
Lawsuit Filed Against NYPD Street Body Scanners - SoftwareMaven
http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/lawsuit-filed-against-nypd-street-body-scanners/
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tsaoutourpants
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 that government at all levels is
always in need of a fresh reminder that the citizens for whom it exists demand
privacy, and that each technological advance is not a new tool to violate our
privacy. However, as often as proves to be necessary, we will give them that
reminder.

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darkarmani
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...](http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/10/argument-preview-drug-sniffing-
dogs-and-privacy/)

Everything I learned in high school civics class seems to be obsolete when it
comes to our Constitutional rights: "bong hits for jesus", "administrative"
searches (body scanners), and now street searches.

Why is it the argument from ignorance/lack of imagination via fear is so
compelling? "We need to do X to stop Y." Where Y is something very remote but
really scary.

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Zimahl
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.

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Wingman4l7
For those who are curious and ignorant of this SCOTUS decison (as I was):
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_v._Frederick>

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stevvooe
What doesn't make sense about this decision is its clear lack of
constitutional basis. How does an opinion (via statute) on illegal drug use
conflict with a constitutional amendment?

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chris_wot
I'm trying to work out how the First Amendment was trumped for students based
on historical opinion! Can someone clarify?

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stevvooe
I have always been confused by this, as well. IANAL, but the reasoning seems
to be based in the need of educators to reduce disruption and offensiveness,
at the cost of protected speech. This wikipedia article [1] does a good job
laying out the history of opinions on the subject.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_speech_(First_Amendment)>

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danso
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 clothes.

From a pragmatic point of view...maybe I'm misunderstanding the technology,
but it seems prone to a wide range of false positives...to the point that
using the scans to justify apprehending someone is not much better than stop-
and-frisking because a person looks "suspicious"

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darkarmani
> In concept, how is this different than being forced to walk through a metal
> detector?

Well, you generally have a choice (kinda) to walk through a metal detector.
People should be protect from random searches while walking around the
streets. At one time there were very specific cases where you had to submit to
a search -- one being hot pursuit.

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danso
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)

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potatolicious
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 ought to be enforced via any
means necessary: legal or extralegal. 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.

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jack-r-abbit
_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.

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king_jester
> 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.

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tsaoutourpants
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?"

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danso
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?

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tsaoutourpants
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.

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potatolicious
> _"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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cg410
Thank you for doing this!

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tsaoutourpants
Happy to help ;)

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codex
From what I can tell these devices cannot look under one's clothes. The image
is just too blurry. In fact, these scanners could be considered cameras that
capture light outside of the visible spectrum. Are we to now say that one
can't take photos in public? That seems to be quite extreme. I would like to
preserve my right to do so, even with an infrared camera.

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DannyBee
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

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tsaoutourpants
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.

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

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knowaveragejoe
If these are terahertz-band scanners, I believe most metals will block the
waves.

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evoxed
So, tin foil hoodies? Or maybe chain mail will come back in style?

I haven't encountered one of these yet, but I'd actually be willing to go
through if I had some sort of metallic pre-wash all over my clothes.

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knowaveragejoe
Apparently there are a number of problems with terahertz technology, meaning
potential methods of fooling them.

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/military/the-truth-
about-...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/military/the-truth-about-
terahertz?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IeeeSpectrumFullText+%28IEEE+Spectrum+Full+Text%29)

