Ethics

The invasive nature of modern airport screening procedures, particularly the full body scans which effectively render airline passengers naked in front of strangers, compels those concerned with notions of personal dignity and privacy to question whether the traditional divide between public duty and privacy has finally been eliminated.  These types of full body scans have been justified on the grounds that airline security is especially vulnerable in the face of real terrorist threats and that this invasive type of airport screening procedure is necessary to ensure airline safety and public confidence in air travel .

Others, including Congressional auditors, have resisted the full body scan policy on the grounds that the photographic data may be misused in ways that are not specifically related to airline security, that personal privacy is being unduly invaded without any type of preexisting cause, and that there are other airline screening measures less invasive than full body scans that can effectively secure the same level of airline security.  What emerges from an examination of the substantive arguments underlying the debate over the ethical propriety of full body scans as an integral feature of airport screening procedures is a very real philosophical divide between those who balance the competing factors in favor of a public duty to submit to the body scans and those who balance the competing factors in favor of a dominant privacy interest.  Despite the need to ensure airline security, the fact remains that full body scans are not necessary to ensure airline security and that ethical concerns such as the right to privacy and the potential abuse of the photographic scans counsels that full body scans should be eliminated from airline screening measures.

As an initial matter, it is necessary to place this debate in its proper and larger context.  The fear of terrorism, to be sure, is the motivating force behind the articulation and implementation of various airline screening measures.  Absent this fear of terror using airlines, this particular issue would not be such a major debate.  The fear of terror, in turn, has lead to a larger debate which focuses on the meaning of personal privacy and whether and to what extant privacy considerations should be minimized or sacrificed in the name of public safety.  The consequent trend has been a rather sharp movement toward the public safety model at the expense of ethical and legal models related to privacy.
One privacy expert from Princeton University, noting this modern tendency to use the fear of terror to infringe on traditional privacy rights, argues that the new czars of public safety have erased the boundary separating their private and public lives and whove decided, apparently, that theres nothing so private it cant be, shouldnt be, shared in public.  Such an observation is not an overstatement.  Privacy, to be sure, can sometimes seem an abstract concept and yet it has always been an ethical maxim that free people are guaranteed to be secure in their thoughts, their person, and their property.  The full body scans directly implicate the ethical right of people to be secure in their person, their bodies, and the process of having complete strangers viewing a naked body is perhaps the most egregious type of invasion short of an assault and battery or a rape.  The argument by the supporters of full body scans to the effect that airline travel is a privilege, and that the government therefore has a right to regulate airline safety by violating privacy, is disingenuous on several grounds.  First, there is an ethical right to travel in the United States which is memorialized in the United States Constitution and consistently upheld by the United States Supreme Court.  Because America is such a large country, airline travel is a necessity and an ethical right rather than a privilege.  Denying people the right to travel because of a privilege-type argument, as is the case with many driving license type restrictions, thus violates the ethical right to travel.  Second, from a more practical point of view, the fact is that the same airline security objectives can be accomplished through less invasive means.  Any ethical debate typically involves balancing a number of factors and the ethics of the full body scans are certainly no exceptions.  Nonetheless, given the ethical concerns involving privacy on the security of ones body coupled with the right to travel freely, the full body scans must be analyzed with reference to whether this extraordinarily invasive procedure is the least invasive type of screening procedure necessary to accomplish the public safety goals.  The evidence suggests that it is not particularly effective and that less invasive measures can accomplish the same level of public safety.  Specifically, The Justice Departments Office of Inspector General said the program shortfalls, found in a lengthy audit, have hurt the TSCs ability to plan its role in the governments new Secure Flight program.  The proffered justification for these invasions of privacy is therefore illusory because they are not contributing in any measurable way to public safety.

In the final analysis, the full body scans are a manifestation of how fear is being used to minimize or otherwise eliminate the traditional ethical foundations of individual dignity and privacy.  People have a right to travel, they have a right to be secure in their physical bodies, and they have a right to be treated as innocent citizens rather than potential terrorists.  The full body scans infringe on and violate all of these ethical notions and privacy rights without yielding any measurable public safety benefit.  An objective ethical analysis of the debate strongly suggests that full body scans be eliminated except in cases where probable cause or reasonable suspicions of a threat are first established.  What is next  Full body scans of minor students in schools or patrons of banks  These are not idle concerns, they form the ethical bases of our most intimate rights as human beings, and the full body scan precedent needs to be overturned.