Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners • Hacker News Board

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#21

Post by tsaoutourpants » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 9:05 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #18

potatolicious wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. One has to remember that having seen the flip side of the urban coin, New York City has taken the stance that quality of life o…

> Both stop and frisk as well as the bag searches on the subway do not pass even a cursory constitutionality examination, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone. Correction: "s/anyone./white people, and we don't pay much attention to whining from those other people./" The point of this was that the cops were supposed to stop and talk to people (685,724 in 2011) and frisk those if the officer is reasonably suspicious…

All on point. These new scanners essentially allow the NYPD to conduct virtual stop-and-frisks, and now the public won't be able to sue them because they won't even know they're being searched!

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#22

Post by tsaoutourpants » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 9:08 PM UTC

josh_fyi wrote: post #20

tsaoutourpants wrote: post #2

Original author here... thanks for posting! :) I filed the first lawsuit against the TSA's nude body scanners when they became primary screening in 2010, and you may also remember me from my "How to Get Anything Through TSA Nude Body Scanners" video. Today I filed suit against New York City for attempting to introduce street body scanners that can look under your clothes from afar. It is unfortunate that it seems tha…

Thanks for fighting the good fight! Just curious ... when you fly, do you get hassled or barred from the plane?

Not more than the average citizen. It actually shocks me that the TSA has never seemed to recognize me, especially in light of the fact that my name is in front of them to see and I always opt-out (except when embarrassing them on video, of course ;)).

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#23

Post by ScottBurson » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

tsaoutourpants wrote: post #4

hnwh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not to mention the health concerns of going around randomly Xray-ing people... "A cancer for you.. and a cancer for you.. "

These devices, as best I can tell, actually don't come with a radiation risk. They're passive scanners, meaning they don't emit their own radiation. TSA scanners on the other hand... ;)

I'm pretty sure you're mistaken. Terahertz waves are absorbed by the atmosphere, so those emitted by the sun don't reach the Earth's surface. So a terahertz scanner has to emit its own radiation.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#24

Post by tsaoutourpants » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

bcoates wrote: post #6

Are there practical materials to make hoodies and/or jeans out of that are opaque to these devices?

There are tons of ways to defeat it. If the courts don't stop the scanners, I plan to design and market a scan-proof holster :)

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#25

Post by jack-r-abbit » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 9:11 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #14

danso wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that's true. I forgot that the NYPD can search through all of your stuff when you enter a subway, but you have the right to refuse and just not take the subway (at least at that station)

In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. One has to remember that having seen the flip side of the urban coin, New York City has taken the stance that quality of life o…

In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary.

Being a frequent user of BART (SF Bay Area Rapid Transit), I understand where you are coming from about how so many people have come to really rely on the public transit systems. But I don't think the NYC subway or BART is anymore critical than air travel. If you were not able to take the subway, you do have other options (bus, cab, walk, etc). Yes... those other options are a lot less convenient and/or more costly, but the same can be said of the alternatives to air travel (bus, train, car, etc).

Every time I go through the Trans-Bay Tube (the BART tunnel under the bay that connects all East Bay BART lines to San Francisco), I think "imagine the chaos it would cause if a suicide bomber detonated a bomb on a train in the tube." So many people use this to commute in both directions, the Bay Area would screech to a halt. That would have devastating effects on the economy (both locally and nationally). I imagine the same can be said if that happened in one of the subway tunnels. I don't think it is too far out of "reasonable" to want to protect them like we want to protect airplanes. That being said, the TSA is a huge failure and should not be used as a model for how to protect the railways.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#26

Post by tsaoutourpants » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 9:11 PM UTC

gnosis wrote: post #19

tsaoutourpants wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These devices, as best I can tell, actually don't come with a radiation risk. They're passive scanners, meaning they don't emit their own radiation. TSA scanners on the other hand... ;)

What makes you think they're passive scanners?

Check the mfgr Web site :)

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#27

Post by tsaoutourpants » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 9:13 PM UTC

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #10

tsaoutourpants wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These devices, as best I can tell, actually don't come with a radiation risk. They're passive scanners, meaning they don't emit their own radiation. TSA scanners on the other hand... ;)

Personally I see the potential for false positives as rendering them mostly useless in a crowd setting.

IDK if a crowd would make them less effective, but there is certainly ample opportunity for false positives -- or worse, cops pretending to get a false positive to justify a manual intrusion.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#28

Post by darkarmani » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 9:21 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #14

danso wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that's true. I forgot that the NYPD can search through all of your stuff when you enter a subway, but you have the right to refuse and just not take the subway (at least at that station)

In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. One has to remember that having seen the flip side of the urban coin, New York City has taken the stance that quality of life o…

> Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary

I agree with you, which is why in the grandparent post i said "kinda." I think it is a HUGE constitutional stretch to not have freedom of movement on public transportation systems. Roads and sidewalks are public transportation systems, so why shouldn't we have constitutional protections on public subways/buses?

The next level of chipping away at this is to have quasi-goverment agencies (government owned corporations, etc) like the one controlling the GW bridge. It pissed me off when the GW bridge used to have signs that said "Photography is prohibited." I really wanted to start a website collecting photographs of the GW bridge, just to show how useless the ban was.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#29

Post by king_jester » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 9:40 PM UTC

jack-r-abbit wrote: post #25

potatolicious wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. One has to remember that having seen the flip side of the urban coin, New York City has taken the stance that quality of life o…

In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. Being a frequent user of BART (SF Bay Area Rapid Transit), I understand where you are coming from about how so many people have…

> Being a frequent user of BART (SF Bay Area Rapid Transit), I understand where you are coming from about how so many people have come to really rely on the public transit systems. But I don't think the NYC subway or BART is anymore critical than air travel. If you were not able to take the subway, you do have other options (bus, cab, walk, etc). Yes... those other options are a lot less convenient and/or more costly, but the same can be said of the alternatives to air travel (bus, train, car, etc).

These forms of transit aren't even close in comparison. They serve different kinds of traffic density, the cost to ride is not even in the same ballpark, and it is NOT feasible to travel around NYC without access to the subway unless you have a large amount of money to spend on cabs (chain bus transit is not time effective for traversing boroughs).

In fact, the NYPD relies on the fact that traveling in any way other than subway is so much of a PITA that people will mostly accept a subway search. Those searches are at the discretion of the officers present, which as we've seen with stop and frisk becomes a racist, classist implementation.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#30

Post by mjmahone17 » Mon, Jan 28, 2013, 9:45 PM UTC

jack-r-abbit wrote: post #25

potatolicious wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. One has to remember that having seen the flip side of the urban coin, New York City has taken the stance that quality of life o…

In NYC the subway is critical infrastructure, as important as electricity or water, denial of its use should not be taken lightly. Denial of this service to people who would not submit to a search, IMO, makes this highly coercive and the search can no longer be considered strictly voluntary. Being a frequent user of BART (SF Bay Area Rapid Transit), I understand where you are coming from about how so many people have…

In much the same way as a public park is a piece of the public infrastructure, and so no one ought be denied use/be forced to assent to a search prior to using, except for constitutional cause, public transit systems ought follow the same rules.