Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans | Hacker News Reader

Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans

forbes.com

130 pointstux196859 comments

We need an app that makes smartphones screech loudly whenever this kind of radiation is detected. If there was a cacophony of annoying noise drawing attention to their actions whenever this is used, they wouldn't use it much. I have little doubt that these are already being secretly used in places that would elicit a WTF from your average citizen.

Are there any sensors on a smartphone that might go detectably wonky when hit with this?

The CCD in the camera ought to go bananas, I'd have thought.

This made me wonder if it was illegal to bombard people with x-rays?

If I had an x-ray emitter gun of some sort, and I walked around blasting people with unhealthy doses of ionizing radiation without their knowledge (it would be silent and unnoticeable), how would I get caught and what would I be prosecuted with?

I feel like it's not too difficult for someone today to build something like that and walk around terrorizing people...

Well, assuming you can afford competent representation... It would be next to impossible to link any particular case of injury to any particular action on your part, so you would quite likely avoid arrest forever and probably be acquitted if it came to trial. You would technically expose yourself to a massive amount of civil liability, but if you could make the argument that many other people are going around doing the same thing, you would wind up paying for a very small share of the damage that you caused. Outside of specific laws passed to punish your specific behavior, you probably get off more or less scott free.

Of course, it has never been difficult to terrorize people like this, and what you're imagining is small potatoes. Just build a big building which does this on a daily basis for decades. We call it "pollution", and mostly shrug it off as the cost of progress.

This is an absurd reply. Just for starters, it has actually happened, the actor has been convicted, and it was held up on appeal.

http://www.uscg.mil/legal/cca/court_of_criminal_appeals_opin...

Eh, I appreciate the link, but I don't really see the connection. Aside from the common theme of radiation exposure, what you posted involves a medical technician performing unnecessary procedures on people. This makes it easy to demonstrate a) that the exposure occurred, b) that the tech knew the effect of the machine and that the procedure was unwarranted, and subsequently c)that his intention in doing this was to harm the victims, or something similarly sinister. It wasn't part of that appeal, but there's also the issue that he did this by taking x-ray images of women's bodies, and I'd imagine a large part of the conviction came from we really don't want a weirdo in the hospital getting off on x-raying female patients.

Never mind that it was a court-martial, and that he was convicted of multiple counts of drug use and dereliction of duty at the same time.

All in all, it has very little in common with our hypothetical, in which one invisibly, untraceably exposes members of the public at large to some unknown dose of ionizing radiation over a period of time. And you've really done nothing to address my observation that, in reality, people get away with that all the time in the form of environmental contamination. We can prove he ate the fish, we can prove he died of cancer, we can prove you're putting cancer in the water. That's just not enough to convict you for his death-- the worst you'll face is a stiff fine under a law that exists only to impose a stiff fine if you put cancer in the water and somebody dies.

Do you, by chance, work for Lucasfilm?

I doubt it. Why do you ask? I don't understand.

Oops, meant to reply to Cushman, who has no contact info in his profile.

Oh, that was a serious question? I assumed it was a reference I didn't get :P No, I do not work for Lucasfilm.

"terrorizing people" - That's basically the basic definition of what a terrorist does. And whoever the original terrorists were, they've have succeeded in making the US Government "terrorize" its own people. This is just the beginning. I have a feeling the worst is yet to come.

USA used to be the place where everyone wanted to come. I think more and more people will try to stay out of USA when they see measures like these implemented to mass-control their own population.

Completely agree, and that's becoming one of my pet peeves. I like to keep in mind that the "original" terrorists were a government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_terrorism

Just stumbled onto this article here, which is even more terrifying, and yet I've already believed at least half of what he's saying was true:

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/12/01/the-truth-about-the-...

Yes, now some of the worst abuses of the past 10 years are becoming enshrined in law, creating a new-normal they can push the boundaries on. I'd like to think the constitution would keep things in check, but I see no sign the Supreme Court will go very far in checking these abuses of the bill of rights.

So discouraging.

Reminds me of the Soviet Union's incessant microwave bombardment of the US Embassy in Moscow. Presumably it was intended to eavesdrop via the "Great Seal Bug" but as a possible side effect, US embassy personnel suffered from a high cancer rate (e.g., Thompson, Bohlen, Stoessel).

Street X-raying may not be as prolonged, but for it to be effective in a drive-by, I imagine they may have to crank up the intensity.

