"So the Westminster parliament and European Union lawmakers (including MEPs) must not only guarantee to the travelling public that their images will be deleted. They must also ensure that body scanners will not be physically capable of storage and transmission. This seems the only way to guarantee that the state will not try to further invade our privacy in future, and that images of celebrities, children or others will not find their way onto the internet and TV. Our fundamental human right to a private life demands no less."No Ms Ludford. The only way to ensure these machines are not used to invade our privacy is to ban them.
This woman is the Liberal Democrat European justice & human rights spokeswoman. To echo Elizabeth Wilmhurst at yesterday's Chilcot hearing it is extraordinary that the political chattering classes can view the world through such distorted lenses as to assume the deployment of strip search machines for the masses is a reasonable response to a failed bomb plot. Remember that these machines do strip search but don't detect incendiary materials.
I wonder what Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman and others who fought two world wars in the name of freedom would have made of the inheritors of their legacy? Ben Franklin might be tempted to draw on one of his own quotes:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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