Science & Tech Quote by Janet Napolitano

Bureaucracy rarely sounds as defensive as it does here, and that is the point. Napolitano is selling not a machine but a story about the machine: one designed to make a profoundly intimate act of state scrutiny feel procedurally antiseptic. The architecture of reassurance is built out of partitions. “Walled-off location,” “never sees,” “never interacts” - each clause is a barrier erected in language, as if privacy can be restored by careful choreography rather than by limiting the search itself.

The specific intent is damage control in the era when airport body scanners were becoming a cultural flashpoint: security theater accused of turning travelers into involuntary exhibits. Napolitano’s diction leans hard on compartmentalization to suggest accountability without granting the public what it actually wants, which is consent. By emphasizing separation between the assisting officer and the viewing officer, she offers a kind of moral laundering: no single person performs the whole invasive act, so no one person bears its full intimacy.

The subtext is a quiet reframing of trust. Instead of asking travelers to trust the government’s judgment, she asks them to trust the system’s design - its inability to “store, export, print or transmit.” That list reads like a tech spec, but it functions as a spell against a contemporary fear: that surveillance becomes permanent, shareable, and humiliating. It also dodges the obvious question: even if the image can’t be saved, it can still be seen. The promise is not “we won’t look,” but “we’ll look in a way that won’t embarrass us later.”