fall of Western Civ, Open Thread, Wire, Headlines, United States, Privacy
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