This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 19th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's been years since the Department of Homeland Security was ordered to tell Americans how they would implement naked scanning

devices at airports throughout the United States.

The agency has effectively ignored requests for most basic information about the activity.

The naked body scanners have been implemented without the most basic precautions.

Ginger McCall, with the Electronic Privacy Information Center says concerns remain about the cost

effectiveness, radiation and invasiveness of these machines.

The federal government has done little to LA the public's ongoing complaints.

She spoke at a Cato Institute's Capitol Hill briefing today.

In 2009, the DHS announced that it was going to start a pilot program with WBI technology used as a primary screening method.

There had been some discussion before that of body scanner technology being used as a secondary screening method.

That is, if you're going through the airport and you go through the initial screening

method, which would in this case be the metal detector,

and then something happens.

The metal detector goes off, you would be directed to a secondary screening method.

So not everyone would start off by going through the body scanner.

That was how it was originally envisioned.

When DHS put this technology out there and started discussing it,

it was envisioned as a secondary screening technology.

But in 2009, they announced that they were going to start a pilot program

which would make this technology the primary screening technology in airports.

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