[sustran] Re: The safer streets of Bloomberg's NYC (?): NYPD and
Pentagon to place mobile body scanners on the streets
Michael Kodransky
mkodransky at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 26 02:54:42 JST 2012
Russia Today (RT) is the propaganda mouthpiece of the Russian government. Nearly all of their reporting on issues in the US are meant to raise alarm based on speculation and conspiracy theories. This is not a credible news source.
________________________________
From: Todd Edelman <edelman at greenidea.eu>
To: WorldStreets at yahoogroups.com; 'Sustran List' <Sustran-discuss at list.jca.apc.org>
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 12:42 AM
Subject: [sustran] The safer streets of Bloomberg's NYC (?): NYPD and Pentagon to place mobile body scanners on the streets
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
edelman at greenidea.eu
www.greenidea.eu
Skype: toddedelman
https://www.facebook.com/Iamtoddedelman
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http://de.linkedin.com/in/toddedelman
Urbanstr. 45
10967 Berlin
Germany
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