Link to the AS&E "ZBV" mobile X-Ray van in question [0], sourced from the linked Fox News article. From the AS&E website:
"Dose to Cargo: Less than 0.1 microSievert (μSv) per scan (equivalent to 10 microRem (μrem)), at an average speed of 5 km/h (3 mph) at a scan distance of 1.5 m (5 ft). Should a stowaway accidentally be scanned, the effective dose is well below the ANSI specified limit for accidental exposure and is equivalent to flying two minutes at altitude."
I don't consent to any form of non-necessary irradiation, regardless of the quantity.
Not sure why the NYPD gets to irradiate me without consequences (which constitutes a search of my person, without a warrant or consent, not to mention having a potential medical impact on people not suspected of any crime) when we can hardly point cameras at them despite it being explicitly legal.
Your consent is not needed even for unnecessary radiation. If I shine my high beams on your car, or have a cellular phone call next to well - too bad. I'm entitled to bombard you with radiation if I want to.
But for the sake of argument Ill assume you just care about ionizing radiation (UV, Xray, Gamma, Neutron, etc). In that case I agree consent should be needed for medium to high dose. It's unfeasible to get the consent of everyone for low doses (x-ray machine x-rays can travel for miles and theoretically infinitely far).
In this case it appears the dose is only about that of eating a banana. Hard to argue you need to consent to that for radiation concerns unless you also agree that everyone should consent to every xray scan that every hospital executes, or every time your colleague brings in bananas to work. Privacy concern is valid though. Radiation one is just fear mongering if OP is correct.
That's PER SCAN. Do you think the Police roll up, do a scan, and then take off? No. They're sitting there scanning constantly (most likely), so to use your analogy, that's a lot of banana eating.
And are we assuming that the person is inside a metal vehicle? What if someone is outdoors?
How much radiation does this scanner actually emit? The numbers are meaninglessness without more information. Why doesn't the manufacturer just publish the hard numbers?
Can be, yes. How often will it be? How often will it be operated remotely, and there's no other police in the immediate vicinity doing traffic control or some such?
[Edit: the article also talks about scanning the inside of a house in 15 seconds. That's not going to happen if they drive up the van, park it, get out, walk 1500 feet away, scan the house, walk back... (Yes, I know, they can drive away and back in another vehicle. It's still not likely to be operated remotely in that usage - all the activity makes it too conspicuous.)]
> They are not hard to spot. Watch the media entrances of events, where the on-location vans drive through. Look for where traffic is routed through a single lane. Inevitably they will route traffic past an unmarked van. Or, look for an unmarked van trolling any parking lots within any security cordon.
That "look for where traffic is routed through a single lane" makes me strongly suspect there's going to be traffic officers in the very near vicinity.
>That "look for where traffic is routed through a single lane" makes me strongly suspect there's going to be traffic officers in the very near vicinity.
In that case those "traffic officers" will be further down directing traffic to the van, not in the van's target.
> If I shine my high beams on your car, or have a cellular phone call next to well - too bad. I'm entitled to bombard you with radiation if I want to.
I think this is a really good point, actually. Do all these electronic devices need to be FCC approved? And if so, how do these vans' dosage gybe with any FCC regulations?
That's equivocation at its best. Candles do not emit ionizing radiation in measurable quantities. X-Ray machines do. There's a huge distinction, similar to the distinction we make between shining an incandescent bulb up at a helicopter or passenger plane, and shining a laser pointer.
So we regulate X-Ray machines keep the radiation leak below the level that would oblige to ask people in the area for consent. GP has a point. The concern in this thread is based entirely on the notion that "radiation" is a scary-sounding thing.
No, the concern in this thread is based entirely on the notion that innocent people are potentially being exposed to X-rays, without their knowledge or consent.
You're arguing against a strawman. HN commenters aren't idiots. The technology in question is using ionizing X-rays, which can have harmful health effects.
I never assume HN commenters are idiots. That's the very reason I hang out here - I learn a lot from what people say in this place.
Having said that, this thread is dominated by commenters who refuse to do the math. X-rays sound scary but they aren't death rays; if you add up the numbers you'll see that it's not even worth to talk about them here. There's higher probability they'll harm someone by introducing more cars onto streets.
What if there is a machine malfunction? Lack of proper maintenance? Operator error? Sure there should be fail-safes, but accidents happen.
Bouncing around in the back of a van, something goes wrong. Instead of a rapidly moving beam of x-rays that doesn't stay in one location long enough to cause problems, you get a focused beam.
Those are fair concerns. I haven't seen the estimate for maximum amount of radiation the X-ray machine could generate when malfunctioning. We need those to see whether or not there is something to worry about.
If it works anything like the backscatter machines the TSA was using (rapidly moving beam), a failure mode like what I mentioned is definitely enough to be dangerous. There was a physics professor from Arizona state who said that the TSA machines could even cause radiation burns if the fail-safes failed and the beam kept going while stuck in one position.
It many not work that way though. Who knows? That's the problem with being secretive about the whole thing. They don't publicly release data on potential malfunctions.
One of my biggest concerns is the amount of training the operators receive on recognizing and reporting potential malfunctions. I suspect it's not sufficient, but again who knows? They won't talk about it because terrorists.
I agree, those are causes for concern. It doesn't matter if they're using radiation - whether they'd be using chemicals, biological agents or voodoo, as the issues of proper training and secrecy around a device that fails dangerously is a serious matter. They should be opposed as everything from waste of tax money to being a public safety issue, just not because of the radiation per se.
I disagree. I think it is worth it to talk about them, for three main reasons:
1. Even if this machine only gives off radiation equivalent to, say, a dental X-ray, I still did not give my consent for it, whereas I did give my consent for the dental X-ray. Consent is important. There are a lot of things that are OK with someone's consent, but not OK otherwise, and we don't have the right to make these decisions for someone.
2. Medical X-rays have positive expected trade-offs for receiving the dose of radiation. Compare this to an X-ray police van than I happen to walk past; there's not really any argument that can be made for why my exposure to this X-ray radiation is worth it for me.
3. The machine can malfunction, or be used improperly, and give off substantially more X-ray radiation than expected or designed. Safeguards are in place for other uses of X-ray to protect against this, e.g. you wear a lead apron to protect the rest of your body during a dental X-ray, and the assistant taking the X-ray leaves the room entirely. Safeguards of these sort aren't possible with the presence of an unknowing public.
There's also of course the entire privacy aspect that we haven't even delved into yet, but the health issues alone are concerning.
So, in any case, the FCC has set limits for acceptable amounts of radiation exposure from certain classes of the electronics that we find all around us every day, and I guess I was just wondering how those limits would compare to the radiation dosage of these vans.
It might not be approved by the FCC, but if it's equivalent to something that the FCC would allow you to carry around in your pocket anyway, it's hard to justify being upset these vans driving around from the perspective of being exposed unawares to their radiation.
There are a number of other reasons to be upset about such vans, though.
So why don't you try the laser experiment. Use a 1 milliwatt laser. That's _less_ energy than the light bouncing from your skin. That's nothing. And it's non ionizing radiation. So it's totally safe. Point it right in your eye. See what happens. By the completely over simplified thinking that you are undertaking here you will be fine. Right?
I meant that light bouncing from skin to eye is a proper analogy for banana dose.
But since you challenge me - I shined the usual ~5mW red laser pointers many times straight into the eye, and had strangers shine them at me as well. It's annoying, but it doesn't hurt. My vision is ok. I'm totally fine.
The quantities of radiation quoted by the manufacturer are extremely low. The actual effective absorbed dose might be different from what they actually say, of course.
I am anticipating that someone will come forth to defend this illegal searching by claiming that the radiation dose is negligible or irrelevant. I want to counter this defense by posing the matter as philosophical rather than an empirical question of whether the irradiation is harmful or not.
