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Full-Body Scanners Deployed In Street-Roving Vans
pickens writes "Forbes reports that the same technology used at airport check points, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on US streets where law enforcement agencies have deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs. 'It's no surprise that governments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vans],' says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. 'But from a privacy perspective, it's one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.' Rotenberg adds that the scans, like those in the airport, potentially violate the fourth amendment. 'Without a warrant, the government doesn't have a right to peer beneath your clothes without probable cause,' Rotenberg says. 'If the scans can only be used in exceptional cases in airports, the idea that they can be used routinely on city streets is a very hard argument to make.'"
Ok, how many "violations" have these scanners found that could be linked to something serious. No, some guy who carries a pocketknife daily who forgot to take it out at the airport is not a real threat.
There are three reasons why we haven't had any "terrorist attacks" since 9/11
A) Terrorists are stupid. Its not easy to carry out an attack.
B) People are smarter. Pre-9/11 if your plane got hijacked you simply complied with the hijackers, landed in Cuba, and were on a flight back home later in the day. Today, if someone would try doing that, they would be stopped by the passengers. And unless there was a plane full of terrorists, the number of average passengers are much, much, much higher.
C) Terrorists are rare. There aren't billions of terrorists everywhere, yes, there are a few, but the number of normal people outnumber them by far which makes stopping them very easy.
9/11 was a one shot deal and only was successfully carried out because prior to that the standard operating procedure for dealing with a hijacker as a passenger was to let them do whatever they want and try to survive because they weren't crashing the hijacked planes in buildings.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Neither. The government these days can either selectively decide which parts of the constitution to follow, the courts can selectively decide how to "interpret" it and congress simply ignores the constitution. How many congressmen (excluding Ron Paul) really make an effort to decide whether something is constitutional or not? The PATRIOT act was blatantly unconstitutional yet it passed with little opposition, many, many other laws have been passed that were blatantly unconstitutional that the issue of the constitution wasn't even raised.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"The Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBVs, as the company calls them, bounce a narrow stream of x-rays off and through nearby objects, and read which ones come back."
A doctor needs informed consent to do an X-ray because of the risk from radiation. Why do these people think that they can irradiate people just because they want to? At least, as I understand it, at the airport you can decline to be irradiated and get searched the old fashioned way. With this you have no right to decline, or even knowledge that it happened.
"If" it violates an amendment?
In my uninformed (IANAL, etc.) opinion, this looks quite similar to--and if anything more egregious than--the circumstances in Kyllo v. United States, in which use of thermal imaging to look inside a private home was ruled unconstitutional without a warrant.
..."Google X-ray backscatter view". Germans are really going to love that one!
They were using the x ray vans in Vancouver. I know one person who works as a delivery driver and he got pulled over downtown Van for having several 24L bottles of liquid in his van. Also they were looking for other things too as I also know of one person busted for having 10+ lb of weed in the car while driving through an area where the vans patrolled.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
How many car bombs have we seen lately to justify these actions?
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.