“See the bones in your hand! See through clothes!  Amazing X-Ray vision guaranteed!” 

That’s how the advertising slogan went for the 1950s novelty sensation “X-Ray Specs”, accompanied by an image of a woman’s hourglass silhouette under her dress. It turns out the goggles were not X-Ray enabled or even amazing, but instead they merely created an optical illusion that overlapped two offset images, creating a darker portion in the overlap that passed for the “X-Ray skeleton” of the object, leaving the boy who purchased them sorely disappointed. 

In recent weeks there has been much public outrage at the new Transportation Security Administration body scanners and enhanced pat-downs. This distrust implies a ludicrous view that airport security officials can’t wait to get their hands on some X-Ray specs as well. That is, the scatter X-Ray images that essentially remove clothes from the body are interpreted as sexual and invasive. 

In my opinion, this is a misunderstanding of the role of the body in public space. By consenting to travel by airplane, I believe an individual becomes a traveling body that can be regulated by security officials and not a private, sexual body regulated by its own interests. Maybe this is a new kind of body that we can’t fully accept, this body with suspended sexuality. 

As citizens we must be alert that in this context individuals must not lose their constitutional rights, in particular those protected by the First and Fourth amendments. But from my view there has been no violation in this regard, as the search is justified by previous terrorist methods and all safe self-expression is allowed. Yet according to some sensationalist voices, travelers’ bodies floating through airport channels have been conflated for private, sexual beings whose rights as such are violated. 

Last week a woman pulled a petty publicity stunt in LAX airport as news cameras filmed her going through security wearing only a black bikini. She was making the point that this is what it takes to travel now — you should enter nearly nude or you will be stripped down. The woman was not searched or scanned presumably because she could not be hiding anything, as if to say you might as well redefine your own privacy through voluntary near-nudity. So how can we define the molten edges of privacy anyways? 

Traditionally, privacy is a condition of intimacy. Now this isn’t entirely true. Candor, be it security details passed between officials or be it the exact shape of a person’s waist, is usually given in private and builds intimacy. But now candor itself has been leaked. Does this change the meaning of intimacy if we know Qaddafi’s bedside secrets and what Passport No. 230662339 looks like naked? Of course not — intimacy is preserved in context, as these public matters are also a matter of context. 

As Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee of England wrote in The Telegraph, “There is a difference between ‘the public interest’ and ‘the public are interested.’” One reason the recent Wikileaks have piqued everyone’s interest is the inclusion of juicy dirt about world leaders amongst other policy and diplomacy information. This only adds to the contemporary lava flow of news and entertainment hardening into one another, not to mention it fuels a sense of constituent injustice that demands to see the emperor in his birthday suit. 

This is a treacherous line we are toeing between transparency and security. Warren Buffett was quoted saying, in reference to financial institutions stripped bare in the financial crisis, “When the tide goes out, we find out who’s been swimming without a bathing suit.” Here is the positive argument for Wikileaks, arguing that it is worthy to shake up people in power so they don’t get too comfortable skinny-dipping. But returning to the importance of context, there is information among the leaked documents that endangers lives of informants and undermines productive national strategies. 

I argue that the gossip-hungry public prurience that is outraged by the supposed exposure of TSA scans bears relation to a reckless approbation of the X-Ray-like Wikileaking. In the end this is about trust. Who can we trust, and with what currents of information? 

In this case, the denial of personal privacy and the acceptance of state privacy are both reflections of trust: Trusting our governments to keep the right secrets and do positive things with classified information and trusting the TSA to use the images of human bodies as data for security purposes, not for the spying objectives of the X-Ray specs. Let’s save our outrage for real human rights abuses and put privacy in perspective.