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Comment by 1oooqooq | Hacker News Reader

a bunch of unhelpful commenters will add that they anecdotally did not experience inconvenience.

this was the same play book with milliliter wave scanners, which are now proven to not be completely safe but who cares. at first you could opt out. then opt out was the same as mandatory patdown. then opt out meant an extra 30min wait by the xray scanner... etc. now its fully not an option.

meanwhile i bet the 911 hijackers would have zero problems getting pre check or whatever other private scamer is selling the no-scan boarding these days.

lastly, yeah, this is totally so they do not need a warrant to unlock your phone if you have face unlock. in the most plain and obvious Kafkaesque "he did provide the facescan willingly your honor. not once he opted out, which was always an option".

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> now its fully not an option

That's verifiably untrue, unless they've changed this in the last week or two, and you'll need to provide some documentation if that's the case. I've always opted out, and I've never had anyone try to tell me that I couldn't.

You can absolutely still opt out of body scans. Talk about being unhelpful.

with the barefoot wait that now is over 30min on lax or other major places. that is the same as losing your flight on the majority of cases.

and sorry if you cannot understand why countering reports of the exception with the rule is not helpful. thats how you get things like whitelivesmatter.

Nonetheless, the option exists. Get there early and you have the option.

(thumbs up emoji)

I did not wait anywhere near 30 minutes at LAX when I opted out there a couple weeks ago!

If you can cite some evidence that your impression is the rule, that might be helpful. My own experience, having opted out and gotten the pat-down every time I've flown since the new scanners were introduced, is that the process has not really changed at all over the years, and opting out has never come close to causing a missed flight.

I still opt out but its gotten very nasty. Last time, I got my testicle grabbed by the agent. So much for the upside down cup.

Look no further for evidence of the hilarious security theater of the TSA than paying them a yearly fee and checking a box on a piece of paper a random employee in the back of the sad empty local Staples store that says "I'm not a terrorist I swear". And suddenly you dont have to take off your shoes or be body scanned and literally none of it matters...

That and the fact that they fail their internal testing regularly.

The TSA is as effective at keeping weapons out of secure airport areas as the tech industry is effective at keeping the CEO from clicking a phishing link.

I fly at least twice a year, and often more than that. My flights are many times along the east coast of the US but also occasionally elsewhere in the country.

I have never gone through a body scanning machine. Not once.

Opting out still works just fine.

> in the most plain and obvious Kafkaesque "he did provide the facescan willingly your honor. not once he opted out, which was always an option".

Wouldn't that be Orwellian? Which Kafka story did I miss?

> in the most plain and obvious Kafkaesque "he did provide the facescan willingly your honor. not once he opted out, which was always an option".

Wouldn't that be Orwellian? Which Kafka story did I miss?

> which are now proven to not be completely safe but who cares

I'm not trying to prove you wrong, but if you have any links, that'd be cool to include.

As an aside, TSA Pre lines just have normal metal detectors. It's worth paying for it just for that IMO.

(It also frankly showcases that this is all dumbass security theater, but whatever)

They require fingerprints for TSA Pre. The same people who don't want to be xrayed won't want the FBI keeping their fingerprints on file.

There's a massive difference between fingerprints and a model of your face.

They're not going to trace my fingerprints to what activity I was up to before flying an airport.

You know normal American stuff.. buying porn, accepting political literature, spending too much time in a public bathroom, and then going to the gun store.

There is a veil of secrecy to the devices (identified here: https://meridian.allenpress.com/radiation-research/article-a...) which makes them difficult to study, however millimeter waves themselves are studied: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10590163

While looking around I also found this handbook: https://books.google.se/books?hl=en&lr=&id=OVRFDwAAQBAJ&oi=f... which is quite informative.

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