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Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans
- georgieporgie 15y agoThe embedded video is dead, but I assume this is the same one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHRlXzRfvpA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHRlXzRfvpA Edit: the video claims radiation exposure is equivalent to a 15 minute airplane ride.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoThanks 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.
- dmoney 15y ago> 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.
- einhverfr 15y agoI 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.
- wbhart 15y agoI'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.
- glabifrons 15y ago"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).
- guard-of-terra 15y agoObligatory Wulff/Morgenthaler http://wulffmorgenthaler.com/strip/2011/02/22/google http://wulffmorgenthaler.com/strip/2011/02/22/google
- tkahn6 15y agoThis article is more than a year old. A follow up would be interesting.
- rdl 15y agoIf 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.
- westbywest 15y agoThe 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.
- rdl 15y agoAccording 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.
- Bud 15y agoI 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.
- reustle 15y ago"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?
- ibejoeb 15y agoBoth 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.
- TruthElixirX 15y agoThe only reason they weren't caught was because of the lack of back scatter vans, right?
- ibejoeb 15y agoRight. Please troll elsewhere.
- ibejoeb 15y agoHah. 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.
- ericd 15y agoSmall correction, the bomb attack on WTC was 1993.
- philwelch 15y agoAhmed Ressam's 2000 plot to bomb LAX involved transporting large amounts of explosives across the US border from Canada by car.
- narkee 15y agoThis 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...
- Cushman 15y agoWell, 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.
- joeguilmette 15y agoDo you, by chance, work for Lucasfilm?
- WalterGR 15y agoI doubt it. Why do you ask? I don't understand.
- joeguilmette 15y agoOops, meant to reply to Cushman, who has no contact info in his profile.
- taylorbuley 15y agoThe 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-reveal-tsa-plan-to-body-scan-pedestrians-train-passengers/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/03/02/docs-re...
- omouse 15y agoThat'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.
- mahyarm 15y agoThen we shouldn't work in voip because governments can spy on peoples conversations, or many other things that are abusable?
- einhverfr 15y agoYou 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.
- nodata 15y agoSo where is the consent to search on this one?
- sage_joch 15y agoWhere 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.
- nodata 15y agoWell 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_in_congress_6928_congress_the/c04n96n http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/6r09d/fisa_passed_...
- noonespecial 15y agoWe 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?
- regularfry 15y agoThe CCD in the camera ought to go bananas, I'd have thought.
- seanp2k2 15y agoThis 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).
- sukuriant 15y agoThe article is a year old
- billpatrianakos 15y agoFrom 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.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ColdAsIce 15y agoSo, you have something in your car to hide? Is that why you switch now. Pot-smoker? Tell us where the pot is bill!
- fluidcruft 15y agoHere'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.
- cluboholic 15y agoat least I hope this craziness stays US only!