[sustran] The safer streets of Bloomberg's NYC (?): NYPD and Pentagon to place mobile body scanners on the streets

Todd Edelman edelman at greenidea.eu
Fri Jan 20 14:42:46 JST 2012


The question I hope people ask themselves is if they should be silent 
about this since under Bloomberg the streets of NYC are getting safer in 
regards to traffic....

- Todd

***

http://rt.com/usa/news/nypd-scanners-new-york-115/

*The safer streets of NYC (?): NYPD and Pentagon to place mobile body 
scanners on the streets*

New York City's war on freedom could be adding a new weapon to its 
arsenal, especially if NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has his say.

The head of the New York Police Department is working with the Pentagon 
to secure body scanners to be used throughout the Big Apple.

If Kelly gets his wish, the city will be receiving a whole slew of 
Terahertz Imagining Detection scanners, a high-tech radiation detector 
that measures the energy that is emitted from a persons' body. As CBS 
News reports,/"It measures the energy radiating from a body up to 16 
feet away, and can detect anything blocking it, like a gun."/

What it can also do, however, is allow the NYPD to conduct illegal 
searches by means of scanning anyone walking the streets of New York. 
Any object on your person could be privy to the eyes of the detector, 
and any suspicious screens can prompt police officers to search someone 
on suspicion of having a gun, or anything else under their clothes.

According to Commissioner Kelly, the scanners would only be used 
in/"reasonably suspicious circumstances,"/but what constitutes 
"suspicious" in the eyes of the NYPD could greatly differ from what the 
8 million residents of the five boroughs have in mind.

The American Civil Liberties Union has already questioned the NYPD over 
what they say is an unnecessary precaution that raises more issues than 
it solves.

/"It's worrisome. It implicates privacy, the right to walk down the 
street without being subjected to a virtual pat-down by the Police 
Department when you're doing nothing wrong,"/Donna Lieberman of the 
NYCLU says to CBS.

The scanners also raise the question of whether such searches would even 
be legal under the US Constitution. Under the Fourth Amendment, 
Americans are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures. Does 
scoping out what's on someone's person fall under the same category as a 
hands-on frisk, though?

To the NYPD, it might not matter. In the first quarter of 2011, more 
than 161,000 innocent New Yorkers were stopped and interrogated on the 
streets of the city. Figures released by the NYPD in May of last year 
revealed that of the over 180,000 stop-and-frisk encounters reported by 
the police department, 88 percent of them ended in neither an arrest nor 
a summons, leading many to assume that New York cops are already going 
above and beyond the law by searching seemingly anyone they chose. 
Additionally, of those 161,000-plus victims, around 84 percent were 
either black or Latino. At the time, the ACLU's Lieberman wrote,/"The 
NYPD is turning black and brown neighborhoods across New York City into 
Constitution-free zones."/

Given the alarming statistics, many already feel that officers within 
the ranks of the NYPD are overzealous with their monitoring of New 
Yorkers, regularly stopping them for unknown suspicions that nearly 
nine-out-of-ten times prove false. With the installation of the 
Terahertz Imagining Detection scanners though, those invasive physical 
searches wouldn't just be replaced with a touchless, more intrusive 
monitoring, but will only allow New Yorkers one more reason to fear 
walking the streets.

/"If they search you, you're not giving consent, so they can do what 
they want, meaning they can use that as an excuse to search you for 
other means. I don't think that's constitutional at all,"/New Yorker 
Devan Thomas tells CBS.

/"There are a lot of cameras already here, so as people walk they're 
being filmed. And most of the time they don't know it,"/adds Jennifer 
Bailly.

A lot is somewhat of an understatement. In Manhattan alone there are 
over 2,000 surveillance cameras, public and private, aimed at every 
passerby. That number is the same as the tally of both McDonalds and 
Starbucks on the island, combined, multiplied by a factor of eight.

CBS News adds that the plan puts the NYPD in direct cooperation with the 
Department of Defense, who is working on testing the scanners to find a 
way to bring them to the streets. Such a joint effort opens up questions 
about other endeavors the Pentagon could have planned out with the NYPD 
in the past, and certainly doesn't mark the first time that New York's 
boys in blue have worked hand-in-hand with federal agencies. Last year a 
report surfaced linking the NYPD to the CIA, as documents became 
available showing a connection between the local police department and 
government spies installing secret agents into Muslim majority 
communities in New York.

By using scanners such as the Terahertz Imagining detectors, however, 
New Yorkers will be forced to endure more than just an unknown number of 
eyes prying under their clothes. The consequences could be biologically 
catastrophic, with the scanning technique tied to problems with the 
human body's ability to operate. According to MIT's Technology Review, 
the THz waves used by the scanners/"unzip double-stranded DNA, creating 
bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with 
processes such as gene expression and DNA replication."/


-- 
Todd Edelman
Green Idea Factory / SLOWFactory

Mobile: ++49(0)162 814 4081

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