EDIT: Ah, in the time that it took me to write this, I have been proven correct.
The quantities of radiation quoted by the manufacturer are extremely low.... when the machines are in proper working order, and maintained and operated as intended by the manufacturer.
My dentist had to take a course in health physics before being allowed to use an X-ray machine on humans. So did my doctor. What makes TSA agents and New York cops so special?
Again, i was simply quoting the manufacturer. Adding information to the conversation. You dont have to believe it or agree with it, but it's a side that should be heard rather than downvoted.
it's only objective in the context of people who understand the magnitude of the numbers being quoted. No data is provided as to alternate sources of radiation. An analogy is made by the manufacturer, but they have incentive to claim that level is as low as possible.
And, without any other information, the specific quotation being presented appears to imply you think it's no big deal (since you didn't offer any interpretation or make a statement relating to your opinion on the matter).
(though to note, I didn't downvote you, I'm just explaining how the information could be seen as "subjective" and not "objective").
I don't think you should be downvoted, but realize that people might be responding negatively because the citation you provided is exactly the citation that defenders of the vans and backscatter scanners at airports provide to dismiss safety concerns. So, without context around your citation, it might seem that you're trying to provide an opinionated defense of the safety of the vans.
As others have mentioned, there are also issues regarding whether those numbers can really be interpreted to mean that they are relatively safe. The manufacturers of backscatter tech claim that's true, but others suggest that because of the concentration in the skin, it's not a good estimate of safety. To interpret your cited numbers, the discussion also needs that side of the story, which other commenters have provided, but your original post did not.
> there are also issues regarding whether those numbers can really be interpreted to mean that they are relatively safe.
And contributing the manufacturer's stated specifications ADDS to that conversation, which meets the criteria for 'goodness'.
Not directing this at you, as you've already acknowledged that the OP should not have been downvoted, but additive facts should, probably as a rule, never be downvoted on account of knee-jerk reactions.
Philosophically, the government should not be irradiating people without their consent under any circumstance. Empirically, there is no* health risk from doing so with these vans.
* By any reasonable measure of increased incidence of cancer from small doses of radiation.
Except there's nothing to support the latter statements. The statement made by the manufacturer 1) could be totally false, 2) refers to a specific single-use of the technology.
They're claiming a specific output per-scan. What if the police are using this van with 10-second scan intervals, pointed at the same building, with people inside, for several hours? That's a fairly plausible scenario which could result in several ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more irradiation.
> That's a fairly plausible scenario which could result in several ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more irradiation.
"Orders of magnitude" is not a magic phrase you get to throw around to scare people.
Assuming 10 seconds intervals and instantaneous scans going on for 8-12 hours you've gone up just about 3 orders of magnitude. That is, from banana-equivalent dose to about the background radiation dose, per this handy radiation reference[0]. In other words, people in that building receive twice the amount of radiation that they would naturally do.
That is assuming a hell and a lot of scans while also ignoring the protection offered by distance and the building itself.
It wasn't thrown around to scare people, it was used because it's accurate. I fail to see how my statement is inaccurate considering by your own admission there are indeed several (3) orders of magnitude difference.
The point I was trying to make was saying that it's some negligible number is wrong. By your own handy reference, it's the equivalent of 2 Dentist x-rays.
The dentist at least has the decency to put a lead bib over you.
> I fail to see how my statement is inaccurate considering by your own admission there are indeed several (3) orders of magnitude difference.
"Three orders of magnitude" is a meaningless thing without context, and I just pointed out that in this context it still doesn't change the conclusion that the exposure is neglible and not worth considering.
> The dentist at least has the decency to put a lead bib over you.
That's because people are irrational and you need to dance around them for their own sake.
> What I'm saying is: That's not entirely relevant if we don't know how many doses people actually get.
True. But then if we count up the reasonable upper bound of possible doses you could get, like "several thousands times a day times amount X", and it still adds up to "not harmful", should we keep being distressed about it?
Assuming 100nSv per scan (first comment in this post). 10s per scan. ~4000 scans in 12h.
-> 400uSv = 0.4mSv.
Background where I live: 2mSv per year. So this is a fifth of the yearly background dose at my place. But in a single day.
For example, scan the entrance/exit of a parking garage (such as one under supervision) regularly, and you have a realistic chance of severely harming the guy at the ticket booth.
I skipped an order of magnitude here. Your calculation seems correct, so we're up to about a mamogram / day (still ignoring the distance and shielding effects of the building, but we're computing the reasonable upper bound on exposure).
Over the year this 0.4 mSv adds up to about 146 mSv. Per the Handy Chart, it's between EPA dose limits for emergency workers protecting valuable property and for those in lifesaving operations. It's about 1.5 times the "lowest dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk".
So in the worst reasonable case, this seems to be indeed causing an unnecessary increase of cancer risk. Personally I think the conditions for that upper bound are very extreme so the real dose in actual use would not be nowhere near the amount calculated above, but at this point I have to agree there's a reason to be concerned and demand more information about the deployment and capabilities (especially radiation output in failure modes) of those machines.
In short: most likely still not in any way dangerous, but the revised margins are much slimmer, therefore there is a reason for concern.
I apologize for misleading anyone by accidentally skipping a zero.
> Philosophically, the government should not be irradiating people without their consent under any circumstance.
So you are against public broadcasting systems? You also don't think that a government should have a moral duty to operate an emergency broadcast system for helping people deal with natural disasters? X-rays and radio waves are both EM radiation.
To be even more pedantic, this stance also means that a government building would not be able to have any lights or heaters (amongst other things). Or a cop searching for a suspect at night wouldn't be able to use a torch.
I think it's a bad, absolutist philosophical point to make.
I think the poster was referring only to ionizing radiation (the kind proven to increase cancer risk). Light fixtures and heaters (infrared) don't fall into that category.
You are correct - I was mostly speaking for effect. But the absolutism is still a problem. For example, if you get into a car accident and are taken to an emergency department in a state where your life is in jeopardy but you are unable to provide consent - should the medical staff have the moral right to do x-rays, which greatly aid their diagnoses?
Also, the medical staff are irradiating you for the direct purpose of aiding you specifically. The police are irradiating you because they've decided you are by default a suspect worthy of search simply by virtue of passing by - the benefit you receive in return for any health risk is debatable at best.
Was it supposed to imply anything? Or it was just an information dump for information's sake, leaving it to the readers to make their own conclusions?
Because regardless of what your post's purpose was, people are obviously gonna read that extract as "hey, it's inside safety limits, so it's ok".
When we post something without further comment it's quite safe to assume that people will think we agree with it, and we're using it to pass a message (especially the most obvious reading it has). The only other interpretation that's (a little less) common, is for people to think we've quoted it sarcastically.
"I don't consent to any form of non-necessary irradiation, regardless of the quantity."
Standing in front of the US capitol building for about an hour is also about 0.1 uSv. Granite is quite radioactive, you know. Some kitchen countertops are much worse.
0.1 uSv is also the generally accepted as the "banana equivalent dose". Bananas are a decent source of potassium, which aside from being an essential element is also somewhat radioactive.
There is no fixed accepted dose rate for flying. More than a couple and less than a dozen uSv/hr is about as accurate as you're gonna get. Depends on flight path and altitude and who knows what all else. The claim that its a couple minutes of flight is not all that far from the truth, more or less.
People who don't really understand what they're afraid of can't rationally minimize risks anyway. Perhaps the granite in a kitchen countertop or architectural decorative feature would increase cancer death rate by 0.0001% but cancer due to chemical catalyst contamination in a replacement laminate countertop MIGHT be ten times the cancer death rate of radioactive granite. Or maybe not.
Assuming they're telling the truth about the dose, I wouldn't worry about the radiation dose. Its small enough to be measured but biologically irrelevant.
