Last week, fellow Madisonian blogger Gregory Humphrey asked "Is Government 'Elitist'?". The answer must surely be yes. Just ask Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
She was at JFK Airport the day after Humphrey posed his question touting those new x-ray scanners that take photos of your naked body. Of course, she declined to lead the nation in being scanned.
Yet when it came to testing the devices - which produce chalky, naked X-ray images of passengers - she turned the floor over to some brave volunteers.
You see, actually being scanned by one is not something for elite Cabinet officials, it's for us plebs alone. Here's some great quotes from her:
"Those who read the images are not actually physically at the gate, so they cannot associate an image with an individual person at all," she said.
"And the machines are set so that no image is retained."
Right. Sure they don't retain any images. It's not like they've been retained before. Right?
For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they're viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that "scanned images cannot be stored or recorded."
Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.
And it's not just in America. In the UK, the scanned images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were not only retained, but also printed and distributed. This of course came shortly after UK Transport Secretary Lord Adonis said that all such images were deleted immediately.
As the Wikileaks documents have reminded us, all you need to know about government is two words: "governments lie".
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