What TSA "Security" Is Costing Us In Dollars
Bob Fisher blogs at TSANewsBlog about the cost of the easily fooled scanners:

While the TSA usually cites scanner costs ranging from $140,000 to $180,000 apiece, this is only the scanner cost and does not include associated airport modifications and installation expenses.

In the case of Akron-Canton airport, the total cost for four scanners was $2,342,567.17, which included $945,439.40 to relocate the food court. The checkpoint alone cost $1,397,127.77 for four machines, or an average cost of $349,281.94 each.

Since most airports usually require some building modifications, such as floor reinforcement, the typical scanner installation is likely closer to $500,000 than $400,000.

The 29 secondary airports received a total of 45 scanners at an estimated cost of $15.7 million and will screen a total of 50,337 passengers a year.

Of these, 18 airports handle fewer than 1,000 passengers daily but were equipped with 21 scanners at an estimated installed cost of $7.3 million to screen 9,538 passengers per day.

...If the TSA truly wants to expedite and improve airport screening, it would use the scanners only as a secondary screening device , as originally approved by Congress in 2008, or as an option to metal detectors for those with metallic medical implants. If the scanners were used to screen only when passengers alarmed the metal detector, or as a personal choice by the passenger, things would work better and faster and would more equitably account for the variation in passengers' circumstances.

...TSA has also avoided any discussion of the backscatter machines because of the lingering health and privacy problems. The agency appears to be attempting to mislead the public into believing that the backscatter scanners have the same privacy improvements as the MMW scanners. It continues to dodge Congressional demands for independent testing despite evidence that these scanners could result in an additional 100 cancer deaths each year.

The scanners have now become a politically charged and divisive issue rather than a tool used to detect contraband. There is also an implication of government corruption and deceit associated with the deployment of these systems, which should be investigated by an independent special prosecutor: has this government agency compromised passenger safety and imposed unnecessary procedures to protect private manufacturers' profits?

The original program stipulated that passengers would first use the walk-through metal detectors. If an alarm was raised, they would be sent to the scanners for further screening. If an anomaly was present in both scans, then the passenger would be patted down or wanded, but only on the part of the body that showed the anomaly, not on the entire body.

Unfortunately, the scanners aren't foolproof, and they fail to detect hidden items 44% of the time. Most of those items would have been detected if the metal detector had been used as the primary screening device. Almost all of the items found by the TSA in 2011 were found via the x-ray belt and walk-through metal detectors, not the scanners.

Of course, the greatest cost is the erosion of our civil liberties -- which most Americans accept like blinking sheep.