Fears that new electronic body scanners cause an unacceptable invasion of privacy seem to have been confirmed by an unusual case in Miami.

A TSA employee has been charged with assault of a co-worker after he was put through the body scanner, which uses radar to view under clothes, during a training session and it displayed an image of his genitals. One particular employee then took to taunting Rolando Negrin about his apparent shortcomings in a specific area.

It all got too much for Negrin and he, in the police statement, "could not take the jokes any more and lost his mind." He confronted the employee in the parking lot, beat him with a police baton, forced him to his knees and then made him apologise.

The case may seem bizarre but it's what most of the rest of America has come to expect in Florida, the most crazed of US states. But it does question the bland reassurances of people installing the scanners here in the US and increasingly at international airports like Heathrow, that they aren't too intrusive and images aren't captured.

Sleuth's been through these scanners twice now, both times as part of volunteer tests that are sadly a memory. The screeners at Heathrow refused then to show subjects from the front, but just the back view was enough to show that basically you were seeing a naked body.

This isn't the first time these problems have happened in the short history of the deployment of the scanners. Given that they are of questionable utility and wouldn't even have stopped the failed underpants bomber (as he should forever be known as part of his punishment) we now need to rethink wide-scale deployment.

07 May 2010