Michael Chertoff behind TSA pornoscanners?

‘Pornoscanners’ is what Boing Boing (courtesy of AoSHQ Headlines) calls them, and that name works for me.   Anyway, it would seem that Michael Chertoff had his hand in the cookie jar on this one: while Secretary of Homeland Security he ordered the pornoscanners from Rapiscan (a company that was one of his clients), and he’s been a busy little advocate bee on that company’s behalf ever since. When asked about it on the Anderson Cooper show, the response (skip ahead to about 4:55) was largely content-free on spokesflack TSA John Pistole’s part, and by ‘content-free’ I mean ‘Pistole claims to know nothing on the subject’:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4lyQFwCzTI

Credit where credit is due: Jane Hamsher has a good timeline of this ongoing mess over at Firedoglake, once you compensate for Lieberman*.  Any other year, this would have been a scandal eight months ago; but this was a midterm election coupled with a horrible economy, so we’re only getting to it now.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*In that spirit: not to noodge Jane, though, but George Soros also owned a bit of this.  I say ‘owned’ because he dumped his stock last quarter.  Say what you like about the man, but he knows when to bug out of a poor investment.