This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 22nd, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

TSA's body scanners cost us liberty. They demand blind adherence to government in the name of security. The Legal Policy analyst at the Cato Institute offers his thoughts.

The first thing we have to keep in mind with body scanners is that it is not clear that they're going to do everything that the government is saying that they're

going to do.

In the wake of the Christmas Day 2009 attempted bombing perpetrated by Farruk Abdulm, the GAO conducted a review of the technology and in March 2010

released a report saying it's not clear that it would have found his bombs.

They the body scanners are very good when it comes to high density items, but not very good when it comes to low density items.

So if you want to take a wild stab at what his bomb was made of, low density items, and any kind of

liquid powder or gel inside a thin plastic container will not stand out like the images of guns on the stock photos that we've seen of this

technology. There is a marginal gain if you're talking about non-metallic

high-density objects.

So if it's a synthetic carbon knife, then that would be a significant gain, but the hijacking

threat is really not what these are directed at.

They're not advertised so much as a hijacking prevention

technology, but as a liquid explosive detection technology.

And it's not clear that those would be detected?

No, it is not clear, and in the GAO report, they said it's not clear that it's not clear and in the GAO report they said it's not clear that

this would have found even if Abdulab had gone through the security

checkpoint that this would have succeeded in finding that we also have to and stipulated that they found all of the low density

materials involved in explosives, the same organization that supported Abdulmitalb's attempted bombing

on the Christmas Day run, they've already found another technology that gets around this, another technique, and that is to hide

explosives inside a body cavity. And they've actually used this, a would-be al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the organization that sponsored Abdomutatollah. would be a

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