Lawsuit Challenges TSA To Prove Body Scanners Aren’t Killing People

Reason reports on CEI's lawsuit against the Transportation Secuirty Administration's body scanner rule, and discusses the case with Marc Scribner and Iain Murray. 

One commenter at the time said they would prefer to drive across the country twice instead of "being subjected to what is clearly a violation of privacy by this intrusive form of airport passenger inspection."

Today, that person might be dead—and even if they're not, the TSA's use of body scanners has increased the likelihood, however minutely, that they are.

That's the premise of a lawsuit filed against the TSA by Iain Murray and Marc Scribner, research fellows at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

In a brief filed this week in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Murray and Scribner argue that the TSA knew its body scanners would cause some segments of the public to switch from flying to driving, creating a safety issue because flying is the mathmatically safer form of transportation.

"We came up with 184 additional road deaths due to that effect, of people driving rather than flying," Scribner told Reason on Thursday.

"This is an effect that aviation safety regulators have dealt with before, and this is a major effect," Scribner said. "All we're asking the court to do is require the TSA to go back and do this proper analysis."

Read the full article at Reason.