What is highly suspicious is a police state violating constitutional amendments probably isn't very concerned with citizen health and probably feels no need to tell the truth. I could see some PR guy claiming its only 1 banana-equivalent-dose or an hour sitting at a granite countertop or whatever because he knows its irrelevant, even if the actual dose is so high that passersby hair is falling out and they're getting radiation burns because its an enormously higher dose. I mean, the government would never lie to us, would they?
An analogy of your argument: gravity exerts harmless levels of physical force on your body, therefore the government has the right to exert harmless levels of physical force on your body.
By the way, radiation exposure is cumulative throughout your lifetime. There is no safe minimum level of radiation exposure. How much radiation you get on a flight is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
By the way, radiation exposure is cumulative throughout your lifetime. There is no safe minimum level of radiation exposure. How much radiation you get on a flight is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
> By the way, radiation exposure is cumulative throughout your lifetime. There is no safe minimum level of radiation exposure. How much radiation you get on a flight is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
It still doesn't matter; assuming the official values are correct within two orders of magnitude, those scans still get dwarfed by the natural background radiation you are exposed to every day.
Complaining about this, or expecting someone to get consent for such levels of radiation, is ridiculous (yes, there are very important reasons for which one should oppose those scans, but radiation is not one of them). It's just failure of thinking by refusing to do the math. By the same token, why should we allow you to increase risk of heart attack of everyone here by using scary-sounding words like "radiation exposure" in the comments? Stress adds up too.
I think most of us here are aware of the basic nature of radiation exposure and have also seen this popular XKCD chart. I personally had to learn a lot about radiation exposure due to a bout with thyroid cancer and radiation treatment and scans. But that is not the point. It's not about the dangers of radiation. It's about the right to expose people to radiation at all, regardless of the danger level.
By your reasoning, it would be OK for the police to take a few pennies here and there from large bank accounts.
> By your reasoning, it would be OK for the police to take a few pennies here and there from large bank accounts.
By my reasoning it's ok for the police to drive around in their cars even though they add up to traffic, which costs a lot of people some pennies lost in gasoline and opportunity cost.
The only reason we're talking about it is because "radiation" sound scary while other things, like "time lost in increased traffic" do not. At the levels of danger we're talking about here we should not be bringing concept of people's rights, lest we want to also regulate disagreeing in Internet comments because of increased heart attack risk from stress.
> The only reason we're talking about it is because "radiation" sound scary
Radiation doesn't "sound" scary, it is scary. And for very good reason: because at the hands of people who don't understand the dangers, it can be absolutely devastatingly lethal.
Take for instance the irradiation accident in Goiania (Brazil) where a radioactive source was removed from a trashed teletherapy machine by people scavenging for scrap.
This is from the IAEA report on the case:
After the source capsule was ruptured, the remnants of the source assembly were sold for scrap to a junkyard owner. He noticed that the source material glowed blue in the dark. Several persons were fascinated by this and over a period of days friends and relatives came and saw the phenomenon. Fragments of the source the size of rice grains were distributed to several families. Theis proceeded for five days, by which time a number of people were showing gastrointestinal symptoms arising from their exposure to radiation from the source.
Result, 249 people contaminated, 4 of which died and 28 suffeed radiation burns, plus environmental contamination kilometers away.
That's why people are scared of radiation. Because it can seriously mess you up.
And I fear that going around and saying "it's totally harmless, like eating a banana" is really not helping the people who use it to be really, really careful how they use it. And they should- because if they don't then it's not at all harmless.
Basically, a backscatter van like the ones we discuss here, if left at the hands of people who do not have any training as radiologists (and possibly even then) is, indeed, for all intends and purposes, a chariot of death with an invisible death ray gun.
Tell me what keeps the operators of this sort of van from forgetting the scanner to "ON" pointing at a crowded building and going for a wee, or a coffee, or taking a nap or whatever. People have done much, much more stupid things than that. See above- glow-in-the-dark powder. They thought it was magical fairy dust and daubed it on their babies [edit: actually that was in a very similar accident, in Ciudad Juarez]. 'Nuff said?
"those scans still get dwarfed by the natural background radiation you are exposed to every day."
As others have said, the effects of radiation are additive, therefore those scans are not "dwarfed" by the natural background radiation etc, they increase it.
Take heat as an analogy. If the background level is at your body temperature and seventy different processes raise it by 1 degree C, you'll boil in your own skin. The background level is safe, each raise is safe, but added up they kill you.
The question is: is this possible with those vans? Is it conceivable that, in some cases, for some people, they may cause a lethal increase in their daily dose of radiation? Is it possible to know this for sure? Uncertain death is even scarier than certain death and for very good reason.
A far better gravitational analogy, assuming I did the numbers right in my head, when a cop stands a normal distance away from me while talking to me, the gravitational force he exerts on my body is assaulting me with about ten billionths of a newton. Depending on how many donuts he's eaten in his career the force might be higher but it would be in the "dozens of billionths of a newton" for sure. And no means no, and no level of assault is acceptable.
Having a cop stand to either side of me superficially would balance the gravitational force, but unfortunately I'd still be getting violently physically assaulted by tidal forces as my flesh stretches out ever so microscopically toward them both.
The government already entitles itself to do far worse things than bounce a few photons off me now and then -- eg every year they pry open my wallet and entitle themselves to a very large fraction of my income.
You should also be wary to chose the new place carefully, there are many areas on Earth where the background radiation is higher than in NY with a scan-van on every corner working constantly.
So, by that argument, we should just let the government do anything then? I once had a similar argument with a friend who insisted there should be stricter gun laws "because the government already has tanks and planes, so the second amendment doesn't make any sense anymore; they could always bomb the shit out of the public if they wanted."
I think the opposite is truth: we need to act now while we still have some power, rather than assume a defeatist attitude and let our children and their children at the mercy of a fully omnipotent government.
No, my actual argument is that all arguments of the form "If the government is allowed to do X then they have to be allowed to do Y, Z and Z' " are a bit silly.
The problem is that x-rays use ionizing radiation which is more dangerous. Some people could be more sensitive or in a more likely scenario they get a lot of x-rays and/or ct scans due to medical issues which requires them being very careful about spacing out scans and exposure to other sources.
Then there is the possibility someone walks in between the van and target. At some point you have to stop the argument that this and that does x and y so z is ok. People are afraid of excessive radiation and the government isn't listening to people.
One thing that infuriates me is that people making these arguments don't even know that x-rays (and cats) use ionizing radiation which is what carries real risks. Incidentally, MRIs do not use ionizing radiation so you can stay in there a "while". Thats how they can do so many cool studies using MRIs.
The problem is people refuse to do the math, or to listen to people who did the math. All they hear is "that scary r-thing".
At this point I think this link will beat Meditations on Moloch in the "most often posted in comments by this user" statistic, but once again I'm pointing to this helpful chart: https://xkcd.com/radiation/.
> People are afraid of excessive radiation and the government isn't listening to people.
People are afraid of a lot of things, and at this point I'm not sure how we should deal with it on a social level anymore. They are scared of radiation, therefore allow for lots of unnecessary deaths, destruction of the environment and even more radiation by refusing to replace coal plants with nuclear ones. They're also afraid of vaccines, microwaves and cell-phone EM radiation (how they were never afraid of radio waves in pre-cellphone era is beyond me, but maybe they initially were but got over it).
That people are afraid of things that aren't dangerous doesn't mean we should stop doing that things. As for how to make people not afraid, I don't know anymore. Maybe we should just pay the advertising industry to fix that with propaganda?
Interestingly, due to the altitude it flew at Concorde included a radiation detector that triggered a cockpit warning light when the incident ionizing radiation exceeded a preset limit. The standard operating procedure if the warning was triggered was to descend to a lower altitude.
(Presumably this was more about the aircrew's cumulative dose than the passengers).
