Finally, a serious post!

This (links to Feministe) really pissed me off. First of all, the idea of using scanners that show what essentially looks like a picture of a person’s naked body on women in a Muslim country? Culturally tone deaf at best, actively intended to provoke at worst. I commend the people who broke this story, and the reporter who allowed herself to be scanned so that people could see exactly what the scans look like. Now the question is, what can we do about it? Because forcing Iraqi women who work in the Green Zone to go through those scanners is classic colonialism at it’s worse, and it needs to stop.
Also, why do they need to save the images? Anyone have a good explanation for that? And, given that the technology exists to replace the individual’s body with a generic torso and only show security personnel non-body items that might represent a breach of security, why is that technology not being used?
To add yet another layer of fucked up, the same scanning process is also apparently being used in airports in the USA. This is an unacceptable breach of privacy in general, but it’s especially problematic for women, and for trans men and trans women who may not want potentially hostile strangers alerted to their trans status. Invasive, open to abuse, a clear overreach of government power…I’m not seeing the upside here.
So the question becomes, what can we do about it? In the case of Iraq and the Green Zone, who do we need to put pressure on to make them switch to a system that replaces the images of people’s actual bodies with generic torso images? In the case of the USA, is it possible to start a campaign to force to TSA to do the same?
I’m not kidding, people, this is a fucking outrage. If they must use these scanners (and I’m not convinced of that either, but putting that aside for a moment), why can’t they use the ones that prevent images of people’s naked bodies being shown to whoever happens to be operating the machine? And why the hell do the images need to be saved once the person has cleared security? This needs to be stopped.