Word of the Day: Rapiscan

[tartysuz]

Rapiscan

Company that makes a full-body scanner used at airport security points.

I couldn't make sense of this word when I first saw it. Rah-peace-an? Rah-pee-scan? I finally figured it must be a mash-up of "rapid" and "scan". A passenger rights activist on CBC Radio's Sunday Morning confirmed this by pronouncing it "Rap-i-scan." However, when she spoke about the invasiveness of the imaging, she, unconsciously I think, pronounced it "Rape-y-scan".

This second pronunciation seemed appropriate in more than one sense. Of course, there is the explicitness of the images, but there is also something that the activist went on to explain. Rapiscan equipment, which she and others say would not have stopped the recent terrorist from Nigeria, was already on order before the panic in Detroit. It turns out that Rapiscan's chief lobbyist in Washington is Michael Chertoff, the former secretary for Homeland Security! Yeah, someone is using the levers of power to grab something that isn't theirs.

One further observation: Canada is buying a different brand of scanner. Rapiscan uses backscatter technology and "Health Canada prohibits X-ray backscatter scanning – pregnant women can't be scanned." Source: Ian Brown, The Globe and Mail, 9 January 2010.

Comments

[dewline.livejournal.com]

I heard that interview this morning, or at least part of it. Particularly the item re: Chertoff...