“TOUCH” DOWN – AIRPORT SCANNER EVP BARES IT ALL

This week's perspective from Kathy Barnett: You don’t need to be a frequent flier to hear about the full frontal assault (pun intended) being waged against full body scans and pat-downs taking place in airports across North America. As evidenced by “Don’t touch my junk!” campaigns and organized protests during the busy U.S. holiday this week, new security procedures are not exactly being welcomed by travellers. Colourful anecdotes and tearful retellings of uncomfortable encounters are getting plenty of ink and airplay, largely because the pat-downs are an inexact science and, as a result, leave plenty of room for scrutiny and criticism. Enter Peter Kant, EVP at Rapiscan, the company that makes the full-body scanner that made headlines for its revealing technology. In an interview with Slate magazine, Kent offered fact after fact to underscore the precision of his company’s technology. More importantly, he pointed to it as the preferred alternative to the more invasive pat-downs, offering polling that shows 99 per cent of passengers would rather go through the Rapiscan machine than be patted down, and that more than 80 per cent of Americans approve of the use of the scanners in airports. In doing so, Kent effectively turned the spotlight away from scanners as the enemy and changed the channel, as we like to say, to one of support for technology over the human touch.