The prime minister would have us believe that body scanners in airports are the latest catch-all for catching potential terrorists. Perhaps he wasn't looking when Manchester Airport launched the trial of the new Rapsican Secure 1000 Single Pose x-ray on October 13 2009.
Within a few hours of the announcement that the next generation of "convenient, hassle-free travel" was about to hit the security lanes, child protection campaigners were informing Manchester Airport management that any creation of an indecent picture of a child – "indecent" meaning showing the genitalia, and "child" meaning someone under 18 – is a criminal offence.
Director of Action on Rights for Children Terri Dowty noted that the Protection of Children Act 1978, as amended by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, makes it an offence "to take, permit to be taken, or to make any indecent ... pseudo-photograph of a child". That includes "an image, whether made by computer graphics or otherwise, which appears to be a photograph."
Consternation ensued. The airport's PR department backpedalled furiously, with their spokesperson Sarah Barrett saying live on BBC Radio: "Imaging technology does not allow security staff to see passengers naked ... these images cannot be linked back to an individual. Children will be asked to take part in the trial, but only with their parents' consent."
But in law, a parent cannot give consent to the making of an indecent image of their own or any other child. Union officials representing 6,000 of the 20,000 workers at Manchester said no one had even told them that the scanner was being trialled, let alone that using it could leave working people, as well as as the airport itself, potentially facing serious charges and criminal prosecution.
The managing director of Manchester Airport, Andrew Cornish, promised to respond fully to the points raised. Today, Unite's national officer for civil aviation, Steve Turner, told me that as far as they knew, the Manchester trials were still suspended pending advice on the legality of the scanner machines.
However, a spokesperson for Manchester Airport confirmed that the trials have in fact been resumed, with some 500 passengers already scanned. "Under-18s can't go through at the moment – there's a grey area in the legal system," the spokesperson said. "But we're hoping for more direction from the Department for Transport soon."
Rapiscan is a subsidiary of a much bigger, California-based company, OSI Systems, with branches in Finland, India, Malaysia, Singapore and the UK. British MEP Philip Bradbourn is among those arguing at the European Union level that use of devices such as Rapiscan's would be "disproportionate" to the security threat faced. The MEP also believed, his spokesman later told me, that these whole-body scanners offered "very little increased benefit for security". Other members of the European Parliament agreed: in the face of an EU Commission proposal to establish a regulatory framework for the use of full-body scanners at EU airports, the parliament passed a resolution criticising the devices in the autumn of 2008. This, and strong opposition from some member states, forced the Commission to back away from such plans, though a spokesman has made clear in recent days that the Commission continues to see such scanners as a "useful additional tool" in impeding terrorists. [See footnote.]
In a world of increasing electronic surveillance – where computer images can be stored, hacked, replicated and passed around the world instantly, and where airport scans link to other ID details about passengers, from passports equipped with RFID chips with the capability to contain enormous amounts of electronically readable personal information – the privacy and data-sharing implications of body scanners are huge for all passengers, let alone children. Can there ever be any guarantee that images of children would indeed be safe, and instantly destroyed?
ARCH's legal adviser, barrister Ian Dowty, has no doubt: it doesn't matter whether the image is kept or not – it's the making of the image itself that is the offence.