I saw mention of a digicam earlier and thought I should relate an experience...

In May we had a flight from Nice, France to Zurich, Switzerland to catch our flight home. We checked in, went through security and then to the gate. While at the gate we were told the flight was cancelled and we needed to go back to ticketing. We got put on another flight (Nice to Paris to Los Angeles - forget about Zurich) and went back through security. Then an hour and a half later going from one terminal to another in Paris, back through security again.

When we got home the compact flash card in the camera was corrupted while those that were in their plastic storage boxes were fine. We had dumped the chips to CR-ROMs in Monaco using a friend's computer there but had taken a few more pictures while on the way to Nice - and those were lost.

A Radar engineer friend of mine said, "Of course." Multiple passes through x-ray can build up static under the right conditions and the body of the camera can intensify that static build-up. Evidently we found that ideal level to zap the chip contents while the other chips outside of the camera were OK.

Moral to the story: Take the media out of the camera before going through security.

Also, if you expect to be near a computer while traveling, take blank CD-ROMs with you and the connector cable (and any software needed - a COPY not the original!!!) so you can back up your pictures. We are glad we did... that card had 187 pictures on it and we lost just six of them.