>how would I get caught

lets hope that in post 9/11 world dosimeters are deployed at various important (i hope it includes "crowded with normal people") places.

>what would I be prosecuted with?

>walk around terrorizing people...

seems like you answered your own question.

>feel like it's not too difficult for someone today to build something like that

your old CRT ("cathode ray tube") TV/monitor :)

You could be charged with battery.

It's more cost effective to be charged from the wall outlet.

Why is this marked down? I literally laughed out loud when I read this. I come to HN for Tech, but a little humor is OK

Sadly, there is a flaw in your argument in that you are not (I presume) a law enforcement officer/similar.

Law enforcement, DOD and other similar agencies are always going to have rights that normal citizens don't have.

Whether they should have the right to bombard you with ionizing radiation with your knowledge or permission is a good question, but you can't argue that it is wrong because ordinary citizens can't do this legally.

"Law enforcement, DOD and other similar agencies are always going to have rights that normal citizens don't have."

I'd nitpick here and say that there's a world of difference between rights and powers, whether those powers are legitimate or otherwise.

They don't have the right to bombard us. They do have the power.

That's fair enough I guess.

I'm a non-citizen so the distinction between a right and a power is of little difference to me. A power can only be revoked by a citizen, and I'm not one.

If these are the same trucks used at entry control points by the DoD, they don't randomly drive around and scan vehicles; they're set up at gates, and you park a line of trucks, then drive the scanner down the line to view all the stuff inside. The radiation levels are high enough that all the drivers are removed to a safe waiting area nearby during the scanning process.

The article seems to suggest that yes, the vans will be driven around randomly.

"American Science & Engineering ... has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, ...."

Likewise the image on the 2nd page of the article of an SUV with the driver still inside.

According to as-e.com (the manufacturer), the backscatter vans are safe to use with occupants in the vehicle; transmissive search are not. Transmissive gets used for cargo search, since it's better at penetrating. The transmissive scanners have a big boom which arches over the suspect vehicle, emitting, with the receiver mounted in the body of the vehicle.

Some of AS-E's trucks do both, apparently.

I agree, these vans could probably be used in occupants-still-in-vehicle mode, but there are a lot of reasons why taking the occupants out will probably still be done. In a bomb situation, you want them under your control and not able to trigger it as readily. You also get a cleaner scan with less human obstruction in the vehicle; humans are going to show up as solid objects in the scan, so hiding other stuff in the middle would be a threat.

I trust the manufacturer of these rolling privacy violations to be honest about their health risks about as much as I'd trust Dick Cheney to demilitarize the US government.

Which is to say, negative quantities of trust.

The author, Andy Greenberg, has been covering backscatter and it's legal and health implications for a while. For what it's worth, this is a very old story.

Andy is either currently on book leave (writing about Wikileaks) or just recently back. I believe this is his latest on the topic, from last March: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/03/02/docs-re...

"Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S."

Is this even a problem? How often do we have vehicle bombs in the US?

Both the 2003^W1993 attack on the WTC and the Oklahoma City bombing attacks were delivered via truck. It's practically the only way to deliver a big explosive device.

Small correction, the bomb attack on WTC was 1993.

Ahmed Ressam's 2000 plot to bomb LAX involved transporting large amounts of explosives across the US border from Canada by car.

Why the hell is this being downvoted? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Ressam#Plot_to_bomb_LAX

The only reason they weren't caught was because of the lack of back scatter vans, right?

Right. Please troll elsewhere.

Hah. Don't like that, huh?

The question was, "How often do we have vehicle bombs in the US?"

What do backscatter vans have to do with this? Want to know my position? Fine: I'm against the arbitrary deployment of rolling scanners.

Don't put words in my mouth. If you want to be snarky, you had better be willing to get it back.

In the past the US had major issues with car bombs. For instance in 1976 the Cleveland area had 37 car bombs. http://www.cleveland.com/moviebuff/index.ssf/2011/03/welcome...

To people in Oklahoma City... at least once too many times.

Agreed! We should ban all cars and trucks from civilian usage since they can carry bombs

This is exactly how civil liberties are slowly eroded away.

That's fucked up. This is precisely why, if you have any ounce of morality or ethics left in your body, you shouldn't develop any technology for use by governments or law enforcement. The potential for abuse is large and x-raying like this is a clear invasion of privacy.

You know, I disagree. I have several possible contracts for training governments around the world on open source software, governments I think we'd all like to see remain stable.