The information look to be carefully selected to paint a very biased picture. It assume a certain amount of metal is between the scanner and the human being, and the air flight comparison is there to minimize the emotional response to risk.
Let assume that this van and flying two minutes at altitude gives around 0.00something risk to cancer and thus death. If someone shoot a gun into the air, do they expose innocent people to the same risk as this mobile X-Ray van? What about a factory that dumps mercury into the water supply, and then compare that to the average increase in heavy metal from eating a single banana?
Objective information is easily shaped to change public opinion, and I for one will be very careful when it is about unnecessary exposure to risk (and I can guarantee that the operators of the van uses protective gear against radiation).
Interestingly, it's nearly the same radiation dose as is living within 50 miles from a nuclear power plant for 1 year. Which is only interesting since the Indian Point nuclear power plant is ~35 miles from Manhattan.
The top layers of your skin is ~5% of your body weight and your only getting that on one side of your body so ~2% of your body weight.
Thus, even if the average is 1 banana equivalent dose, your skin is getting ~50 times that which may or may not be safe, but it sounds worse.
PS: Of course this also assumes nothing breaks and it stays in motion, if the vehicle stops without turning off you might get hundreds or thousands of times that.
You're presumably thinking alpha particles if you're thinking of radiation which is stopped by, and therefore concentrates measured exposure at, your skin. I rather strongly doubt this machine uses alpha particles. Considerations which make me doubt this: they would get blocked by insulating materials such as e.g. the side of the surveillance van, the side of your vehicle, 3 cm of open air, etc.
No, X-rays have different penetrating power based on frequency. There using a back-scatter approach as it's just one van which means very low penetrating power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray
Bananas throw out beta radiation. It's not as penetrating as alpha - attenuation depth in water on the order of centimeters rather than millimeters? - but I think a banana-equivalent dose will be pretty solidly concentrated in your digestive tract.
No, the banana is radioactive from potassium-40, which your absorbing and spreading throughout your body.
However, you also excrete potassium making the Banana equivalent meaningless as it's calculated by assuming you kept that potassium for 50 years which simply does not happen. AKA you would end up with less than 365 Banana equivalent doses by eating 1 banana a day for 1 year. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose)
Its mostly the fault of one isotope of potassium and many hiker types eat bananas specifically to boost their blood K levels because otherwise they get really annoying muscle cramps. Its a moderately strong beta emitter and the range in water (close to human body) is about 2 cm or so. There are probably no parts of your innards more than 2 cm from the nearest bodily fluid (blood or whatever).
Humans are surprisingly radioactive BTW. We each have about a hundred grams of potassium happily radiating away. An interesting technological challenge for a startup might be using purely passive radiation monitoring to detect humans. For security sensing or something. Maybe in a 100 years automatic supermarket style doors will sense humans radioactively rather than current microwave doppler and infrared systems. Maybe.
> An interesting technological challenge for a startup might be using purely passive radiation monitoring to detect humans.
Beta is super-easily stopped. A piece of cardboard or tinfoil reduces it dramatically, or stops it completely, depending on energy per particle, total flux, etc.
I've a Luminox watch, the dial is visible in darkness all the time, you don't have to "recharge" it. It works by having small amounts of tritium decay within luminescent tubes. The radiation produced is beta - but the levels of radiation outside the watch are essentially zero. The body of the watch is enough to contain it.
Again, and as others pointed out in other contexts here, it depends on the energy. Tritium has 20keV betas AFAIR. Some elements produce multi-MeV beta decay. That is not stopped by thin cardboard.
Isn't all x-ray exposure one sided based on the radiation source? Doesn't all radiation exposure start with the skin? X-ray penetrate so not all energy is deposited on the skin's surface.
> The radiation doses emitted by the scans are extremely small; the scans deliver an amount of radiation equivalent to 3 to 9 minutes of the radiation received through normal daily living. Furthermore, since flying itself increases exposure to ionizing radiation, the scan will contribute less than 1% of the dose a flyer will receive from exposure to cosmic rays at elevated altitudes.
Backscatter deposits that radiation disproportionately in areas of the body that are prone to cancer - skin, testes, breast tissue, etc.
So those areas that are particularly sensitive take a disproportional hit with this technology.
This [1] is a letter from a group of prominent scientists and oncologists at UCSF who wrote a letter to the White House about the uncertainties of the technology when it was used by the TSA at airports.
I was lucky enough to ride on the Concorde from Heathrow to JFK when I was about 12 (the 747 (seats ~400) we were supposed to take broke down, and they only had a 737 (seats ~300) and a concorde (seats 100) available; my dad, having many tens of thousands of airline miles and super double platinum status on basically every airline, including british airways, was able to get our family of four as part of the hundred that got on the concorde for that flight).
The cruising altitude of the concorde at mach ~2 is between 60 and 65k feet, basically double a normal airplane (wikipedia says 60k, but I distinctly remember the monochrome LCD in the plane that said we were traveling 1350 mph at 64k feet)
I'm curious, now, what my cosmic radiation dosage was at that altitude. Surely, given the nature of atmosphere and radiation, the dosage at twice the normal altitude is considerably more than twice what it is at 30k feet. I wonder what that did to my chances of getting a radiation induced cancer now ;)
As an aside, that happened well before 9/11, so I was actually able (/invited by the flight attendants) to go to the cockpit and talk to the pilots while were cruising along at mach 2. I remember asking the pilot what the actual takeoff speed was (he said about 175 mph, if I recall correctly. Given the glued-to-the-seat acceleration we experienced on take off, sounds about right), and all sorts of other nerdy questions about the technology.
I'm gonna pour one out for the pre 9/11 days when curious kids could visit the cockpit of an airplane and be a nerd with the pilots.
I'll pour another one out for the Concorde.
I still remember it pretty vividly (though memories can of course be deceiving ;), but we made it from heathrow to jfk in 3.5 hours. I believe, also, that with the time change, we landed about 15 minutes before we took off.
</OT>
I've now been living in NYC for ~15 years (moved here about 3 weeks before 9/11), and have watched the NYPD develop it's various anti-terrorism tactics. From the weird aluminum devices I've seen in penn station next to the armed-with-assault-rifles national guard folk on major travel days, to the stickers on the street food carts citing their affiliation with some NYPD anti-terrorism program, I've been concerned for years about the NYPD overstepping reasonable bounds on their behavior.
Where does this end? How do we encourage the police to actually be reasonable? I do have an acquaintance in the NYPD (we went to college together), but conversation on this topic is more or less not possible. The thin blue line is very much a thing, and it appears to be impenetrable for us 'civilians' (the general attitude I got from said acquaintance is "you wouldn't understand").
After reading caf's comment about Concorde's radiation detector, I came across this: "To protect passengers and crew from unnecessary radiation exposure, airworthiness authorities of Britain and France require that civilian aircraft, which fly above 50,000 ft, have a solar cosmic ray warning device. If the radiation level reachs 100 millirem/hr, the pilot is to descend to a lower altitude." - https://www.faa.gov/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oam...
Guessing there aren't a whole lot of civilian planes affected by this rule :-D
Another benefit of the Concorde is that you were exposed to that radiation for a much shorter time than the passengers flying at 40k feet for hours longer.. I'd like to see the comparison but am too busy to do it myself tonight.
On it's face, this may seem completely harmless, but what about when you consider how the device is going to actually be used?
I imagine constant-scanning over a period of several hours would be on the order of several hundreds/thousands of bananas. Would that be banana-boarding?
Several thousands bananas a day add up to about the background radiation level. Most people won't be spending all day sitting next to this van, and even if, there are some other radiation sources one is exposed to daily that just dwarf the emissions from the scan-van, per this handy chart[0] that I'll soon get banned for constantly posting in this thread.
TL;DR: it's harmless, please focus on the actual problem - i.e. police taking nudes of you without your knowledge or consent.
