Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans
forbes.com
forbes.com
No thank you.
I have nothing to hide, but I fear what others might want to look for and why.
I'll come right out and say it – the balance of power between the common citizen and the government has shifted way too far in favor of the government. More and more we accept invasive search/oversight from powers who continue to deny the public the same sort of transparency and insight.
"Who watches the watchmen?", indeed.
edit: in case this isn't glaringly obvious, the joke is that we do have our own lobbyists. They're called congress.
They're just horrible lobbyists.
I guess I can see your point, but I think, in general, lobbyists are thought of as external to the congressional establishment, despite the similarity in possible roles, such as you point out... well, at least that's the way it works in my head, fwiw.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/american-people-hire-highpo...
To make this clearer: the way the system is set up, your Congressman isn't lobbying for any individual, they're lobbying for a percentage of the voting block that is sufficient to return them to Congress next vote. This is why campaigning on single issues is so common, and so successful for power-blocs such as the Christian Right.
(This isn't to go into gerrymandering, which further skews the 'democratic' input of your system. If you didn't already know that only ~8-12 seats in Congress are actually contested in terms of party fealty, you really, really, really should do).
This is where I think current "politics" is lagging many decades behind modern society.
Politicians are fundamentally geographically defined. They get voted in (or out) by groups of people with no relationship with each other beyond happening to live nearby. That idea worked out fine when your village was your whole life, and it works OK for "big issues" that affect everyone (like taxation, education, military), but there are a lot of issues where there is more than enough public support to deserve representation but that support is not geographically localized enough for the current system to give the people concerned a voice.
So many of the things I end up shouting at the television or newspapers about are in this category.
What _I'd_ love to be able to vote for:
A Congressman for The Internet
A Congressman for Copyright and Patents
A Congressman for Motorcyclists
A Congressman for Citizens Rights WRT Government & Law Enforcement
Instead, the issues that concern _me_ are debated and voted on by people who don't give a damn because they know there's not enough geeks/musicians/inventors/entrepreneurs/motorcyclists/libertarians geographically clustered enough to make any difference at the polling booth, and so the only issues that ever get addressed are ones with a local enough aspect to risk having a likely effect on a city/state/federal elections outcome.
Society has spread beyond having my circle of friends and acquaintances being "other people in my village" - and in the last 20 years the internet has magnified that change enormously, political and legal structures haven't changed to reflect that. (and may never - my circle of friends crosses national boundaries in ways that probably make my desires of how I'm personally politically represented impossible)
There aren't really that many corn farmers out there. Maybe you meant "a large percentage of her campaign donors are corn farmers"?
Are they really? I suspect a lot of representatives are successful largely due to their ability to get federal funds directed toward their districts. The point I would want to make isn't that representatives should be better at shuffling money around, but rather that the whole game shouldn't be about shuffling money around.
- "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
We don't need to justify privacy rights. The constitution already does that.
IR sensors used on a home constituted a search so could not be used without a warrant. This would likely end up in a similar ruling, especially since it can provide more detail than that the walls and roof are hotter than they ought to be.
That's a very narrow victory though.
Yes, but at least three major parts of the dissenting opinion do not apply to backscatter machines.
First, Justice Stevens argued that heat emissions can easily be detected by the general public by a variety of means that do not involve special equipment.
Secondly, he argued that heat emissions are a part of the public domain once they leave the home, and are therefore fair game for inspection.
Finally, he argued that because the data provided by the sensors was incredibly crude, and gave no specific details about the home's contents, their use did not constitute a search.
And while I disagree on the whole, all of those are at least reasonable points that a sane person could make regarding IR sensors. But they utterly disintegrate if you switch to talking about firing x-rays into someone's home or car and generating a detailed image of its contents.
I can see an eager SWAT team ready to raid that family house on the corner because since they have those shields they must be terrorist, or at least doing something illegal!
In addition to privacy, I'm just as concerned about the potential danger of exposure to X-rays.
I wonder how long it'll be before things like this become "prohibited items" to regular citizens to own: http://www.cooking-hacks.com/index.php/documentation/tutoria...
A network of those with bluetooth or wifi connections, spread around critical intersections around the place where you're particularly concerned about your privacy could give you more than enough time to reconfigure things into something that'll look quite different on an x ray screen...
*Or the sort of people who construct IEDs?
But I understand the 4th Amendment to engender a freedom from scrutiny. If they don't have any reason to thing we're doing evil, they should mind their own business, regardless of the degree of physical intrusiveness involved.
