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US Marshals Saved 35,000 Full Body Scans
PatPending writes "A Gizmodo investigation has revealed 100 of the photographs saved by the Gen 2 millimeter-wave scanner from Brijot Imaging Systems, Inc., obtained by a FOIA request after it was recently revealed that US Marshals operating the machine in the Orlando, Florida courthouse had improperly — perhaps illegally — saved [35,000] images [low resolution] of the scans of public servants and private citizens."
The more these assholes abuse their power, the less willing the public will be to entrust power to them.
Oh god, who am I kidding?..
We all knew it would happen sooner or later. So, when does Bodyscanporn.com open up? :)
~Bchickens
And they'll get about as much of a punishment as Charles Rangel.
Like maybe: "The officers involved have received reprimands that will go in their permanent record."
If someone is going to invade my privacy for pointless security theater, I might as well make it as uncomfortable and inconvenient for them as possible. In airports, I always opt for frisking instead backscatter. No pictures to save then, either.
No, it's the fact that the data isn't supposed to be stored. They're retaining the data illegally. That's what we're supposed to be even more worried about--the abuse of the system.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
No, what you should be worried about is that other people are concerned, and the government that represents them doesn't give a shit.
You should be concerned that the government that represents them lied to everyone and said that images could not be saved on the machines that the TSA was getting.
You should be concerned that you are being asked to give up more and more privacy, now the privacy of what is under your clothes and in your pockets, for little more than the simple assertion that it is needed, with nothing of significance to show any real credible threat whatsoever.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I thought that for passengers' privacy, the nude-o-scope operator was in another room with no view of the real person, but these photographs match each person with their scan so there obviously is a simple way to view person both clothed and naked! ohhh, the opportunities...
Did anybody else notice that in some of the images the people well behind the pad (but still in the image frame) are showing up as well? Just how much EM do these things ACTUALLY emit?
You mean the same machines that we're repeatedly told cannot save images? The ones people don't like because of the privacy invasion and the answer is always "the machines cannot save images"?
Who is actually surprised by this?
Is anyone really surprised? Have you ever met a mall security guard, bouncer, airport monkey who wasn't a complete power abusing ass? Face it people do give them grief and it can be a shitty job so the only people that are going to take it are the type who are looking to bully the public.
None of the politicians would stand by any government servant. If there is one thing civil servants know, it is when the shit hits the fan, one of them will be scape goated. Media would be going fanning the flames. All those liberatarians and the small government conservatives and the "tax cuts will solve everything" crowd will be silent, very very silent. There will be no one to tell in the media frenzy, "It is sad it happened, but it can't prevented without serious invasion of privacy of millions of people and huge expansion of the government and law enforcement expenditure."
Next time a terrorist blows up a plane, stand up and say, "yeah, it is sad and tragic. But we as a country have gone through far worse. We lost a million soldiers in WW II. 50K in Vietnam. Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, London were all bombed mercilessly. We survived. Compared to that it losing two buildings and 3000 people is nothing. If we cower in our shoes and crap in pants, the terrorists have won. Just let us go back to normalcy." But no one will.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Saying "the pictures will never be saved" is known as a "Pie Crust Promise" - easily made, easily broken. Here is some interesting reading on similar promises from the government, especially on how the SSN will never be used for identification. http://www.scragged.com/articles/the-plague-of-presidential-pie-crust-promises . The moral is never EVER trust the government .
Trains don't fall from the sky. They run on electric power. Carry many more people than planes. Stops right in the middle of downtown, origin and destination, no trip to and from the airport needed. Sometimes you can just get on, no papers or checking at all, and buy the ticket later on board. Sometimes there is a restaurant car, or a bar car. You can see the scenery, it is less than a yard away from your window. You have long seats, tables, lots of space, walk around the cars. You can get off at the next town, walk around, and take the next train. There are almost never any accidents. Did I say it's electric?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Bush's Fatherland Security czar, Michael Chertoff, profits from the sale of the nudie-scanners.
http://gawker.com/5437499/why-is-michael-chertoff-so-excited-about-full+body-scanners
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/full-body-scanner-lobby-michael-chertoff-rapiscan-2552674.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2627190/posts
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/01/airport-scanner-scam
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
The TSA is now groping women's breasts and little kids genitals. (See the recent video of a girl crying, "Stop touching me!"