I do think we have to consider the ethical implications of product development generally, and I think we need to be willing to refuse to sell products and services to government and law enforcement agencies when this raises concerns and problems.

But I don't think that extends to all technologies. The people who wrote SE-Linux for example have done us all a favor.

Then we shouldn't work in voip because governments can spy on peoples conversations, or many other things that are abusable?

No I was talking about making software and giving access to spies such as the government. I think programmers should consider the privacy and ethical implications of whatever they create.

Or pretty much any other technology.

Obligatory Wulff/Morgenthaler http://wulffmorgenthaler.com/strip/2011/02/22/google

So where is the consent to search on this one?

Where is the right to a speedy and public trial in the latest NDAA passed in the Senate? I would argue that the most important issue of our time is the accelerating theft of freedoms by the federal government. To put it more quantitatively: the trend of our incarceration rates over the last few decades should be enough to give anyone pause.

Well for that to happen we'd need to

i) make the erosion more visible

ii) have a better sense of perspective.

Sadly this list is no longer maintained: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/6r09d/fisa_passed_...

This article is factually incorrect on a big point: airports are NOT using millimeter wave scans (X-ray) as a secondary scanning measure like the article indictes; they are used as the primary security scanning measure, at leat at SFO and DTW (I know because I've opted out of both).

The article is a year old

    From a privacy standpoint, I’m hard-pressed to see what the concern or objection could be

Really?! You're looking inside my fucking car! Without a warrant! That's what the objection is. Do these people hear themselves speak? First you put cameras everywhere I exist, then I go through your metal detector, get patted down, submit to a body scan, have my conversations recorded (sometimes), my cell sends all my keystrokes, Facebook advertises my phone number, bots crawl to get my email, and I'm basically reachable 24/7 even if I turn my electronics off. Then you roll out the roving x-ray machines on wheels and tell me I shouldn't object? Nuh uh. Enough's enough. I basically have to live in a cave to avoid being tracked but even caves barely cut it these days.

Living in the US you get used to having no privacy and for the most part I've never really cared. I always figured that if you're doing nothing wrong there's no problem. But then I notice that every time I shrug something like this off they come out with something just tad more invasive. Maybe this is my personal epiphany, the point where I turn and say "hey, this stuff isn't cool anymore". I now see that if you give an inch they take a mile. I'm switching sides. I'm on the privacy nut side now.

Here's the thing... it would be one thing if privacy was gone. i.e. EVERYONE had access to the cameras, data etc. That's really the only way to avoid the panopticon.

So, you have something in your car to hide? Is that why you switch now. Pot-smoker? Tell us where the pot is bill!

This article is more than a year old. A follow up would be interesting.

The embedded video is dead, but I assume this is the same one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHRlXzRfvpA

Edit: the video claims radiation exposure is equivalent to a 15 minute airplane ride.

"the video claims radiation exposure is equivalent to a 15 minute airplane ride."

That's also the claim the TSA makes about the body-scanners in the airports, yet these are dramatically more powerful (to be able to see through metal). Google (image search) a bit "scanner van" and you'll see these things can penetrate multiple layers of steel (pickup truck bodies, etc.) with no problem. That takes a wee bit more power than looking through cotton jeans and underwear.

Don't forget about the TSA cancer cluster... or the fact that the TSA lied outwardly about the safety of the devices (stating the NIST, which doesn't perform product testing, tested the body scanners and certified them as safe).

Thanks for the link. I wonder how hard it would be to make a wave guide for this band. Or of course a cloaking device which obscures THz frequencies.

On the one hand I'm all in favor of driving these around where there may be active IED activity but less thrilled about having them randomly running through traffic, only to suddenly pull me over because I've got 3 bags of fertilizer for my new grass sod lawn.

The older I get the more I realize I haven't thought too hard about the downside of living in the kind of places one reads about in science fiction.

> On the one hand I'm all in favor of driving these around where there may be active IED activity

That would stop being a good idea once "insurgents" learn what X-rays are.

I wonder how hard it is to make a device which homes in on X-ray devices.... you know... to guide some sort of thing to an x-ray source.....

yeah, I agree. That's a bad idea.

I'm sure it detects all manner of organic and explosive material, like fuel in fuel tanks, and brake fluid and sump oil, and shopping from the supermarket.

Of course you should be able to shield yourself from the harmful effects of the X-rays by sitting behind a thin wall of metal, for example the metal making up your car's body....

Why don't I believe a word of this.

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