This story comes up every now and then; I have a hard time seeing it as a “scandal”. It’s nothing more than a piece of historical anatomical pseudoscience that happens to tickle the salacious fancies of puritan America with the proximity of “nudity” and the names of recognizable celebrities.
It draws my interest because of the obvious parallels to the millions of backscatter pictures taken by the TSA over the past decade, many of which are naked pictures of children and the elderly. The overwhelming majority of Americans consent to having these pictures taken before getting on a plane.
The sort of group psychology and doublethink that allows us to ridicule this dated pseudoscience on one hand, while walking right into a similar situation in every American airport today, is inherently fascinating.
The phrase "nude photos", for better or worse, tends to make people think that there was some prurient interest in taking them. As far as any of the published accounts go, there wasn't; this was simply Not Very Good Science.
It's certainly preferable to have consent before gathering clinical data, but I wouldn't make too big of a deal out of this. In the annals of things done without proper consent, this barely registers.
I don't think it's been scandalous for about four decades. Even when it was happening it was an open secret. I don't think 'scandal' ever truly applied; that implies surprise.
Seriously? "Nobody held a gun to their head" is your criterion? For guys and gals fresh out of high school?
Will you also tell me that employees can't sue for unpaid overtime, hazardous work environment, sexual harassment etc. because nobody held a gun and they could always quit? Such sheep, those common workers.
This deep underlying assumption that nudity = scandal is amusing. I'm Australian, and I thought my culture was pretty similar to the US in a lot of ways, but the puritanical terror of nudity that pervades ever word of the article seems very odd indeed to me.
For the benefit of those who have not read the 1995 article all the way through to the end:
"As I thumbed rapidly through box after box to confirm that the entries described in the Finder's Aid were actually there, I tried to glance at only the faces. It was a decision that paid off, because it was in them that a crucial difference between the men and the women revealed itself. For the most part, the men looked diffident, oblivious. That's not surprising considering that men of that era were accustomed to undressing for draft physicals and athletic-squad weigh-ins.
"But the faces of the women were another story. I was surprised at how many looked deeply unhappy, as if pained at being subjected to this procedure. On the faces of quite a few I saw what looked like grimaces, reflecting pronounced discomfort, perhaps even anger."
That quite well illustrates the unacknowledged privilege of women at that time. The men were so accustomed to being denied privacy, either by cultural norms at the time, or by force by the government, that being forced to undress and be photographed was nothing unusual to them. Women, on the other hand, considered this an affront, because they were not subject to either of these. Thank you for pointing this out.
That women, far from having extra privilege in this area, felt extremely threatened at being made to be naked, knowing that this level of vulnerability had no upside for them. Whereas men had no particular concern, because their photos would not likely be misused.
Frankly, the suggestion that women have more power in this sort of situation is so wrong-headed that I honestly can't imagine how anyone familiar with Western culture could come up with it.
So if it was such a bad idea for the women, why did they do it?
When it is better for men to do what they are told than otherwise, you classify it as a benefit. When it is better for women to do what they are told than otherwise, you call it oppression. I'm trying to draw attention to this double standard.
To be clear: neither the men nor women gained directly from having their photographs taken.
I don't honestly believe it's possible for someone to ask questions like that without a malicious purpose, so I shall refrain from engaging you henceforth. I pray that the women in your life, if you have any, can see what you are -- but I'm fairly sure it's obvious, so I'm not worried.
My purpose is to get people to question feminism and see outside a very narrow worldview in which women are always victims. In your case, I have failed. And the way you make this argument personal is really pathetic, although not surprising.
Or you could interpret is (as I think other replies are suggesting) as men feeling no shame or threat to being nude. I'm not sure how to articulate this but the women may have felt they were "losing" something by being photographed nude. The men probably didn't.
In this case, it makes complete sense. The original was intentionally inflammatory leading with a line about nude pictures of Hilary Clinton, and was based on the NYT article to begin with.
Somebody changed the "Soylent has rats and mold" title and link to "Soylent is awesome!" with a link to a less hostile article. (Well, the original article the first post was referencing.)
Fox News and other agencies do the same thing any time they're reporting that something controversial or offensive took place. It's not because they actually consider it bad, it's that they know it's inflammatory and gets viewership.
Are you kidding? My response was 2 sentences about how I've seen them especially, and TV news in general, replay things they were saying were so "edgy" for TV, _on TV_. Just like the re-distribution of these images in an article about how inappropriate the taking of these images was. I don't know how to explain that more clearly?
