BRITISH citizens face the prospect of being routinely frisked for hidden weapons, explosives or drugs. And they will not even know it is happening.
The UK government is backing the use of remote body scanning, which uses terahertz radio waves to see through clothes, revealing what is hidden beneath. Michael Pepper, a terahertz expert at the University of Cambridge, says the technology is 鈥渘ow established and could be implemented in two years if there is a will鈥�.
Which there appears to be. On 27 April, a committee of the Department of Trade and Industry recommended the UK embrace the technology, with the government helping to fund its development, in a bid to capture a piece of the expected 拢400 million market in terahertz imaging.
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Privacy advocates will not be happy. Not only can remote body scans reveal hidden illegal objects, they also show a profile of everything else on your person, including your most private anatomical features. 鈥淏ody-scanning is debasing 鈥� nothing more than an electronic strip search,鈥� says Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has campaigned against the use of the technology in the US. And 鈥渟ecurity personnel do not check their sexual impulses at the door when they arrive for work鈥�.