I'm sorry, but if someone were being forced to eat thousands of bananas a day, people would be pretty outraged.
I'm all for keeping this about privacy, but don't dismiss the health stuff. Dentists still give you a lead bib to protect against x-rays (2doses worth according to XKCD), so yeah, don't dismiss it.
> I'm sorry, but if someone were being forced to eat thousands of bananas a day, people would be pretty outraged.
Yes, but not because radiation. There's a difference between scanning someone and force-feeding them.
X-rays are emitted by many processes, including playing with an office tape. If, say, relays in traffic lights emitted equivalent amounts of X-rays in the course of their normal operation (don't they? did anyone check?), nobody would be talking about it. The reason we're talking about vans is because police is taking nudes without consent; radiation is only used as an additional, powerful argument, because it sounds scary.
> I'm all for keeping this about privacy, but don't dismiss the health stuff. Dentists still give you a lead bib to protect against x-rays (2doses worth according to XKCD), so yeah, don't dismiss it.
I think those are 2 doses afer taking into account the shielding you get. I wouldn't expect it to be much higher without shielding though, but medical profession is both extremely sensitive about legal issues and not beyond doing weird things to cater for irrational fears of people. For instance, the reason you get "a MRI" and not NMR - for Nucler Magnetic Resonance, as it is called everywhere else in science - is because patients were afraid of the word "nuclear".
I think the reason we're talking about the vans (at least the reason I am) is because it's directed radiation, not just an electric field that extends symmetrically in all directions.
The dentist I went to (who was really great) explained that there was actually a pretty big difference in the radiation levels between hardware from 10 years ago and today. IDK when the reference date for that xkcd chart is. f
But either way, why should we let someone subject us to even slightly just a tad potentially harmful in a directed manner? I'm not cool with that.
> IDK when the reference date for that xkcd chart is.
From what I can tell it was last updated in 2011[0].
> But either way, why should we let someone subject us to even slightly just a tad potentially harmful in a directed manner? I'm not cool with that.
We're talking about so very slightly very much just a tad harmfulness that if we were to be consistent about it we'd have to take issue with every single thing in our lives. This is beyond "I'll stay at home, external world is dangerous" levels of harm. So why are we suddenly singling out radiation, and not say risk of getting driven over by scan-vans? Or risk of accidentally angering a cop and getting shot to death, as it happens in the US from time to time? In my opinion, we're privileging the radiation issue way, way too much.
So the FAQ of the company that sells sketchy (until recently) secret X-Ray vans to the NYPD asserts that they're completely safe. Have these dosage levels been independently tested?
Great. So what happens when the police get to love these things and there's 7500 of them in a city and you get scanned by 5 at once continuously wherever you go?
If somebody only takes a penny from my wallet, they still stole it without my consent. Even if x rays were 100% completely harmless, it still amounts to being searched without my consent.
Why is this legal? In Kyllo -vs- United States, the USSC ruled that using modern technology to peer into someone's home constituted a search under the 4th Amendment[1], and required a warrant.
It's probably not, but considering Chicago ran a blacksite operation that moved over 7000 people and relatively little has happened in regards to that, you can bet nothing will happen with this.
The goal of modern law enforcement in the US is to just grow bigger and bigger and get more and more toys.
Start program. Don't tell anybody about it. In fact, make it illegal for people to know about it. Buy millions of dollars in equipment. Use equipment even if untested/ineffective. Buy more equipment and start more programs. Repeat. Gotta stop terrorism, after all.
Also, if someone starts to challenge your data source, be sure to settle or drop the case. We wouldn't want a legal challenge to have a chance of succeeding and stopping the unconstitutional practices.
Why is it legal to collect every passing motorist's speed using a radar gun? Why is a red light camera legal? I assume they aren't.
They are both very unconstitutional, just gathering massive amounts of evidence with no warrant or probable cause. Why any of these practices have lasted longer than a year after deployment is beyond me.
Why is it legal to collect every passing motorist's speed
using a radar gun? Why is a red light camera legal? I assume
they aren't
Both those examples happen when the subject of question is on public property and whose investigated crimes are those of the actual vehicle being misused.
They are not hard to spot. Watch the media entrances of events, where the on-location vans drive through. Look for where traffic is routed through a single lane. Inevitably they will route traffic past an unmarked van. Or, look for an unmarked van trolling any parking lots within any security cordon.
I wonder if there is a way to render these scanning devices ineffective or shroud items from them.
I don't see why it would be a problem to scan-proof vehicles, containers, or clothing, considering that they don't have a warrant for the search in the first place. I guess lead-lining everything is pretty inconvenient, but I don't see why the pigs get to see me naked for free.
It takes a skilled professional to properly diagnose such things even when the right equipment is used. These vans were designed for scanning vehicles more than people, and for objects much larger than a tumor. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they are completely unable to detect cancerous growths.
i'm not asking for professional diagnosis, just a quick BigData/Image analysis (a small plugin for the Palantir system which processes these images anyway) on an original image what this one i'd guess was significantly downscaled from:
(i mean you can see the guy's balls even on that downscaled image :)
I think all these Big Brother total surveillance technologies can have huge public benefit if/when public actually gets access to it. After all it is our tax dollars that paid for it and normally we're supposed to get access to the info government procures on our dime.
> I'm not asking for professional diagnosis, just a quick BigData/Image analysis
There is a reason these kind of analyses are still done by humans, even with extremely high resolution images, with the proper contrast. Big Data is not a solution to every analysis problem.
> i mean you can see the guy's balls even on that downscaled image
And if he had testicular cancer, it would be a tiny speck on those balls. Also, compare the humans you see in that image to a picture of a simple chest X-ray. Notice how you can see barely any internal structure? This image can diagnosis that they all have two lungs, but not much else.
So here's a question...are there any ways we can definitively detect these vans (ie. something that can detect a large source of x-rays being emitted)?
If so, are there consequences for identifying and making it known to those nearby that "this van is scanning you without your knowledge/permission?"
Yeah, for sure. Wasn't at all planning on doing this--just kind of assumed it would inevitably happen what with the prevalence of smart phones and geo-tagging capabilities.
One could imagine it being fairly trivial to create an app that broadcasts the location of these things if they can be easily detected.
This makes me wonder if I was scanned on my way through one of the many tunnels in NYC earlier this summer while I was vacationing there?
There were about 15 lanes of traffic (toll lines) converged into two lanes to enter most tunnels. If what you say is common practice for the NYPD at events, certainly they would have something setup at tunnel entrances too.
An aside: I've never seen a Google search using encrypted.google.com - very cool! Apparently it prevents the referrer/query data from getting passed along to wherever you click.
Can someone explain to me how this is legal seeing as to how the Supreme Court ruled this unconstitutional without a warrant in Kyllo v. United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States)? Or is this just another case of the rule of law being neglected by authorities again as if it didn't exist?
The holding in Kyllo is based on the search being of a home, where the Fourth Amendment protections are strongest (“At the very core” of the Fourth Amendment
“stands the right of a man to retreat into his own
home and there be free from unreasonable governmental
intrusion.” Silverman v. United States, 365 U. S. 505, 511
(1961). ) and the holding is narrow: Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not
in general public use, to explore details of the home that
would previously have been unknowable without physical
intrusion, the surveillance is a “search” and is presumptively
unreasonable without a warrant.
I'd expect NYC to say "These vans are strictly for anti-terrorism purposes and if we see a bomb then you're welcome to cite the exclusionary rule from the safety of a non-blown-up courthouse", though that viewpoint will not command a whole lot of support on HN. I think it's probably a loser at the current Supreme Court on a drug case and would get a 9-0 with Scalia writing a florid distinguishing opinion from Kyllo if a terrorism case somehow made it all the way to the Supreme Court. (Amateur analysis here; IANAL.)
>stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion
Sort of a funny concept in the day and age that you get no-knock raids where cops shoot your pets with fully automatic assault rifles based off anonymous telephone calls.
Nah, clearly the definition of "unreasonable" has been altered quite a bit over the last few decades. No knock raids generally have a legal warrant, given by a judge and everything, allowing them to do so.
Instead of a bomb how about a warning that these vans exist? You could have a bunch of nerds leaving arduinos in Ubers around NYC. Have the arduinos measuring radiation and phoning home with any locations that are above average. At the very least it would be an interesting map to look at
Geiger counters are to become next sensor to be added to iPhone 7 i guess. A health app counting you daily calories and roentgens. Or an augmented reality app which shows the sources of radiation, like those vans, around you.
Film badge dosimeters are very cheap, well-tried technology, they are lightweight and don't need a power source. For measuring long term cumulative radiation dose they are hard to beat.
Ionizing radiation is a broad category that includes portions of the EM spectrum. EM radiation is ionizing if it has enough energy to remove at least one electron from an atom, this includes the upper bits of UV and above. There are things other than EM that are things that are ionizing radiation too like subatomic particles.
Geiger counters can also detect XRays more or less effectively depending on their design.
> Ionizing radiation is any type of particle or electromagnetic wave that carries enough energy to ionize or remove electrons from an atom. There are two types of electromagnetic waves that can ionize atoms: X-rays and gamma-rays, and sometimes they have the same energy.
Carry one of these radiation detectors.[1] It will emit loud beeps if hit by an X-ray beam. This is a scanned spot beam system, so the exposure is short but easily measurable.
AS&E offers the system (which is rather large) in two models of Mercedes Sprinter vans and a Ford 550 for off-road use. This thing has been around for almost a decade; they recently came out with a new van, but it's apparently the same backscatter hardware.
It's a very short range technology. For cargo container or vehicle inspection, they need separate scanning units for both sides and the top. Even for scanning people, both sides have to be scanned separately. It's not suitable for looking into houses.
But if you think something is a bomb, it's a good way to get a quick look. Because it can identify different elements, explosives really stand out.
To explicitly summarize your comment: technology is going to be abused by the powerful regardless of what they claim unless we enact strict systemic controls on their use with intense oversight.
Such enforcement is entirely possible, it just takes the political will to do so.
This latest incident is just another piece of evidence for America being a police/surveillance state. I'm not sure how people can deny it anymore.
I just sat on a jury in Colorado where we found a police detective guilty of abuse of power and other charges. Almost every witness with another police officer.
So no, cops do not always ignore other cops breaking the law.
I recently saw a report that showed that when cops report other cops, the chances of a conviction or other serious consequences are well over 50%, whereas civilian complaints against cops tend to be more like 1%. Because a lot of times civilian complaints aren't about actual abuse of power, but "I don't like the tone of voice he took with me" or whatever.
Good cops generally want to get the bad cops off of the force.
This too is changing. Especially in Baltimore, the political apparatus has realized that without intervention and harsh oversight, the population will riot and destroy the city. Thus, the officers involved in the Freddie Gray incident were indicted, and may go to jail.
I wish it hadn't taken a riot in Baltimore, but it's probable that there will be more riots before we get the kind of oversight that is needed.
In LA, when the Simi Valley jury acquitted the cops who were videotaped beating Rodney King, that would have been the end of the matter if the riots hadn't occurred.
Edit: this is just to give readers extra information.
The current story does not count as a dupe because it contains significant new information. When a story is on the front page, that automatically means we haven't marked it as a dupe.
- If NYPD has it, other large port cities or metropolitan areas must have them as well. Florida jurisdictions have featured prominently for Stingrays and other military tech, wouldn't be surprised to find Orlando or Miami or what not sporting them as well.
Edit: Read the rest of the article, apparently U.S. News has found "[more than] 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside." The use case is to intentionally expose people to the xrays.
- Are they getting warrants for these scans?
- What ombudsman process or other audit-able legal infrastructure is in place in New York City that allows non-police persons to establish the veracity of the warrants they get to run these scans?
- How do we confirm scans only expose the specific people identified in the warrants to x-ray radiation?
- If collateral private spaces are scanned along with the intended target, how does NYPD ensure those images are destroyed (as they're outside the scope of their warrants)?
- The court discussion mentioned in the article indicate the specific technology used in these vans has been repeatedly banned from use on humans, by US and other authorities. Where is the non-company-funded, reviewed-and-published study data showing this backscatter x-ray tech isn't harmful?
I think we need new kind of cop show. "The Wire" for 21st century, where police investigates bening cases as a threat to national security, drives around the city in x-ray vans, share pics, show unrestrained joy when they get another MRAP and engages in borderline torture that's clearly shown to not work.
The military industrial complex certainly has to have something to do with this. Not making enough money on international wars? Ok, let's go sell to domestic police forces.
I would love to hear if anyone here knows for certain if there is a link between companies selling to US military for international war and the companies selling these contraptions to domestic police forces.
Before we really understood x-rays and before ultrasound, x-ray was used to scan pregnant women. Not surprisingly, this resulted in many tragic birth defects and miscarriages, before researchers and doctors figured out what was going on.
Of course, it is a question of dose, but if a pregnant woman is the person of interest/around the POI and subjected to this multiple times, have they even considered that the dosage level could become harmful for the fetus?
I would love to have light up barber poles that turn on a rotating red light when they get hit by x-rays. Then you put them on street corners all around the city.
I'm not so sure I agree that's overly ethically gray - it's EM radiation detection just like using any other camera or eyeballs, only at different wavelengths.
X-ray imaging, on the other hand, seems FAR more ethically gray to me, especially given the potential public health consequences.
Considering thermal imaging was considered a search requiring a warrant, it would make sense for any sort of detection not available to normal human senses to be a search.
The supreme court had issue with the thermal devices because they weren't generally available to the public. Dogs are generally available and they're smelling things outside your home/car where they don't need a warrant.
This is interesting. You have to add an extra filter to make a camera stop seeing infrared. How it was determined thermal devices aren't generally available?
I would assume the reasoning was that if you can't go to the local electronics store and buy the item in use by police, then it isn't commonly available to the public. But, from my quick reading of the case details, the outcome of that case is pure crap.
The Supreme Court seems to think thermal is special compared to visible wavelengths [0]. Note that this ruling would probably be overturned now that smartphone thermal imaging accessories are under $200 [1].
I wonder what the protocol is when the X-ray van 'sees' something sketchy - "Driver, I have a sudden suspicion there's something hidden inside the door of your car..."
I don't even know if I disagree that the NYPD using things like this isn't a more effective way to prevent crime, but I don't think it matters. They are a law enforcement agency, not a domestic espionage or counter-terrorism agency.
Someone should create a monitor that reacts to directional x-rays and squeeks. Then you can go outside and find them and yell at them. Also, take pictures, plant a tracker, spray paint flowers. Use your imagination.
Copper sulfate nanopowder can successfully diffract x-rays. I wonder how effective against a ZBV scanning would a paint with CuSO4 nanopowder be. Anyone have any idea?
And what will be done? Nothing. The government can radiate you without consequence, without audit, without anyone being held responsible, and if that ever changes it will be the tax payers who pay the fine to radiate themselves while the corrupt gain lucrative contracts for doing such a fine service.
Americans live in a police state and they are too cowed to even admit such a basic truth.
I have to wonder, what do people think the line is? When does the US become a police state?
I see people claiming that because we can discuss whether we are in a police state openly, we are not in one. This is a mistake because it assumes the goal of a police state is oppression. Oppression is not the goal of harsh policing or surveillance. Oppression is the means to achieve the goal of political stability.