And I just now heard an interview with an American is being punished $11,000 by the U.S.G. because he refused to be scanned, or groped by the TSA, so the guards told him, "You cannot fly." He then canceled his ticket, got a refund, left the airport, and was arrested for leaving the area.
Apparently once you enter an air terminal, you no longer have any rights... except to submit to the US Gestapo and their warrantless/illegal searches.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You're absolutely correct, but at the same time, let's not forget that such abuses occur because those in power deliberately lie to the people. That is what the Gizmodo article proves--that the public is intentionally told falsehoods so that the government can continue their abuse. It isn't the individual screener or machine that is the root of corruption. Rather, the corruption is systematic, in the form of a security agency that tells people that their privacy is assured when it is not. They do this because it makes their task more expedient, and gives the impression of effectiveness. Much the same can be said of the deliberate provocation of fear as a means of gaining more power and control.
I repeat: the corruption is systematic. Yes, you can remove the opportunity to exploit weaknesses and the lack of accountability, but this is a piecemeal approach to fixing the larger underlying problem, which is that we have a system that is accountable to no one, that is fundamentally disinterested in serving its stated purpose, and exists for the sole purpose of allowing those in power to concentrate their influence through the use of scare tactics and lies. In other words, we wouldn't need to stop individual enforcement officers from violating people's privacy, and we wouldn't need the regulations to do so, if we didn't need to subject people to these scans in the first place. This technology didn't always exist, yet people weren't being blown out of the skies every day for the lack of it. There's an unspoken, and therefore largely unchallenged, assumption that this kind of screening is necessary--which on the face of it is an absurd claim, for if it were, the only rational way to use it would be to apply it to everybody. And I need not state the myriad ways in which someone with half a brain would still find it trivial to circumvent it.
What is needed is a drastic change, one in which the people reassert their control over the government that purports to serve them. I doubt this will happen, but nevertheless it is the only viable solution.
1. radiation exposure and some mall cop staring at my dick. with pictures for permanent internet memories
2. some mall cop groping my dick
i choose 3: fuck flying. taking the airplane is a burdensome horrendous experience that just keeps getting worse and worse. it makes driving 20 hours seem more attractive than flying 4 hours
"the terrorists have won" is a lame trite statement, but it's true. they've permanently altered our society to turn us into scared cattle and they've permanently made airplanes a hellish unattractive transportation method
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So where are the political people who promised us it was "impossible" for the images from these scanners to be saved? It was clearly a manufacturing possibility that the images could be stored. And the rule of operation is that "if it can be done, it will be".
Geeky systems observation:
There needs to be a better political process where, when the political message is later proven to be a lie, we can shoot the original messenger. Because without negative feedback the system will continue to run amok. The current political process is not good enough and has a large enough time lag that corrective factors build up and sever oscillations occur.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_margin
Next Wednesday: http://www.optoutday.com/
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Who cares whether the machines can save images or not anyway? Any screener with a camera phone could just take a picture of the screen.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
They're retaining the data illegally.
No one really seems to care if anything is illegal anymore, as long as it isn't a "classic" crime like assault, robbery, murder, drugs, or the like. The notion of illegality is as benign and dead as ever. Now it seems, laws are merely for retaining and furthering the authoritative reach of those in power, not as a code by which we determine what constitutes a crime.
... against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." Shall not be violated. Here I was, locked in a bathroom with two police officers, being searched, all because I didn't get lucky when somebody went searching for a promotion in a post-Columbine fear state.
I've had money stolen by Fortune 500 companies and those employees laugh at me after I read the applicable laws aloud to them, even though they were clearly -- even personally -- in violation. It's all just a joke, a game. Of course, they win, because it wasn't enough dollars and cents to coerce me into jumping through all the necessary hoops and sending of all the paperwork to the various & mysterious government entities whom I would need to reach out to in order to even have "THE LAW" enforced.
