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Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

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Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#41

Post by jellicle »

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... ;)

The distinction you are trying to make is not between emitting and not emitting radiation - most of these scanners emit some form of electromagnetic radiation.

The distinction you're trying to make is between ionizing radiation (x-rays; causes cancer) and non-ionizing radiation (all other sorts of electromagnetic radiation including visible light, infrared, microwaves, and so on; doesn't cause cancer).

The TSA currently has some scanners that scan using x-rays and some that scan with non-ionizing radiation.

A regular boring old security camera is also a scanner that emits non-ionizing radiation - most of them use infrared LEDs to illuminate at night. If you could see into the infrared it would look like every security camera has a big flashlight mounted next to it, shining on you. So the target, you, gets irradiated with non-ionizing infrared rays, which bounce back to the camera and are recorded. Using different wavelengths of illumination, you find that some of them penetrate clothes easily to see what's underneath. That's what the NYPD/security apparatus are interested in.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#42

Post by tsaoutourpants »

jellicle wrote: post #41
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... ;)

The distinction you are trying to make is not between emitting and not emitting radiation - most of these scanners emit some form of electromagnetic radiation. The distinction you're trying to make is between ionizing radiation (x-rays; causes cancer) and non-ionizing radiation (all other sorts of electromagnetic radiation including visible light, infrared, microwaves, and so on; doesn't cause cancer). The TSA curren…

No, that's not the distinction I'm trying to make. The NYPD scanners, as best I can tell, are PASSIVE scanners which means they emit NO radiation (any moreso than your digital camera "emits radiation"), ionizing or non-ioninzing. They simply measure the terahertz emissions (and reflections thereof) of other objects -- they do not introduce their own terahertz waves.

I'm not defending the scanners (obviously)... I just want the case against them to be clear and sound.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#43

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

bcoates wrote: post #6

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

Yes. It's trivial to defeat. Proprietor reports that he can't keep them on the shelf.

http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2011/01/12/airport-scanner-blo...

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#44

Post by danso »

tsaoutourpants wrote: post #34
king_jester wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

I don't disagree with your last paragraph but I'm not sure what your point is except expressing a tautology. Let's pretend that there was no way to hide a gun (Mayor Bloomberg bans clothing in the summer as a way to curb the problem of people hiding high fat snacks in their pockets)...are you saying that police should not take notice of people carrying firearms, give the very low incidence of legally opened firearms?

How else could they enforce the city's laws, besides waiting for someone to actively commit a crime with the gun before they can ask if the gun is legally owned?

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#46

Post by tsaoutourpants »

danso wrote: post #44
tsaoutourpants wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I don't disagree with your last paragraph but I'm not sure what your point is except expressing a tautology. Let's pretend that there was no way to hide a gun (Mayor Bloomberg bans clothing in the summer as a way to curb the problem of people hiding high fat snacks in their pockets)...are you saying that police should not take notice of people carrying firearms, give the very low incidence of legally opened firearms?…

That's exactly what I'm saying. The carrying of a firearm should not be considered evidence of a crime in progress in and of itself. Nowhere else in America, save for NJ, IL, and DC, is it unusual for someone walking down the streets to be in possession of a firearm. Lawful firearm owners should not be harassed to prove their lawful status at every turn. The police can ask questions when they have reasonable suspicion.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#47

Post by jlgreco »

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…

7,257 out of 381,948... wow. With a success rate as abysmal as that, it is a wonder that we still take a police officers "gut instinct" as seriously as we do.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#48

Post by tsaoutourpants »

DannyBee wrote: post #45

I hope you win, but the way case law has been going, this is going to be a difficult lawsuit to win at the lower levels

Of course it will. And let me guarantee you this: the city will not start by defending the merits of the scanners, but by doing everything it can to get my case dismissed before it has to do so.

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#49

Post by tsaoutourpants »

jlgreco wrote: post #47
Spooky23 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

7,257 out of 381,948... wow. With a success rate as abysmal as that, it is a wonder that we still take a police officers "gut instinct" as seriously as we do.

Most of the rest of those 382K searches weren't victims of mistaken "gut instinct" but rather officers knowingly searching them without cause. NYPD pressures its street cops to perform these searches using quotas (which they refuse to call quotas).

Re: Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners

#50

Post by potatolicious »

tsaoutourpants wrote: post #46
danso wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your last paragraph but I'm not sure what your point is except expressing a tautology. Let's pretend that there was no way to hide a gun (Mayor Bloomberg bans clothing in the summer as a way to curb the problem of people hiding high fat snacks in their pockets)...are you saying that police should not take notice of people carrying firearms, give the very low incidence of legally opened firearms?…

That's exactly what I'm saying. The carrying of a firearm should not be considered evidence of a crime in progress in and of itself. Nowhere else in America, save for NJ, IL, and DC, is it unusual for someone walking down the streets to be in possession of a firearm. Lawful firearm owners should not be harassed to prove their lawful status at every turn. The police can ask questions when they have reasonable suspicio…

> "Nowhere else in America, save for NJ, IL, and DC, is it unusual for someone walking down the streets to be in possession of a firearm."

Right, so we've established that legal firearm ownership is vastly outnumbered by illegal firearm ownership in the above places, and that seeing a legal firearm on the street is in fact extremely rare.

So... you live in an area where there is a substantial known presence of illegal guns, that isn't balanced by a substantial ownership of legal guns. When you see a gun, how is it not at all suspicious?

I do not see your conclusion as a logical extension of constitutional principles, it seems more informed by your own stance re: gun ownership. The constitution grants the right to search upon reasonable suspicion - I'm unsure how a gun's appearance in a place where there are almost no legal ones fails that bar.

Whether or not NY should have such strict gun laws is an entirely separate debate - as it stands it seems perfectly reasonable for the presence of a gun to be suspicious.

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