If you’re modest, think twice before having sex in your van, truck, or RV. Law enforcement uses roving vans with backscatter X-ray technology to peer inside vehicles (the same technology used in airport body scanners). In the Land of the Free, authorities don’t request search warrants. More at Forbes here and here. What, you don’t want an X-ray bath?
What? I mean govs are baddies, but… Really? You have no other place to play daddley-the-rapist other that in your f-kin car? Strange people living on the face of the strange planet, go figure.
I’m guessing the people driving these vans are not just imaging suspect’s cars. They are apparently operating w/o warrants.
“Lets see who’s getting laid in this neighborhood tonight!”
“Hey look, that guy’s masturbating, lets irradiate him.”
Basically try to picture Beavis and Butthead operating these things, because that’s probably who is actually doing it.
I was a “Security Officer” for high-risk (danger/security) jobs for quite some time. You are more right than you know!!
–The loon
Loon!
Jefro!
You never had sex in a car in your life? You must have had very boring late teen years.
A bit disturbing scenario for its use, but this really is pretty awesome technology. Very very interesting, and will certainly find plenty of agreeable applications as well.
You’re saying that they just rove around and scan people without telling them? That seems pretty invasive. In the U.S. courts have stricken down attempts to scan people’s houses from outside in this manner. Maybe a court challenge will come up with the roving vans.
Certain authorities in the US have had similair technology for years (think DHS and so on). I couldn’t find a good article about it on the Internet right now.
I did find this one from 2009 about how accurate some of the technology could be:
http://www.commlawblog.com/2009/12/articles/unlicensed-operations-a…
And this post from 2002 which points to nowhere anymore to illustrate for how long technology like it has already existed:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/02/06/15/1226229/terahertz-imagin…
US government sucks, US policies suck. USA’s invasions on other countries suck. USA’s past and future both suck. USA sucks.
I truly admire intelligent entities living in USA. You must be very patient, wise people. How can you stand such incredibly high amount of absurd? it’s totally beyond me.
C.A.R. Hoare won`t like this.
Officer it’s my wife, really, she just like to dress like a slut sometimes..
New business opportunity.
Lead panel aftermarket.
I really hope this technology comes to Germany quite soon. You know, “we” Germans are always quick foxes when it’s about adopting US habits, especially things claimed to be for our own security, for democracy, free market, freedom ‘n stuff, and it’s a nice opportunity to spend tax payers’ money. 🙂
Still I see a positive aspect in this technology: The x-ray vans could be employed by the police to check payload securing of trucks, maybe it’s easier this way than taking a truck off the road in order to inspect it. In this regards, they couldn’t just draw few samples, they could… draw some more samples!
Improper payload securing has been a main reason for car accidents for many years now. Instead of polluting innocent people with x-ray, why not use that technology for something reasonable?
Conforming to your market gap idea, also the car, van and truck manufacturers would profit, as they will be required to sell more powerful vehicles in order to carry the heavy lead panels.
Hooray for Doctor Wilhelm Röntgen, inventor of x-rays, saviour of the free market! 🙂
Yeah, good luck with this being used for an actually useful purpose. If it doesnt stop the terrorist or save the little children…fat chance.
Good luck with that, if the EU has banned the use of the tech due to health concerns, you know like irradiating people, then no way will Germany be jumping on the tech.
Sometimes the EU ain’t as bad as the brit press makes out but then there is the part where the US pushed a lot of dodgy investment stock onto them and the rest is history. We’ll see if the EU becomes that soon.
Just because something is prohibited, it doesn’t imply that it won’t be done. It’s done secretly, and when it accidentally becomes public, there’s lots of “ah!” and “oh noes!” and “oh god!” and “how coult it”, then someone gets fired, and the next story enters the stage (e. g. attack dogs, cold winter, youth poverty or plagiarism). Meanwhile, the next “banned” technology will be instantiated, justified by “it fights terrorists”, or particularly for Germany, “it reduces unemployment”, “it saves nature” or “it benefits freedom and democracy”. In the end, nobody cares.
You can find many examples of “banned” things that have been done in german history. And if you closely look at today, you’ll find many more.
As I said, nobody knows, nobody cares.
What about a few extra layers of lead paint?
We just now found our head of R&D:-)
I think he meant “Super Proton Privacy Shield Plus”. Lead Paint would scare the mommies. Leaving the name as lead paint, would have the same effect on sales as Gillette calling its next razor the Gayzer pro.
And now with have a our head of public relations and marketing!
Bill what do you think about cowboy boots and a turtleneck shirt?
I don’t care if anybody can see me having sex with the help of some expensive device. But I sure don’t like being randomly X-rayed.
