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defrogITEM: You know those backscatter x-ray machines that airports want to use to scan you for explosives and take pictures of you naked?
They’re also being disguised as delivery vans in order to do drive-by scans on parked cars, trucks, vans and, well, anything next to a curb.
Informative yet slightly creepy company video follows.
Reiss claims that the vans aren’t going to be capturing images of naked people, at least not to the same degree as airport scanners.
On the other hand, that’s not really the point. This kind of thing raises all kinds of 4th Amendment issues about privacy, search warrants and police oversight.
What grates even more is that there isn’t any real public discussion about whether it should even be allowed – these vans are just being quietly sold and deployed as though no reasonable person could possibly find anything wrong with giving the police the ability to search yr car electronically in passing and bust you for whatever they find. The abuse potential is staggering.
That said, I can’t imagine a conviction based on something like this would hold up in court without a challenge, so we may see a court decision on this a few years from now.
As for the inevitable “But if yr doing nothing wrong, what have you got to hide?” argument in favor of things like this, this essay on privacy is recommended reading.
Drive-by voyeur,
This is dF
They’re also being disguised as delivery vans in order to do drive-by scans on parked cars, trucks, vans and, well, anything next to a curb.
American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, 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, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.
Informative yet slightly creepy company video follows.
Reiss claims that the vans aren’t going to be capturing images of naked people, at least not to the same degree as airport scanners.
On the other hand, that’s not really the point. This kind of thing raises all kinds of 4th Amendment issues about privacy, search warrants and police oversight.
What grates even more is that there isn’t any real public discussion about whether it should even be allowed – these vans are just being quietly sold and deployed as though no reasonable person could possibly find anything wrong with giving the police the ability to search yr car electronically in passing and bust you for whatever they find. The abuse potential is staggering.
That said, I can’t imagine a conviction based on something like this would hold up in court without a challenge, so we may see a court decision on this a few years from now.
As for the inevitable “But if yr doing nothing wrong, what have you got to hide?” argument in favor of things like this, this essay on privacy is recommended reading.
Drive-by voyeur,
This is dF
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no subject
on 2010-09-04 03:29 am (UTC)But I will still take the barrel of rum.
no subject
on 2010-09-04 04:58 am (UTC)