Nearly ten years ago, I was searched every single day before class my senior year. I dropped out because they wouldn't stop and I was sick of it. No due process. There were no charges, no arrest, no evidence -- nothing. Just some overzealous police officer saying I did something (I didn't), and that being enough. The police are the authorities on reality now, I suppose. Be searched, or be denied an education! No one cared at the school, the local school board, the state department of education, the ACLU, the attorney general's office -- whoever I reached out to. Couldn't even find any money-grubbing lawyers to take on the district. I was only seventeen, a definite no one. Why should they care? There are no consequences if they don't.
There, in the corner of a locked bathroom, lay the United States Constitution trampled, battered, abused, and with a page upturned to the fourth amendment, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons
So, the law is dead. It's because nobody cares. No one is individually accountable. Nothing matters as long as you can have your TV dinner in front of a friendly glowing screen made just to keep your empty mind company; crawl under your made-in-China blanket at night; and sidle up to that wife of yours you met staring down the packets of pet niblets at the grocery store in the dog food aisle.
Take away a person's false sense of security and all of the comforts of modernity, perhaps they'll have time or be more inclined to think about trivial, meaningless things such as "sense-makery" and "justice."
not much, just being forced to manually insert line breaks into my comment
This isn't the ONLY thing either...
Big Sis Caught Lying To American People
http://www.infowars.com/big-sis-caught-lying-to-american-people/
Video: Big Sis Caught Lying
http://www.prisonplanet.com/video-big-sis-caught-lying.html
'Naked' scanners at US airports may be dangerous: scientists
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h08khPyFPinX_4vNYd1JZwn8hV4Q?docId=CNG.442824fa7c08853af96322d7315a6f02.461
Shocker: TSA Has Been Molesting Children For Years
http://www.prisonplanet.com/shocker-tsa-has-been-molesting-children-for-years.html
TSA Now Putting Hands Down Fliers’ Pants
http://www.prisonplanet.com/tsa-now-putting-hands-down-fliers-pants.html
TSA Gives Rapists And Illegals The Green Light While Groping Children
http://www.prisonplanet.com/tsa-gives-rapists-and-illegals-the-green-light-while-groping-children.html
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Damn the people of the US are fat!
Perhaps you're too young to remember or just trying to bash Obama, but I seem to recall during the Bush administration that the telcos were all coerced to enable illegal blanket wiretaps on US citizens without warrants. These airport x-ray devices weren't invented, developed, and deployed in just two years. The rollout was initiated during the Bush administration. It was he who authorized the creation of an entire additional government department, the Department of Homeland Security. Talk about increasing government spending unnecessarily by duplicating efforts... Why won't the tea-partiers call it like it is?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Lying about this is unconscionable, but I can see a valid reason for them wanting to save such things: it lets you know how they were defeated last time.
Suppose that somebody does manage to sneak something deadly on board. If this were a bug in a piece of software, you'd all want to leap to reconstructing the event, and you'd be irked if you knew you had deliberately thrown away a crucial piece of information. Especially since if it happened once, it could happen again. So you'd have to go on lockdown.
I'm NOT trying to justify this. Lying bad, radiation bad, groping bad, virtual strip search bad, TSA bad, pictures always leak, terrorists winning, Orwell right, etc. I'm good with all that.
But I'm a bit surprised that they didn't even try to make the case for saving the pictures, perhaps with an public key encryption and the private key kept only on a piece of paper locked in a safe somewhere. I guess they felt it was futile; people are uncomfortable enough about the pictures as it is.
Child porn.
Why should I care about the low-res crap copped from some security scanners?
Seriously, as long as they don't give me cancer (which is iffy so I'm "opting out" until "the science is in") or cause growths (like a second head,) who gives a fuck?
Hell, if they turn the heat up in winter, I'll walk naked through the airport. It won't be pretty but neither is comedy.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What I would personally like to see is someone with a young child, preferably female that instructs their child to start screaming if anyone touches their genitals.
link... have you called your airline contacts and congresscritters? I sure have.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
This is a scam.
These scanners were promoted by Michael Cherfoff, Head of Homeland Security under W.
Now he is CEO of the Chertoff Group, and is lobbying for Rapiscan, which makes these very machines at issue here. How convenient.