As Americans debate the safety and propriety of new airport scanning devices, gear up for National Opt-Out Day, and endure a lot of headlines with the word “junk” in them, the Washington Post has reported on a “cheap and simple fix” to the problem:

The fix would distort the images captured on full-body scanners so they look like reflections in a fun-house mirror, but any potentially dangerous objects would be clearly revealed, said Willard “Bill” Wattenburg, a former nuclear weapons designer at the Livermore lab…. “Why not just distort the image into something grotesque so that there isn’t anything titillating or exciting about it?” Wattenburg said.

I told Robert Mankoff, our cartoon editor, that Wattenburg and the T.S.A. should team up on a distortion algorithm with Gahan Wilson. Grotesque, not titillating—but the idea, at least, would be too exciting. So Bob dug up this selection of airport-security cartoons from The New Yorker’s archives. Most of them come after 9/11, a couple are from the hijacking wave of the seventies, and the earliest predates the Second World War.

Happy travels!