I'm not making lame excuses for the government. At no point did I say that it was ok for them to store the images. My point was that this statement:

  They told us they wouldn't store the images on the
  previous scanners, but it turns out they were.

was disingenuous. Saying that 'they lied about storing the images' has no basis in truth here (at least without presenting other evidence that I'm unaware of).

I don't know about you, but I don't think that there's any reason to make misleading statements in order to present the case that these images shouldn't be stored.