First, it is true body scanning might not detect all threats. But it does detect a significant class of realistic threats, which are not feasibly detected by other means.
Second, despite political flannel, it is obvious that even excellent intelligence work, which after all would no doubt require extraordinarily invasive access to private data, cannot prevent unpredictable killers from presenting themselves at check-in. Grooming of otherwise unremarkable agents is a terrorist method.
Third, I struggle to see the difficulty in allowing intimate but non-tactile searches, given that tactile and quite intimate searches are already commonplace.
Forth, in any balancing exercise, obviously a sacrifice of “modesty” (so called) on the part of some people is an appropriate, rationally connected and proportionate method, when the nature of the threat is destruction of the plane and the murder of the passengers.
Speaking for myself, being unabashed like those admirable German Young Pirates, I would walk naked, no bra no knickers, in public through a scanner if that was the proportionate price of safer travel, for myself and my co-passengers. I would subject myself to such scanning, and reasonably expect my co-passengers to likewise consent.
In particular, so called “religious beliefs”, but to my mind utterly irrational reactionary dogma, should carry zero weight, in considering the proportionality of the scanning. So-called “religious concerns” about modesty are code for hatred of the public and political visibility of persons of my physiological type. “Religious modesty” is at root a pretext for enforcement of religiously inspired gender apartheid. Ha, I would make it a buying factor that the airline employed intimate scanners 
It is also relevant that this hatred of the feminine, and the consequent revolting hyper-masculinity and erotic frustration, are part of the psychosexual imbalance generating the violence within the Islamic Ideology, the inspiration for most contemporary terrorists. Public security policy could quite properly have as one of its purposes the undoing of this psychosexual imbalance.
As a general doctrine, we need to carefully distinguish slightly neurotic conceptions of privacy meaning invisibility, from privacy meaning the right to control my person and property and interests. We live in a very high-speed, technologically driven culture, where the swiftness of our transactions is highly beneficial. But that implies a preparedness to consent to the sharing of well-defined but often very detailed data about oneself with persons who otherwise know nothing about you.
Remember that travel is a choice, and primarily a matter of private contract. Although freedom of contract has its limitations, the starting point of contractual consent to intimate scan, as a precondition of travel, is hardly obnoxious.
Furthermore, if I choose to travel, I have an extra-contractual duty to assist my co-passengers to travel safely. This derives from my innate humanity, my common-sisterhood.
I observe, with a smile, that if I happily get undressed voluntarily to make love with someone I care for, then it is difficult for me to argue that I should not be highly visible when my mortal interests and those of my co-passengers are significantly engaged.
Obviously the technology is open to mischievous use. So, non-retention of scanning data that reveals no realistic threat, beyond say the duration of the flight, sounds like a sensible data protection principle.
Regards, andrea
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Prostitute says she “would walk naked, no bra no knickers, through airport scanner.”
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