I have never understood the US publics horror at body scanners. So they show your junk. Who gives a shit?
I give a shit, thank you very much. For me, it's not about "showing my junk", it's about a needless intrusion into my privacy that wouldn't have detected ANY of the previous attacks.
If they shorten lines at the airport
Haven't seen anything showing that they do this, and my understanding is, that isn't the point of their use.
and avoid some of the pointless 'pat downs' then I'm all for efficiency. The scanned images are not all that personally identifiable in a real sense, and as far as I know they haven't been proven to be less effective than existing pat downs, those fake 'sniffers', etc.
Then I'm for NOT spending hundreds of millions of dollars if these machines are no less effective than pat-downs (as you claim, though the obligatory *citation needed* probably applies).
The scanned images are not all that personally identifiable in a real sense
See above, that's not the point.
I don't think anyone ever believed these are the end-all-be-all of airport security and I don't recall anyone saying they would prevent someone from tossing contraband over an airport fence. A basic premise of life..never put all of your eggs in one basket, applies here. Security checks at airports are a necessary evil, and they won't be going away. Complaining that these won't stop someone from tossing something over a fence doesn't address what they do detect, or that they do have valid uses for common contraband at security checkpoints.
Correct, but the if they don't detect what they were designed to detect, then they aren't valid for their intended purpose either. Unless you understand that their intended purpose was to create the illusion of additional safety ("security theater"). Even on that point, they aren't quite working as intended.
