While the police state is expanding throughout the United States it’s expanding at a faster pace in some places. States like New York, Massachusetts, and California are expanding at an incredibly rapid pace as are the cities of Chicago and New York. Not only has New York all but disarmed the law-abiding citizenry they’re working on ensuring those individuals remain disarmed. Because of the recent cases involving law-abiding citizens being dumb enough to attempt compliance with posted “No Guns Allowed” signs the police force in New York is looking for new technology to detect those who are carrying concealed weapons:
The NYPD is stepping up their war against illegal guns, with a new tool that could detect weapons on someone as they walk down the street.
But is it violating your right to privacy?
Police, along with the U.S. Department of Defense, are researching new technology in a scanner placed on police vehicles that can detect concealed weapons.
“You could use it at a specific event. You could use it at a shooting-prone location,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told CBS 2′s Hazel Sanchez on Tuesday.
It’s called Terahertz Imaging Detection. It measures the energy radiating from a body up to 16 feet away, and can detect anything blocking it, like a gun.
With the recent introduction of body scanners at airports I’m sure you’ve heard of terahertz imagine. Most airport body scanners use millimeter waves as terahertz imagine is still a relatively new technology with a rather disturbing side-effect:
Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they’ve found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That’s a jaw dropping conclusion.
So the New York Police Department (NYPD) is using a technology that can damage DNA to detect concealed firearms. First of all it’s none of NYPD’s business who is and isn’t carrying a firearm because, regardless of what city officials believe, the right to keep and bear arms is still codified in the Constitution (and even if it wasn’t the right to self-defense is a natural one that can’t be rightfully overridden by some assholes in a government building).
If this technology gets off of the ground the denizens of New York City may find themselves exposed to dangerous terahertz waves just so some piece of shit working in NYPD can get his jollies off disarming a peaceful individual (or outright shooting the poor schmuck because “he had a gun”). I’m still waiting for New York City to setup checkpoints at every point of entry where people and their vehicles are thoroughly searched before being granted entrance into the prison city.
an interesting aside: The RCSO has one one of the enhanced imagers. Had it for months. Cost them a pretty penny. The put it in the adult detention center as soon as it became available. They wanted it to fight contraband being smuggled into the detention center.
What’s interesting about this? A court ruled they CAN’T use it because it’s an invasion of privacy for the inmates.
I had to dig up the case I was thinking about that relates to these new scanners, it’s Kyllo v. United States. That Supreme Court case ruled that searching a person with a termal imager constituted a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
I can’t imagine these scanners can be considered any different than thermal imagers in the eyes of the courts. With that said I’m not surprised New York is attempting to ignore a Supreme Court ruling, they seem to think their city is a country in of itself.
The technology to see weapons on a person already exists in the form of IR cameras and it is 100% safe since it uses a passive approach. On the issue of Kyllo v. US the ruling only applied to the home so they have yet to actually trample over a court ruling. There was a few years ago at one of the College bowl games the use of am IR camera to perform remote searches for weapons, the camera used is one already employed by many PDs across the country on their helo force.