Oppression can be used to liquidate protesters which threaten stability, as it has been done in the US as well as many other places. Oppression can be used to squash unorthodox thought, as it was done in the USSR and East Germany. Oppression doesn't have to do both of these things, though. Power is free to decide what items constitute the biggest threat, and how oppression should be applied to best mitigate that threat.
Openly using forceful oppression to prevent people from criticizing the government's policies is likely to stir up far more bad will and instability than merely using oppression to protect physical assets via invasive scanning etc. It is not intellectually realistic to envision a 1984-esque police state where speaking out against Big Brother gets you black bagged. That is far too obvious, and far too simple for reality.
Our current situation is as real of a police state as it gets. If you live in NYC, you're 24/7 surveilled via a multitude of vectors, even if you're not suspected of any crime. The police are not accountable for anything, and allowed to conceal their methods and programs, even to your detriment. A police state.
In many places around the world that actually deserve the name of "police state", you would not be reading this article in a domestic publication. In fact, many of these countries wouldn't even let you read it online if it was published somewhere else.
America has a lot of problems, but hyperbole isn't a solution to any of them.
Peoples bald assertion that America is not a police state is empty useless rhetoric, plenty of facts disagree with such simple, propagandistic statements. Try actually contributing instead of shouting useless nonsense.
EDIT:
It is clear no significant counter arguments can be made, so instead down votes and accusations. Enjoy your echo chamber HN
>The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.
~100% of American communications are monitored by the government. We have secret courts that authorize the killing of American citizens. We have National Security Letters, requiring people to do exactly as they're told and not allowing them to tell anyone (in some cases even their lawyer) they've been served with one. Government agencies operate outside the bounds of the constitution on a routine and mass basis (NSA's phone spying program was found to be illegal/unconstitutional) with zero repercussions to government employees and agents who violated the law.
It also defines this:
>An electronic police state is one in which the government aggressively uses electronic technologies to record, organize, search, and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens
America is the poster child of an electronic police state. We do it more than any other country on a scale larger than any country in history. Americans are more monitored than any large group of people in the history of the world.
I guess the main difference is one of scale. The vast majority of citizens don't "experience restrictions on mobility or expression" in a significant way, even though it happens to some people.
Restrictions on speech, specifically with NSLs, can happen to only a few people but still be extremely significant. The example of the Lavabit email hosting service comes to mind. He was served with an NSL requiring him to nefariously gather the private encrypted emails of his users. He was a single person with an extremely important thing to say with drastic implications, but was legally barred from doing so. I would call that significant. Multiply times thousands of people and you have thousands of very important things being censored.
> He was served with an NSL requiring him to nefariously gather the private encrypted emails of his users.
Should really be:
He was served with an NSL requiring him to gather the private encrypted emails of one of his users.
Rather less inflammatory, and more accurate - the NSL really only affected the person (actually, it may have been slightly more - two people?) using the service that was being targeted. The reason the service was shut down was because of the precendent; the request was definitely not for blanket access to all users communications, which would be blatantly illegal.
> "earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user’s metadata."
> "the documents indicate the bureau was still trying only to capture metadata on one user."
> "while the metadata stream would be captured by a device, the device does not download, does not store, no one looks at it, [and] at the back end of the filter, we get what we’re required to get under the order."
> "So there’s no agents looking through the 400,000 other bits of information, customers, whatever, [...] No one looks at that, no one stores it, no one has access to it."
So, they were still only looking for (and recording) metadata on one user...
Airports. No fly lists. Mass surveillance. Free speech zones, civil forfeiture, national security letters. Millions of Americans have a security clearance, the government has created a two tier system of those inside and everyone else. Big media is tightly controlled in America, and after TPP and other international treaties the internet will also be even more tightly controlled. Civil liberties have been extensively erroded since 9-11, how can anyone besides a shill or the ignorant not know such basic facts?
How are free speech zones a "restriction on [...] expression"? Surely they are the very definition on the LACK of restrictions on expression, the physical embodiement of the freedom of expression...!
The OP was using a shorthand expression for the oppression zones surrounding free speech zones. Free speech zones are areas where normal rights apply, implying that their immediate vicinities are special areas where free speech is curtailed. The zones themselves aren't oppressive, but indicate that oppression exists at their borders, and the free speech zones themselves are used to justify the oppression zones.
OK, I get that one could make that inference. And, having read more about them [1] I think I picked the wrong thing to rebut, as they are probably one of the better examples of "restrictions on expression." The others, I still contend, not so much.
Unfortunately your text largely uses the rhetoric of conspiracy theorists. You even use the word "shill". I don't think reasoned debate is possible with you, because your opinions are so extreme.
The person you're responding to stated very few opinions (essentially "things will get even worse") and some well-known facts. The tone and style of rhetoric is a little heavy but there is absolutely nothing extreme about any of the statements there. An extremist would be someone who chooses to plug their ears and shout and refuse to acknowledge these simple factual statements about American society/government.
Facts were stated, but not the salient one: what proportion of the population experience those things, which is what the comment's parent was talking about. You could have a secret court that decides to kill one person per year, but one person out of a nation of 300M does not a police state make.
TL;DR: A sense of proportion is missing from the factoids.
Well, the fact that the killings are secret means that all we know is that there are nonzero of them since we know there is at least one; if you choose to believe the number is tiny then that's fine but don't act like it's known. That's the very problem behind secret laws/courts/killings; we don't know the scale, we can't. If we interrogate people in court about it to try and find out they will lie under oath and say it's their duty to lie.
And of all the many, many issues brought up you cherry picked the only one which only effects a (likely) small number of Americans so honestly I'm inclined to give that to you since you've let the other 10 or so very serious charges stand. Hooray, you've established that given what's public knowledge it's reasonable to believe we probably don't secretly execute -that many- american citizens without a trial, if that's what 'defending the establishment' looks like then consider the establishment defended.
I think police state is a little much but honestly it's an amorphous term with no meaning other than as a rhetorical tool to evoke some horrible regimes from history. I don't think we are as bad as them, but in particular the post we are talking about is factual and hardly extremist. We don't have to be in Stalin's Russia for there to be some serious problems.
I wasn't literally saying that the said secret courts were matching a quota of one per year. It was an intentionally extreme example to highlight the concept of proportionality.
And seriously, you chide me for playing funny buggers with numbers, then characterise a list of 11 things as 'many, many'? Not to mention that you're implying that the rest of the items are frequently encountered - how many people actually run into no-fly list problems, or have been corralled into a free speech zone?
Finally, I couldn't give a fuck about the Americanness of the victims. I'm not American myself. I think it's a stain on the general American character that so often in discussion about human rights, that whether or not a victim is a US citizen is a salient issue. Why is it less of a moral crime for an unaccountable court to decide to kill a foreigner they don't like? Why is it less of a crime for a tourist to be put on a no-fly list or have their speech curtailed?
You completely misread me if you think I'm of the opinion that the US doesn't have problems. It has serious problems, and a double-helping of them. It also has a lot of awesome aspects. Authoritarianism is on the rise, but the US as it currently stands is not a police state. There is so much hyperbole in US political discourse; everything is polarised and taken to extremes. Someone is a democrat|republican? Now we know everything there is to know about that individual, and they clearly support everything that one party (of only two) does!
The comment I'm arguing against is a typical sky-is-falling polarised position, and doesn't have the shades of gray that the real world does. In police states, people have their movement limited, are afraid to speak out against the government (hardly the case in the US) for fear of prison or similar, and are even afraid of talking to their neighbours due to widespread citizen informant networks. The US is a long way from that - but again, you don't have to be a police state in order to have problems.
Anyone who has ever thought about protesting has been effected by free speech zones -- they have effectively killed protesting. Anyone who has made a public (or not so public) statement critical of the government has been effected by no fly lists -- the threat of a secret list that government officials place you on without justification that seriously damages your life that it is impossible to be removed from is enough to have a chilling effect on every citizen.
