I like to think of it as a commentary on the masturbatory nature of DHS policies.

What about trains, subways, busses, boats, schools.

The point of that article was that there is still a lot unknown about the risks and there is nobody but the tsa themselves testing them. The EU didn't ban them for fun. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2062646/Naked-airport-X-ray-body-scanners-banned-Europe-cancer-fears.html

The passengers are probably fine, how about the person working next to the machine 8 hours a day. What happens if the machine breaks and starts leaking radiation, is that possible.

I don't want my children to grow up in a world where it is normal to treat eachother like what happens now at airports. Oh well 30 more years and we won't be flying anymore anyway if we don't find an alternate source of fuel.

Commerce clause, people. The only flights the TSA would have no right to regulate under these laws would be intrastate flights, which would be a sizable enough market in Alaska, but nowhere else.

Plus the interpretation would run that any airport that offers interstate flights would be subject to the process

Although the whole "strip search" thing feels like people are deliberately blowing it out of proportion to me. People who force themselves into strip-search mode are already looking for trouble (similar to protestors who deliberately provoke police to later claim police brutality), because the machines are perfectly quick, viable, and with the added bonus of not having some stranger touch you (only having them look at the CG contours of your body, so no more embarrassing than if you were wearing a bodysuit)

Although this isn't to say that i feel the TSA method is optimally effective. Real anti-terror action comes from intelligence and the fieldwork of agents. The underwear bomber from 2009 was under suspicion by the federal authorities, they simply should have been more vigilant about denying him a visa.

Well actually that's  completely untrue.  Other people have been testing them... and deemed them harmless.  The EU ban is nothing but rank popular scare based on nothing.

who else has been testing them? and what kind of test did they run? I couldn't find much besides this article which suggests there was not long term safety testing done, but just a one time test of how much radiation is used in one scan. It was done by NIST, but it did not metnion any long term testing.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/30/did-airport-scanners-give-boston-tsa-agents-cancer/

Same reason we have to put up with all these extreme measures.

The Commerce clause does not give the Federal Government the power to override other parts of the constitution.

The commerce clause is completely misinterpreted, anyway. It's clearly obvious, when taken into context of the rest of the constitution, that "regulate" meant to "keep regular" rather than "do whatever the fuck you want".

You're right, however that's how it's interpreted by a huge swath of the body politic for a long time now. How I long to see some Santorum type use it to outlaw abortion on the grounds that we can't have people terminating future consumers and taxpayers willy nilly, just to see if the penny would finally drop that, derp, giving the federal government this kind of insane power is maybe not such a good thing.

It can be done, but it is easier to do if you actually have a case regarding the constitutionality of the law. The Federal Court system is designed primarily to avoid matters that don't pertain to constitutionality, such that you rather need to have a strong basis for something being unconstitutional to get federal courts to hear cases, not merely your claim of unconstitutionality. A physical case creates a greater claim than a lawsuit existing in a vacuum. States can get away with making direct lawsuits, because they are, well, states, and it is easier for a resident of a state to sue a state, which could then evolve into a federal case, but the 11th amendment dictates that non-residents of a state cannot sue said state (so if, say, i were gay and didn't like that whole Prop 8 thing in California, as a PA resident, i am legally barred from suing them)

Centuries of jurisprudence dictate that it is easier to make a case if you have an actual case, which makes sense because otherwise the whole thing would devolve into a constitutionality pissing contest, where special interest groups would immediate launch lawsuits in federal court for any law they didn't like. What happens instead is that groups like, for instance, NARAL Pro-Choice America look for a specific instance where someone is being brought up on anti-abortion laws, and they then contribute money to that individual, perhaps even provide them with lawyers, to take their case into higher court.

Certainly that is how the commerce clause was originally intended, but given judicial precedent, that is how it would be interpreted in this case. And i would argue that there is a place for it, as it has provided the federal government with leverage against the states in instances where it was badly needed (i believe the commerce clause was useful in the civil rights act, for instance)

And the commerce clause would give the federal government power to override other parts of the constitution that pertained to commerce, like, say, the 10th Amendment, which would otherwise be the saving throw for Alaska and Texas in this case (that antiterrorism security is not a power specifically enumerated to the federal government, but if antiterror security is deemed essential for the airline business, then there you go)