My big worry i guess would be if they are recording, and where does this data go and for how long? I’d hate to see some hacker group (black or white hat) getting a hold of (hundreds of?) thousands of videos of private citizens going at it (or other activities not illegal, but maybe frowned upon), and releasing it on the net. While it would be super funny, it would also suck for those involved, and quite possibly be costly (as in lawsuits) for the government and by proxy, tax payers…
“Hopefully” this will massively backfire soon, with news surfacing that some minors (having sex in the back seat of a car or smth) were viewed by those vans. Which is a virtual certainty – after, I don’t know, an hour of driving around? Half an hour?
(well, and at least hopefully in a jurisdiction where, in turn, that horrible act is generally legal for the kids involved)
Even “better” if the vans record it what they see!
If there’s one thing we can count on, it’s the “think of the children!” hysteria – why not exploit it for something sensible, for once?
Though, OTOH, in the case of recording minors in their rooms by high school ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_Distric… ), there was some… leniency.
Edited 2011-12-02 18:58 UTC
Why are you having sex with the help of some expensive device? 🙂
To introduce some variety 😉
X-RAY PORN! \o/
It would be probably a bit underwhelming. After all, if it was fine to show a moment of, yes, boning in a video clip often broadcast in prime time a decade+ ago, and including children…:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpKCqp9CALQ (SFW)
MRI sex, OTOH… (this one’s a bit NSFW, I guess, in a weird way; Google gives a flood of material, after popculture noticed it ~2 years ago – unfortunately, perhaps because of it I can’t quickly find the website from few years back, of researches behind it)
PS. At the very least, they were honoured by the scientific community quite some time ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners#2000 (Medicine, also link to paper)
Edited 2011-12-04 16:05 UTC
These security technologies don’t do anything to stop terrorists, at least the serious ones.
You can back scatter all you want, if I want to take down a plane.
Its going _down_.
Same thing if I want to blow up the Congress. You are not going to be able to stop me.
This ultimately will end with everyone being sent to the Gulag.
These security policies are the paranoid delusions of an desperate Empire in decline.
-Hack
Yeah, these are nothing more then another method of conservatives in the US securing more anonymous funds to their 501(c)(4) Super P.A.C.s from defense contractors for sending them massive no bid contracts so they can run the regional government out of cash so they can continue to cut from education and social services and run on their self fulfilling prophecy platform of government not working.
See Milwaukee, WI’s big plan to curb gang violence: Lets buy a bunch of gigantic armored vehicles that have a bunch of camera turrets and “gunshot detector microphones” on them so we can park them in minority neighborhoods in the hopes that someone is stupid enough to commit a crime near one!!1!!!eleven
These thing are less effective then the cops they put out on pedal bike patrol… When we where kids we would mercilessly harass them to make them chase us since we could easily lap them around the block on their nice $300+ aluminum frame w/ fork and frame gas shocks 21 speed mountain bikes on our POS $50 KMart steel frame Huffy 10 speeds… To add further insult we started getting those nice bikes as well.
Yes cars where called in a few times, no, not even those could catch us since the other kids I would do this with could all easily get up to 25~30mph over flats on those POS 10 speeds and we knew every shortcut and hiding place in town.
I don’t know about the US in particular, but I think “tax magic” is the same everywhere. For example, in Germany there’s a saying “material costs good, personnel costs bad“.
Real cops are too expensive, but “investing” in technologically-advanced material (be it digital radio, armored vehicles, cameras, trapdoors, whatever), even if more expensive in the end, seems to be more promising.
I believe there’s lots of “tax magic” in the background, seen in quarterly processes. The benefit of the society, a real fight against terrorism or just the simple opportunity of bringing the state’s responsibilities for the people into life again don’t play an important role. Service contracts, continuous delivery of material and finally the “hey, look what I’ve got!” are in the scope of the planners.
And even if the technology purchased is good, it will be operated by stupid idiots. I’ve seen policemen talking into the back (or the battery, or the antenna) of their handheld radio, complaining they couldn’t understand each other. 🙂
To close the circle to mobile x-ray surveillance:
Even though this idea has lots of potential (as I said, to improve security on streets when applied to trucks to investigate the securing of their payload), this doesn’t seem to be interesting enough. Remember the “look what I’ve got” teaser? It’s exactly that.
And if operated by idiots, propagated by idiots, and maintained by idios, with other idiots defining the “proper” procedures, you can easily estimate how tons of data will be stored, and finally, they’ll find their way where they don’t belong. It has often been that case, e. g. in Germany, confidential tax data written to CDs found their way to people who sold them back to the government. You never know who gets his hands on data that you expect deleted. Nobody deletes anything.
