Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 61 posts

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#31

Post by alxndr »

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…

I would think that NYC's subway is vastly more important to the NYC area than BART is to the SF area.

"During the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, BART recorded an average weekday ridership of 366,565, the highest in its history" [1]

NYC MTA average weekday ridership, 2011: 5,284,295 [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit#Ridershi...

[2] http://www.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#32

Post by greenyoda »

ScottBurson wrote: post #23
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... ;)

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.

Infrared radiation (e.g., from body heat) is in the terahertz range[1], and might be what these sensors are picking up. And there are definitely passive sensors for infrared, e.g., night vision goggles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared (300 GHz to 430 THz)

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#33

Post by [deleted] »

danso wrote: post #7

Playing Devil's Advocate here: how is this comparable to "nude" body scanners? From the demo images, it seems to produce an abstract outline except for the shapes that, I'm assuming, are too dense to be organic. In concept, how is this different than being forced to walk through a metal detector? Both this visual body scanner and the metal detector only provide vague indications of what you have hidden under your clo…

[deleted]

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#34

Post by tsaoutourpants »

king_jester wrote: post #29
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #25

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. 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…

Really it comes down to the fact that many people rely on all of those transportation methods to do things like work, study, visit family, etc., and can't do it another way, because of time, money, or whatever. Under those circumstances, any government hoops to jump through should not be considered voluntary and consensual.

The NYC subway system is particularly sensitive to this, as others have pointed out, because so many people use this to work every day. You can say the bus is an alternative, but what about when they make a requirement to get on the bus? (TSA has already been caught at Greyhound stations!)

...or looked at from an entirely different angle, why should there be people trying to determine if I have a gun in a bus, on the subway, or on the streets of New York? Aren't guns legal in America? The fact of the matter is that it is so impossible to lawfully carry a gun in NYC that the cops, now using these scanners, presume you can't have one. Imagine a Texas sheriff with a scanner. "Excuse me sir, I've scanned you and you have a gun on you." "Yeah, so?"

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#35

Post by Wingman4l7 »

Zimahl wrote: post #16
darkarmani wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to relate to using devices to detect things inside your car (dogs) or devices to detect growing lamps in your house (unconstitutional search). It looks like they are working to erode searches again, using dogs to detect drugs inside a home. http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/10/argument-preview-drug-snif... Everything I learned in high school civics class seems to be obsolete when it comes to our Constitutiona…

Ugh, "Bong Hits for Jesus". That SCOTUS decision sincerely and utterly gnaws at my core. One of the worst decisions in the last 30 years.

For those who are curious and ignorant of this SCOTUS decison (as I was): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_v._Frederick

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#36

Post by tsaoutourpants »

darkarmani wrote: post #28
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…

> 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 h…

I wouldn't even consider Port Authority to be "quasi-government" -- it's essentially a collaboration of the governments of NY and NJ.

Luckily, those photography signs were removed since they cannot be constitutionally enforced. There's actually a great guy in Miami now (no, not me ;)) who fights battles about photography all the time. He recently got his ass kicked bt gov't security contractors for taking pictures of a train track. His site is photographyisnotacrime.com

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#37

Post by Anechoic »

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…

"imagine the chaos it would cause if a suicide bomber detonated a bomb on a train in the tube.[..] That would have devastating effects on the economy (both locally and nationally)"

A bomb of the sort that would fit into a backpack would probably disable the car the bomber was riding it, kill people immediately near the bomber, injure folks farther away in the car, and do pretty much minimal-to-no damage to the tracks or tunnel. In the worst case, the affected tunnel would be out of commission for a few days/couple of weeks while the tracks were cleared and everything would get back to normal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings#Tra... (keep in mind that US trains have higher crashworthiness standards the European trains, meaning they are structurally stronger)

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#38

Post by russell »

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…

RE: loss of the transbay tube. The Bay Bridge carries roughly the same number of commuters as the transbay tube. In the 1989 earthquake part of the bridge collapsed and it took several weeks to repair. The Bay Area did not screech to a halt. Sure we were inconvenienced and there was some economic damage, but we coped.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#39

Post by tsaoutourpants »

greenyoda wrote: post #32
ScottBurson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Infrared radiation (e.g., from body heat) is in the terahertz range[1], and might be what these sensors are picking up. And there are definitely passive sensors for infrared, e.g., night vision goggles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared (300 GHz to 430 THz)

+1. These things are basically fancy infrared goggles, detecting heat emitted from your body.
Post reply on HN