Dis­turb­ing news from the New York Times—the TSA says it plans to replace metal detec­tors at most US air­ports with backscat­ter x-ray machines:

Ini­tially, the machines were sup­posed to be used only on pas­sen­gers who set off the metal detec­tors, to pro­vide them with an option to the cus­tom­ary sec­ondary phys­i­cal pat-downs and inspec­tions by elec­tronic wand. But Robin Kane, the agency’s act­ing chief tech­nol­ogy offi­cer, said that the ini­tial results from pilot tests at some check­points at 19 air­ports in the United States had been so good that the idea of using the machines as the stan­dard check­point detec­tors made sense.

Fore­most, I main­tain my objec­tions on the basis of pri­vacy and safety. But to replace a huge num­ber of $3,000 metal detec­tors with com­plex, unproven machines that cost $100,000 to $170,000 each? How does one jus­tify that in this eco­nomic cli­mate? Say, for the sake of argu­ment, that these machines could make air­ports 0–15% more secure. They still cost 4500% more! The era of “more secu­rity at any cost” is over—or at least it ought to be.