The justification “it fights terrorists” looks like a welcome statement when it’s about massive investitions into some new technology, or an argument when some secretly kept technology becomes public. The opposite jusstification, “but it doesn’t fight terrorists”, is very helpful when an investition should be denied, even if it would be something positive.
Let’s invest into better schools. – But that doesn’t fight the terrorists!
Why did you buy a fleet of new PCs for the your governmental department this year? You bought a full new equipment last year. – Because those new PCs do fight terrorists!
See how nice it works? 🙂
Also remember my words: Everything that is possible will be done, no matter if we can recognize it. Whenever media thinks they’ve discovered something new, revolutionary or scary, it just means that it’s been “business as usual” for many years now. Remember the last “scandal” when government was claimed to be spying at people? They do this all the time, even now, as I type. And it’s not just my government doing so. Be it x-rays, radio, cameras, Internet… the more the better.
So this involves driving around beaming high energy penetrating radiation at folk.
Not only endangering privacy but DNA too.
Well, spontaneously, I’d say that it depends on the x-ray dose. Ordinary radiography doses should remain pretty much harmless as long as exposure remains exceptional.
The problem is that metals only weakly transmit most electromagnetic waves, absorbing and reflecting most of them. If this is also true of x-rays (which I don’t remember), it means that what is a safe dose for people fornicating inside a car could be highly harmful for an unprotected pedestrian passing by near the police van.
And in any case, sending ionizing radiation on people without their consent is simply not right, no matter if it should have no averse health effect on most people.
Edited 2011-12-02 20:53 UTC
Now we know where all recent claims of spontaneous combustion come from!
Any dose of ionising radiation has inherent harm through stochastic effects – a several photons could cause a double-strand break which can lead to cancer; given enough radiation, deterministic effects will occur, so epilation and erythema.
I’d be very concerned over the exposure used on these machines – x-ray photons abide the inverse square law, and as mentioned before, it will be attenuated by metal sheeting twice and the contents of the car before being detected. The dose received will invariably be high – even more so if you stand next to the car.
If a pregnant woman and small children would particularly be at risk; furthermore, the skin dose received from these machines is likely to be very high (like the back-scatter machines), again, increasing the likelihood of cancer and other affects.
This is also not taking into consideration the care and quality assurance the machines may or may not be getting. In the UK, x-ray based machinery (in addition to other imaging technology used), by law, has to be constantly assessed in-house and by medical physicist in addition to maintained to ensure that everything is working safely; it is probable that these do not (there was an article on 400 people receiving a dose a lot higher from a CT exam).
Buzzila,
Are you able to speak authoritatively on the matter? That’d be very cool.
I’m curious how often cellular mutations naturally occur and what, if anything, is the typical outcome of such mutations.
Buzzila has the right of it.
“Mutations” occur very frequently – tens of thousands per cell per day, but a very high frequency of them are repaired. See e.g. Friedberg, et al. DNA Repair and Mutagenesis, p.16.
Knowing this, it is perhaps good to know that the risk of cancer from additional radiation is extremely low, but bad to know that randomly speaking someone could get cancer (in fact it may even be highly likely that some few people get cancer because of the stunts our government is pulling.) I’m sure that is all very acceptable for them, as long as they can claim it is “safe”.
Edited 2011-12-03 23:57 UTC
Neolander,
“Well, spontaneously, I’d say that it depends on the x-ray dose. Ordinary radiography doses should remain pretty much harmless as long as exposure remains exceptional.”
Well, as I understand it, it’s not the quantity that matters, but rather the odds that any given x-ray photon interacts with our cellular dna to create a mutation. What are the odds that any given exposure results in a cancerous mutation? Non-cancerous cell mutations probably aren’t harmful when the cells just die off on their own, but I’m not sure about non-cancerous mutations that don’t kill off the cell.
Assume a cell C undergoes a series of exposures resulting in various mutations a,b,c. My question is, would the cell still have become cancerous without all the previous mutations?
C[ ] -> original cell
C[ a ] -> benign mutation
C[ a , b ] -> benign mutation
C[ a , b , c ] -> first cancer symptoms
C[ b ] -> cancerous?
C[ c ] -> cancerous?
C[ b , c ] -> cancerous?
C[ a , c ] -> cancerous?
If any of the later 4 above are cancerous, it suggests a coincidence that the prior mutations did not result in cancer. If a cell has equal risk of contracting cancer at each exposure, then it places doubt on the common medical notion that x-rays are ok as long as they’re infrequent.
