Taking on the Government Government run Amok: XRay INNOCENT Civilians Walking or Driving. (WILL SEE YOU NAKED!)
Government run Amok: XRay INNOCENT Civilians Walking or Driving. (WILL SEE YOU NAKED!)
The Truck That Invades Your Privacy, Photographs Your Genitalia, Records The Photograph For Posterity, And May Cause You To Die Of Cancer
By Jack Baruth, on July 30, 2011
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. —O’Brien, in “1984″.
O’Brien was wrong. The picture of the future is a picture of you: completely naked, with your privacy invaded, taken as you walk along the street, sit in your own vehicle, or pursue your own private business. You will be recorded forever, your movements will be marked, your possessions will be noted, you will become completely subservient to a government you may not even remember electing. Eventually, you may die of cancer, moaning out a final cry of drug-addled defiance as you are culled — in a quite humane fashion, of course — to prevent excessive healthcare costs.
The company helping to bring you the above future is called, without irony, “American Science and Engineering, Inc.”
What you see above is supposedly one of the photographs returned by the “Z Backscatter Van”. The “ZBV” can be driven anywhere a regular light-duty truck can be driven. It creates backscatter X-Ray images similar to those employed by the TSA in its “nudie booth” airport scanners. It’s the only image of human beings released by AS&E, Inc, which assured Forbes magazine that the images collected by the ZBV were of “lower resolution” than those collected by the airport scanners, which are already infamous for delivering precise pictures of your naked body to a $12-an-hour drone in an office somewhere.
As far as photos go, one couldn’t ask for one more deliberately deceptive. The humans in the photo are seated, facing away from the camera. It’s a low-res JPG. Given the almost pornographic delight with which AS&E displays photos of the Z Backscatter Van’s imaging capabilities in other areas — it’s detailed enough that one can easily distinguish the type of vehicle in the no-person-shown photos — it’s a virtual certainty that it can, in fact, record with more detail than the company lets on. Check this photo out:
Now comes the best part. The public has, by and large, accepted backscatter machines in airports because “it would take 50 backscatter images to deliver the radiation of a single chest X-ray” and “if you choose not to fly, you have nothing to worry about.” Don’t forget the old chestnut “the images are not stored, nor are they related to specific individuals.” All of that goes out the window with the ZBV. If you work a hotdog stand and the ZBV circles your block ten times a day, congratulations! You just got an extra 60 full-strength X-rays a year. Hope that hotdog stand has health insurance. And, of course, the ZBV isn’t bound by any silly rules about storing or correlating images. It can record as long as you have hard drives to hold the images, and you’re free to take visual-spectrum photos at the same time and correlate them.
My friend Miss Melisa Mae wouldn’t have to reach out at dinner and check her dates’ equipment anymore; oh no. It will be possible for her to purchase a short list of men who meet her lengthy qualifications. (For the record, Melisa, I just wasn’t out walking the day the vans went by.) You’d better hope that your hobbies are acceptable, now and in the future. Don’t take your shotgun to the trap shoot the day some minor Congressman is in town! You’ve just become a terrorist. Don’t buy too much fertilizer for your McMansion! Do you carry two laptops in your car, one for work and one for home? Maybe you’re a “hacker”. Don’t leave a glucose checker in the car as you interview for a new job; your potential employer may have no interest in diabetics.
No doubt many TTACers won’t have a problem with this. They may point out that most of us have already been forced to show our genitalia to strangers by agencies as diverse as one’s public school and/or the Nolet Distillery. This isn’t about sexuality, however. It’s about privacy, the Fourth Amendment, and the right to be secure against unwarranted, health-endangering search. Speaking personally, after being “randomly selected” seven times in a row for the airport scanner at CMH, I’ve started opting out. I tell the TSA people that if they want to see me naked, they have to do it like everybody else and listen to me play John Mayer’s “Wheel” on the acoustic guitar first.
The vans cost $850,000 or thereabouts. Hundreds have been sold, to customers as diverse as the Department of Defense and small-town law enforcement agencies. The NYPD is one of AS&E’s thrilled customers. Next time you’re in Manhattan, don’t forget to smile — and, er, stand up — for the camera.
(Ban the Cams note: Just turn around and MOON THEM! Or better yet, use that middle finger!)
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