Nu Labour: Making You Safe With Child Porn

This cracks me up:

Campaigners have claimed the images taken by the controversial machines could breach legislation making it illegal to create indecent images of children, as well as threatening the privacy of other passengers.

Excellent stuff, albeit pretty bloody obvious. Let's start with the privacy issue:

Simon Davies, of human rights campaign group Privacy International, said he also feared that scans of celebrities or of people with unusual body profiles could prove an "irresistible pull" for some employees, leading to their potential publication on the internet.

There's nothing potential about the publication of such images; if these machines go ahead, this will happen. Just think about it. The first time a funny image or body shape goes through, the captured image will be e-mailed to a friend. It might be a man with a button mushroom penis, or a woman with more folds of fat than an opulent pig. And once that first e-mail is sent, it becomes a done thing. After that, more e-mails will be sent, and the whole thing will become normalised. And then, at some point, the images will be sent from one organisation to another, from one recipient to another, and the captured image will go viral.

So what if someone gets embarrassed? I can hear the shrill, "makemesafeatallcosts" brigade asking that question. After all, these machines are going to save lives. Except there is no guarantee that they actually will save lives. And just imagine if it was you - your body image - that went viral. How would you feel if you were exposed to international ridicule because you happened to want to get onto a plane in this increasingly insane, Orwellian country?

Moving on to the child porn accusation:

Terri Dowty, of civil rights group Action On Rights For Children, told The Guardian the scanners could breach the Protection of Children Act 1978, under which it is illegal to create an indecent image or a "pseudo-image" of a child.

I don't know about the technicalities of the law around this, but it does seem logical that taking thousands of pictures of children effectively in the nude might become a problem at some point. Given the government's record with sensitive information, something will leak, sooner or later. And the outcry if it happens to be nude pictures of children will be absolutely staggering.

But it is the irony here that really startles and amuses me. In their haste to make us safe from a largely ersatz, manufactured threat, the government may be proposing the production of what could be considered child porn on a massive scale. Which is perhaps the perfect summation of the idiotic "War On Terror" and the startling inability of this Labour government to get anything right.