Follow the Money on Full-Body Scanners

 

Michael Chertoff was Secretary of Homeland Security in the Bush administration from Feb. 15, 2005 to January 21, 2009, and co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act. After he left government “service,” Chertoff co-founded the Chertoff Group, a risk management and security consulting company, which employs several senior officials from his time as Secretary of Homeland Security.

Chertoff’s father and grandfather were rabbis, the latter an emigrant from Czarist Russia. Although Chertoff’s mother was a flight attendant of Israel’s El Al Airline – the same El Al that eschews scanners for the more effective airport security method of passenger profiling and screening — Michael Chertoff is an advocate of porn scanners at airports. In 2010 he admitted that a client of his security firm, the Chertoff Group, is Rapiscan Systems, one of the two manufacturers of the scanners.

Each full-body scanner costs a whopping $150,000

 

Mark Guarino writes in  the Christian Science Monitor, December 30, 2009:

There is also the cost the scanners pose to the airline industry. Airport security has evolved in stages in the years since 9/11 as each thwarted terrorist attempt is answered with an increased stage of security, from bag checks at the gate to the removal of belts and shoes. The scanners will become the costliest solution yet.

Passengers will likely bear the brunt of the financial toll from airlines faced with recovering money lost from hikes in airport operational costs, says J. Randall Nutter, an aviation expert and visiting professor of business at Southeast University in Nanjing, China. This could add to the fatigue consumers already feel from other added costs. “None of this helps. It’s an industry that has struggled to be profitable,” Mr. Nutter says. “One more of these blows make it that much harder.”

o