From my initial reading of your comment, I thought you were defending the posting the photos on the grounds that FoxNews does it too. That is an excuse (a bad one), not justification.
It seems that wasn't what you meant. Maybe you would like to rephrase?
He was providing the reason for why the authors would have published the photos (by using Fox News as an example), not defending or justifying their having done so.
Oh I see. Not sure how to rephrase - but what I really mean is my very last statement - the author doesn't truly believe that it was wrong to take these photos so strongly that they aren't doing the same - they just know these photos are controversial enough to attract attention - and that's what they're after. I'm sorry if it's confusing...
So the machine takes the same picture, but simply pre-processes it into a cartoon image using "Advanced Imaging Technology" (now there's a hilarious non-description) before throwing it up on the monitor? Where do the originals go? Do they ever get audited or offloaded for quality control purposes--how else can they expect to be sure the algorithm works?
The news reports on this switch are all over the place in terms of quality, and you happened to pick one of the worse ones. I'm not the only one asking these questions: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/29/travel/tsa-backscatter
"We'd like to see clearer rules about the collection of the images," Rotenberg said. "Are they deleted? Are they saved? Is some analysis being done and can they be linked to passengers?"
Not to mention the enormous waste of money it must have been to install and then remove the old machines. And what now happens to all the pictures they took, which are probably accumulating dust on some DHS subcontractor's hard disk somewhere in America?
I have no idea how it is actually implemented, but it seems like it could be implemented in a perfectly acceptable way.
The first step is to define what acceptable is. As I do not understand why nudity is unacceptable in the first place, I will not attempt to do so, and will instead employ the time honored tradition of hand waving.
In the new system, a reasonable implementation would be to discard the original image imidietly. Quality control can be done by putting the machine into debug mode and using consenting individuals as test subjects (or seeing if the cartoon image detects when the target things are present). There is also no guaranteed that the old pictures were ever stored. Although in both cases, I suspect they would store the data, in some form, for at least the short term to assist in a post-hoc analysis if their is a security failure.
Also, I think it was a software update only, the machines are still the same.
You are sure all the scanners, or even most of them, have been updated and that they don't fall-back to showing detailed nude images? The TSA wouldn't lie, right?
It's interesting how the word "nude" boosts posts to the top of the social hierarchy on HN, Reddit and YouTube, among other sites, even in cases when the content would be otherwise irrelevant or uninteresting to the communities.
> It's interesting how the word "nude" boosts posts to the top
We're mammals. Despite our large cerebrums and ability for abstract reasoning, we're still primates. Of course we're drawn to sex, food, and emotion.
I think it's more interesting that we're surprised by this. Sure, it's good to try to overcome your bestial nature, but pretending it isn't there at all seems a bit silly.
We seem to be the only mammals that are particularly attracted to nudity. As far as I can tell, no other mammal even notices when one of their species is naked.
At an old job, I once wrote an internal library for working with RDF. Very unsexy stuff, nobody cared. When I changed the name of the library to "Graphic Nudity" (it exposes your graphs!), suddenly a lot of people took notice.
When I hopefully will be 70 one day, I wonder if i would actually like to see such photos of me. I think I might. "Once I was young, and I looked so awesome. Oh, those were the days..."
Why am I not surprised that Paglia loves this stuff? Wherever there's a well-bred controversy, she's in the thick to concern-troll with grotesque absurd sophistries.
"Because copyrights are governed by federal law, there is only one statute of limitations for copyright claims. Copyright infringement claims are rights of the copyright owner of the photograph and have a three-year statute of limitations from the date of the infringement. See 17 USC 507(b). Some courts start counting the three years when you had a reasonable chance to discover the infringement."
The subjects of the photos wouldn't have a copyright claim on the photos, as they did not take them (the university did, and would own the copyright). I'm sure there's other laws at play though, such as personality rights.
My rule of thumb when I wonder that sort of question is 7 years. Nearly all statute of limitations fall at or below that point. By which I would then conclude, no chance could they still be prosecuted.
There are certain violations that will be exempted from the statute of limitations, but a moderate scandal/invasion of privacy isn't going to qualify. Wikipedia lists fraud against the court, international crimes, and heinous crimes, e.g. heinous violence
I just the whole article and now I wonder what happened to these photos and with this long article a reader would expect to see some photos... any source on this?
This thread is all too interesting. I found myself revisiting the dictionary for definitions of words I never knew.Everyday I learn something new from HN
Might as well be phrenology otherwise.