If you need conclusive proof that the Transportation Security Administration carefully picks the most ignorant and incompetent applicants, consider the words of Sabrina Birge, an airport security officer at at Nashville International Airport. When Andrea Fornella Abbott refused to have her daughter subjected to molestation or to radiation, Birge informed her that the scanner was not an X-ray but "uses the same type of radio waves as a sonogram."
That's right. She claimed they use the the same sort of radio waves as a sonogram.
The new backscatter scanners do, in fact, use X-rays, and the evidence is clear that the TSA has lied about the evidence for their safety.