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Z Portal Strip Searches Cars at the Border, Is No Tunnel of Love

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You know the recently deployed airport scanners that see through your clothes and show your bits 'n' pieces to some dude supposedly in a locked closet? Called backscatter, the tech been re-jiggered into a portal that cars crossing the border will have to drive through, allowing border agents to search your car without, you know, actually searching your car. The Z Portal will obviously strip-search anyone driving it, too, but a Customs spokesman swear it's less revealing than the staticky porn your dad used to watch on an old TV.Updated.

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Update: Z Portal reiterates you don't have to fear border agents gawking at your junk: "The X-ray image generated does not create the detail that you describe because of the subjects' distance from the X-ray source and the movement of the vehicle through the X-ray beam. Additionally, the car is in the path of the X-ray beam so this also obscures the detail of the individual."

The first Z Portal is being set up at San Ysidro, a port of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border south of San Diego. Anyone who's "referred for a secondary inspection" will drive through a giant car wash that's not really a car wash, but a Z Portal. If you don't trust Customs' assurances no one will see your private piercings, you can actually have a border agent drive it through.

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The purpose of the portal, obviously, is to find smuggled weapons, drugs and illegal immigrants that'll took our jerbs, while taking less time and posing less of a risk to border agents. Hey, it's better than a cavity search. But you still might wanna leave your laptop at home. [CNN]