Just having the government, or its computers, paying attention to us all the time violates this principle.
The intent of the BoR is just to keep the government from meddling, not to prevent the people, as those directly creating the culture and society, to react as they see fit. The government isn't permitted to stop us from saying bad things [2], but you're perfectly free to respond to the offensive comments of your neighbor. A court mind find someone innocent of a crime as a result of "technicalities" from the the 4th Amendment, but you're still free to shun a person that you believe to be evil.
[1] And, without explicit incorporation by the Court under the 14th Amendment, it applies only to the federal government and not the states. That seems pedantic, but it was only very recently that this was recognized for the 2nd Amendment, for example.
[2] Which doesn't stop them from doing so anyway; see recent legislation about cyber-bullying, for example.
so of course, disputes generally hinge on whether someone's subjective expectation of privacy is objectively reasonable or legitimate.
when i get a minute i'll edit this post with some examples!
Even though it's perfectly legal for a neighbor to notice something potentially suspicious about me (e.g. that I travel a lot or have a lot of guests), I don't think that taxpayer money should be used for concerted observational efforts without some form of court order.
Years of precedent in the form of case law do also weigh in, as others have mentioned.
Just say'n is all...
Honestly? You're hard-pressed to see how x-ray vision into people's cars is a privacy concern?
IIRC, they struck down heat images of houses without warrants because they reveal too much about the inhabitants' activities. This is way worse.
http://www.aclu.org/national-security_technology-and-liberty...
See?
the supreme court (led by scalia) has said that "heat-sensor" searches of homes are illegal. it's true there's a diminished expectation of privacy in vehicles, but i'd be very surprised if the x-ray vans withstood a legal challenge.
just recently, there was also a unanimous opinion also that held that warrantless gps tracking is unconstitutional.
in my opinion, the biggest problem faced by the court in fourth amendment cases isn't political pressure, but the subjective notions of privacy of the individual justices. they've lived lives that are very different than those of the average american, and as a result i think their perception of what makes an expectation of privacy reasonable is a bit off
They could have a doctor ride along and examine the x-rays of the people they scan. The program could then be legal under an Health Care mandate! Easy solution!
OK. Not so funny... that's why I'm not a comedian.
Whoa, I missed the "Health Care mandate" Constitutional amendment. Regular laws cannot override the Constitution, which says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The roving X-ray vans are missing a warrant, probable cause, and a description of "the place to be searched".
Assuming the machines are properly serviced and not faulty.
(What? You mean that TSA goons get to shoot X-rays at people without having to take the same courses as doctors, dentists, and medical techs, including state certification and continuing-ed requirements?! Sign me up!)
The company’s vice president of marketing Joe Reiss told me in an interview that any dosage received by a human from these backscatter vans would be "exceedingly small," far smaller than a medical x-ray. He says that the vans’ dosage falls well within the health standards set by American National Standards Institute, and AS&E’s marketing materials say that the scan’s x-ray levels are equivalent to the dosage received in fifteen minutes inside a typical airplane.
Obviously, these things can't be turning up everywhere, or that remote possibility that a person would be scanned over 1000 times per year is all-of-a-sudden not so remote. Some regulation is clearly needed.
[Another interesting question is how the drivers of these vans are protected from cumulative radiation exposure, as these X-rays are being scattered around them all day.]
I'm guessing it won't be long until law enforcement agencies start using these when they have "probable cause".
I also suspect that, like airport scanners, these scans amount to nothing more than security theater and pork-barreling for contractors with government ins.
Nor do I trust that those machines in a van are calibrated properly - they may be emitting far more x-rays than they're supposed to. Who'd know?
An insurance company could buy scans of cars linked to license plates to see if you are gaining weight over time, or how often you smoke. That's what I came up with after a couple of minutes of thinking. I think this technology should be criminalized.
If you think about this, and how this country looked like 7 years ago, where is this all going? I cannot imagine all the changes by the time I will be dead, in 50 years from now, approx.
Honestly, if applied broad spectrum (pedestrians, passenger vehicles, etc) what is the legality of what I conceal on my person or in the privacy of my car? What if I'm in a public space and I have a concealed weapon but a permit to do so? How do the differentiate in that situation?
I really don't like this at all. I love how the company making this product is called 'American Science & Engineering' and if this is applied on a street level it's one of the most un-American things I've seen.
Stuff like this makes me sad about where this country is heading.
The chickens have already flown the coop.
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."