If we could digitally test a cell’s DNS for traces of cancer characteristics, then we could mathematically prove correlations between multiple mutations and cancer, I wonder if anyone’s attempted it.
Edit: fix osnews formatting
Edited 2011-12-02 23:19 UTC
All radiation has the potential to cause cancer, the problem is it’s impossible shield yourself from all radiation since you need things like potassium which are radioactive.
What they mean by “medically safe” is exactly that, in medicine you often have to cause wounds or poisonous materials to extend someone’s life and/or improve their quality of life and thus will have to weigh your options for say:
Give them an X-ray and maybe in 20 years they’ll die from cancer caused from it or save their arm and possibly their life(infection can set in) doing the X-Ray to see how we can repair this spiral fracture.
You make these kinds of decisions all day every day without ever noticing them, but with things like radiation exposure we have other options in most cases that are preferable to the radiation like Geothermal, Solarthermal and Wind power over nuclear or coal(contains uranium among other nasties) due to how dangerous and ridiculously hard to clean up and dispose of material and the fact that when shit goes bad it goes incredibly bad. Google coal slurry disaster and mountain top removal disaster. Neither gets any media coverage due to where they happen and the fact that every news network runs ads for “clean coal technology”…
I’m not an expert here but most oncer genes are mutated growth regulatory genes which do not function in growth regulation as they should.
We can conclude therefore that any damage to a growth regulatory gene could result in a cancer i.e any exposure to ionizing radiation could result in cancer. However, many systems have several fail-safes so that if one system of control fails then another is in place. You can imagine – cell growth being inhibited by the presence of a certain grow regulator substance, then by contact with other cells etc. In this case cumulative exposure and cumulative damage will certainly increase the risk of a cell becoming cancerous by progressively knocking out more regulatory systems.
…it just moved across the atlantic?
Edited 2011-12-03 01:45 UTC
Mr. Fosdisk’s story is just another fine example of “crap” journalism and scare tactics to grab attention. His link to one of the Forbe’s articles is dated Sept. 2010! The DHS has been using this technology at US ports of entry for years now, well prior to 2010 or December 2011. And they have no intention of roving America’s streets with this technology as his headline so mistakenly suggests. We actually have laws against such things here in the US which he so conveniently decided to leave out of his article.
Edited 2011-12-03 02:32 UTC
The problem is the U.S. Government doesn’t care let alone abide by the rule of law. We in the U.S. have the illusion of Freedom and self govern. Latest example is the new defense bill that would allow the US military to detain American citizens indefinitely.
Direct violation of Posse Comitatus and Habeas Corpus.
You say “And they have no intention of roving America’s streets with this technology as his headline so mistakenly suggests.”
But the second Forbes article states “..the company says law enforcement agencies have also been using them domestically, deploying the roving scanners to search for vehicle-based roadside bombs in American cities.”
Please read the articles yourself before casting aspersions at others.
Well, I happen to live here in the US and just because someone wrote something down doesn’t make it true. I can assure you that the article you’re referring to is false. Those vans are not being used to scan for roadside bombs in ANY American city. And even if they were, what’s wrong with that? If there was a suspected bomb in a van parked next to a school or playground I’d think the responsible thing to do would be to check it out. So yes, I WILL cast my aspersion on those who refuse to read articles which make no mention of roving the streets to scan cars for those having sex OR planting roadside bombs. From the looks of the responses here, maybe 5 people actually took the time to read the articles, old as they are. The others respondents are just feeding off the disinformation thrown around by the others who didn’t read the articles and the sensationalism of Fosdick’s headline. As for ridiculous bills submitted thru Congress or the Senate, that happens all the time. Just because it’s submitted for vote doesn’t mean that it will be enacted into law.
There’s something called “The Rule of Law” which the is clearly defined in the U.S. Constitution like for example –
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
If the Government has no respect for the Rule of Law why should anyone else?
There’s another legal term called “probable cause”. Show me one documented instance of these vans being used anywhere in the US without probable cause and I’ll also show you the case being thrown out of court. But I’ll help out here, you won’t find a single instance of these vans being used without probable cause or a search warrant. Period. How’s that for the rule of law?
It’s called “The Patriot Act”, just do a google sometime and see where it has been used against U.S. Citizens.
You know like Professor Steve Kurtz, Brandon Mayfield, Adrian Lamo should start you off.
Yep, Government sure adhered to the Rule of Law didn’t they?
I’m not a physicist, but I can’t imagine an x-ray dose strong enough to penetrate steel plating to be safe for humans.
This is just an opportunity for me to make special x-ray reflective car wax. Matter of fact I think I will copyright and patent that by this post.