Have you had a bad experience at the airport with full body scanners? You can make a report at EPIC.
EPIC is a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.
EPIC relies on individual citizen support to keep fighting for your rights. They have also filed a lawsuit to stop the use of full body scanners.
The controversy over the full body scanners at airports hasn’t even died down yet and they are starting to be used in vans roving around US streets. According to Forbes, “American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, 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.”
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. Absorbed rays indicate dense material such as steel. Scattered rays indicate less-dense objects that can include explosives, drugs, or human bodies. That capability makes them powerful tools for security, law enforcement, and border control.
“It’s no surprise that goverments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vans],” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “But from a privacy perspective, it’s one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”
It’s no surprise that law enforcement are so happy about these vans. They can infringe on your privacy without you even knowing about it. AS&E claims that there isn’t a need to worry about these vans because they don’t see as well as the airport scanners. They are attempting to deflect privacy advocates from the fact that these vans still violate a person’s privacy and their fourth amendment rights. Unlike the airports and the TSA, AS&E freely admit that these scanners can save the pictures that it takes.
Despite the fact that the feds said that messages couldn’t be saved, but could be saved for training purposes and despite the fact that the feds reassured everyone that this function was not turned on in working machines and they wouldn’t be abused, they have now admitted that the function is turned on and some law enforcement agencies are using it.
Read the rest of my article at The Daily Censored.
On July 20, 2010, the Department of Homeland Security announced a substantial change in the deployment of body scanners in US airports. According to the DHS Secretary, the devices, which had once been part of a pilot program for seconary screening, will now be deployed in 28 additional airports. The devices are designed to capture and store photographic images of naked air travelers. EPIC has filed an emergency motion in federal court, urging the suspension of the program and citing violations of several federal statutes and the Fourth Amendment. Public opposition to the program is also growing. For more information, see EPIC v. DHS (Body scanners) and EPIC Body Scanners.
Despite the fact that most citizens do no want internet monitoring, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano continues to claim that it is needed to prevent terrorism and she believes that the trade-off with respect to civil liberties is worth it. Napolitano believes that a balance can be found and that the government needs to continue its pursuit of terrorists especially now that homegrown American terrorists are appearing more frequently.
“The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet,” Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
Napolitano said it is wrong to believe that if security is embraced, liberty is sacrificed.
She added, “We can significantly advance security without having a deleterious impact on individual rights in most instances. At the same time, there are situations where trade-offs are inevitable.”As an example, she noted the struggle to use full-body scanners at airports caused worries that they would invade people’s privacy.
The scanners are useful in identifying explosives or other nonmetal weapons that ordinary metal-detectors might miss — such as the explosives that authorities said were successfully brought on board the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
One major problem with the full body scanners is that, despite the administration’s constant nagging that the scans can’t be saved, we know that they can be. Our constitutional rights also allow us to say we do not want to go through the scanners and would rather have a pat down.
The Constitution and our form of government was created to protect our civil rights and civil liberties from a government that would prefer to keep tabs on every aspect of every citizens’ lives.
If we continue to erode civil liberties in this country, we might as well just dig up Joe McCarthy and ask him for some tips on how to control the citizenry. The Bush administration said that the Patriot Act was necessary for the same reasons. We had to find the terrorists whether they were here or abroad.
This same story keeps getting pushed more and more over the past few months, which makes one begin to wonder why it’s so important. The smart “terrorists” will, of course, use codes or stay off the internet completely. The government won’t be able to stop those that are truly determined. What will happen is people will feel safe in yet more security theater while the government starts to monitor any website they deem to be anti-government. This is how it always works. It doesn’t matter which party has the power, they all do the same thing.
