If you travel this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, be prepared: Airport screeners may ask you to step into a full-body scanning unit so they can get a nudie picture of you.

In case you haven’t heard, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration recently installed close to 400 full-body image scanners in 68 airports across the country, including Los Angeles International. More are on the way. These units expose the passengers to low doses of radiation to create what officials swear are not nude images of the passengers. Maybe I’m no expert, but the examples on the Internet sure look like nude images to me.

Since this is still America, you can refuse to submit to the pornie shot. But that means you’ll have to get one of the new enhanced pat-downs. The only problem: Some passengers have already squawked that these are way too, umm, enhanced.

So those are your choices for the upcoming happy holiday: Let TSA workers get a peek in your underwear or allow yourself to be groped in your nether region. And you thought it was an indignity to trash your water bottle and fingernail clippers at the airport. Hey! Those were the good ol’ days.

The TSA used to be known as the place that hired professionals who were our front line of protection from terrorists. But now it’s quickly getting the rep as a great place for perverts to get a job.

You might remember that after the shoe bomber episode, we had to start taking off our shoes at the airport. Then after the liquid bomb incident, we all had to start tossing toothpaste or any other gel or liquid greater than 3 ounces. And since the so-called underwear bomber almost blew up a plane over Detroit last year, we’ve now got to let the TSA explore Down Under. Just wait until a terrorist hides a bomb in a body cavity. That’s when I stop flying for good.

Now you could probably argue that federal officials really can’t force you to give up a nudie photo of yourself or get groped. After all, the Fourth Amendment protects us from unreasonable searches. Silly you. Faith in the Constitution is about as quaintly outdated as citizenship classes in public elementary schools.

Of course, this new body-scan policy is great for a local company, OSI Systems Inc. of Hawthorne. It’s Rapiscan unit made most of the new full-body scanners, and the company’s stock is up about 30 percent in the last three months. The company’s founder and chief executive, Deepak Chopra, got invited to accompany President Obama on his trip to India recently.

But will it really be good for this company? I mean, the backlash is just starting. The company may well get a terrible reputation; its scanners are already called Rapescan on the Internet. Who knows? OSI may soon be a corporate name that’s every bit as beloved among air travelers as BP is among Gulf Coast shrimpers.

Am I being too hard on this tough new policy? After all, shouldn’t we be willing to surrender a little of our dignity to combat terrorism?

That would be an easier argument to make if the new scanners represented a true advance. But they don’t. They don’t sniff out explosives. All they do is show what’s in your underwear; they are good at spotting hidden knives and guns. But the TSA already has a device to do that. It’s called a metal detector.

And if the full-body scanners were really a technological marvel, why has Israel – the place most prone to be a terrorist target – dismissed the new devices?

But now that I think about it, maybe OSI’s Rapiscan devices really are a marvel. I mean, they’ve gotten me to do something I never thought I would: I’m actually thinking Greyhound is an attractive travel option.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].