And for certain middle-eastern racial groups the no-fly list is actually a pretty widespread concern that effects a lot of people.
10 is not a large number when you are discussing people. It is a huge number when you are discussing serious issues that are independent, each of which requires a response. It is so many most people cannot keep track of them all at once without pen and paper.
And if you are concerned with non-americans (as you should be) every statement in that list is much, much worse from your perspective.
I think the sky is falling, but it's falling slowly. A better analogy is a lobster in a pot of hot but not yet boiling water. If your lobster friend turns to you and says "this water we are in is boiling" do you respond "I took a temperature measurement and technically it's not boiling yet compared to these previous measurements, stop being hysterical" or do you say "you're right, we really need to get worried about this water temperature situation RIGHT NOW" and try to stop it?
Now that sounds quite weak argument: Where exactly goes the line? A quite small minority of DDR or Soviet (speaking of post-Stalin timeframe) 'citizens' actually were jailed or killed. I'd bet that also a very small percent of Chinese population is killed outside the judicial system today, or even within the judicial system's framework of courts and executions, even if they give death sentences very liberally.
It's a question of principle. Either the government and its agencies are held accountable, or they are not. Arbitrary and extra-judicial use of power is still arbitrary and extra-judicial use of power, even if the wielder of that power chooses to use it discreetly. The government is not restricted by the constitution if they can just choose what parts of it they pay lipservice to as they please, even if they do that only seldom and to people who don't matter or "don't deserve our sympathy".
It's only a weak argument because you've strawmanned it. I didn't say that the only thing that makes a police state is state killings. My point was about proportion, not mere absolute existence. You wouldn't say that Norway (0.7 murders/100k pop) is the same as Honduras (~90/100k, from memory) in terms of personal safety, simply because murders exist in an absolute sense in Norway.
> Either the government and its agencies are held accountable, or they are not.
Such philosophical absolutes are useless in the actual human experience. You chide me for weak arguments, yet you hold the modern US state and Hitler/Stalin/Mao/Pot's states as morally equal, since they all have extrajudicially killed at least one person and proportionality does not matter. Clearly this is not the case - the world is shades of gray, not black and white absolutes. Some grays are darker than others.
> We have secret courts that authorize the killing of American citizens
You say this like it's an everyday occurrence, something that happens repeatedly, many many times. But it isn't - it happened once when Anwar al-Awlaki [1] was killed in a drone strike. [ EDIT - should be "happens rarely" not just once ]
As for the 'electronic police state' comment, again this is untrue. The purpose of the bulk surveillance is absolutely NOT to gather evidence against citizens. In fact, it is used agains foreigners only for national security and intelligence purposes. In absolutely exceptional circumstances it is permissible to search the collected data for records pertaining to citizens, but we see in the Snowden documents that there are legal safeguards and procedures to protect against accidental or inadvertant surveillance of citizens.
The frequency is not really relevant. It was and is legal and faced no real opposition.
>The purpose of the bulk surveillance is absolutely NOT to gather evidence against citizens.
They admit themselves they gather bulk data on everything. The intent of an organization that has proven to lie through their teeth and break the law really means nothing. Intent is also pointless, the action is what matters.
>In fact, it is used agains foreigners only for national security and intelligence purposes.
The cases you are citing are all unauthorized accesses and abuses, not systematic government policy. Your argument seems to be that because a law could be broken, then it must be being broken, which is hardly useful.
The law can be broken, there is abundant evidence that it is broken constantly, and there is very little to no accountability when it is broken. There may as well be no law at all. The entire fucking program was illegal for years and it didn't stop them. They literally don't give a shit if what they're doing is illegal.
We all saw the GCHQ documents, and we all know there is no way to separate bulk "American" content/metadata from non-American. The government considers the most intimate affairs (LOVEINT, SEXINT, etc) as firmly their business to snoop on for the purposes of future blackmail-- it does you no favors to deny this, and puts you in a counterfactual position.
The "Main Core" intel database has dossiers on every person they could find data on. There are no distinctions between foreigners and Americans, as we saw from the Snowden docs.
We also saw from Snowden docs that the DEA among other organizations definitely (100%, utterly indisputable, look at wikipedia if you are unclear on this matter) use "parallel construction" in which the NSA passes evidence for criminal cases to the DEA, which then obfuscates the source before going to trial.
Stop shilling, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Nobody is going to engage with you if you use the word "shill". It is the rhetoric of conspiracy theorists, and debate with conspiracy theorists is not technically possible.
Try replying to the points I raised. Responses like yours which essentially state "we can't discuss this issue as a group because of some social norm I don't like" really do scream out that someone doesn't want to bite into the meat of the issue.
"A shill [...] publicly helps a[n] organization without disclosing that they have a close relationship with the organization." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill
> it happened once when Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike.
There have been three US citizens[2] killed by two separate drone strikes. Anwar al-Awlaki is one; in that same strike also killed was Samir Khan — the very Wikipedia article you linked to mentions this. In a separate strike[1], Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki (the son of Anwar), a 16 year old with "no connection to terrorism", was killed.
> You say this like it's an everyday occurrence
Even that it isn't an everyday occurrence, how does that justify taking the life of an American citizen without providing due process to that citizen?
> procedures to protect against accidental or inadvertant surveillance of citizens
This is not even remotely true; the Wikipedia article on the NSA states that the NSA "[relies] on a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act whereby the entirety of US communications may be considered 'relevant' to a terrorism investigation if it is expected that even a tiny minority may relate to terrorism"; the 120 million Verizon subscribers whose data was collected were protected against "accidental or inadvertant surveillance"?
Programs such as MUSCULAR[3] gathered data secretly on American companies' data-center links.
But let's consider that perhaps you don't believe "merely" spying on someone to be a violation of the constitution; let's say that the collected information needs to be actually used against a citizen:
> In August 2013 it was revealed that a 2005 IRS training document showed that NSA intelligence intercepts and wiretaps, both foreign and domestic, were being supplied to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and were illegally used to launch criminal investigations of US citizens. Law enforcement agents were directed to conceal how the investigations began and recreate an apparently legal investigative trail by re-obtaining the same evidence by other means.
Social commentators employed by the same companies that give us garbage news, terrible reporting, and comically blatant bias at every opportunity. For a social commentator to speak out against the government on a major news outlet would be a ratings disaster. Most Americans either agree with the surveillance state, don't give a shit, or don't even know about it. American media outlets are tremendously political and it'd be political suicide to speak ill of those who essentially own you.
I don't know how anyone can argue that the US doesn't fit the definition of an electronic police state as it was defined above. Your head would have to be very deep in the sand.
I think he meant social commentators in academia/think tanks, not anchors at news stations.
> For a social commentator to speak out against the government on a major news outlet would be a ratings disaster.
What do you see them constantly doing when it comes to police brutality? And for the federal level, have you watched Fox News while we've had a Democrat president or MSNBC while we've had a Republican one? Gratuitously negative in both cases.
There is certainly tons of bias at all the popular news outlets, but it's very different from the bias of state owned news agencies.
The problem is that both sides of the political spectrum are in favor on the problems being discussed here. Very few congress members are against the NSA spy program/NSLs/secrete courts/etc. They will bash republicans for being pro-life, but they won't bash them for being pro-NSA (generally speaking).
Also, even amonst the academics, the only ones that make it on air the vast majority of the time (and are placed in a positive context within the programming) are the ones conforming to what the media wants. Ask anyone who's ever been on "the list" for expert interviews on television. They call you up and say "would you be willing to go on air and defend this position?". If no, they hang up and try the next person. The opinions broadcasted on American television are as scripted as any other TV show. Through this process they create what the socially accepted norm is, and even if the majority disagree, they become the "fringe" because their opinions are not as well represented.
"I don't know how anyone can argue that the US doesn't fit the definition of an electronic police state"
Unfortunately the vast vast majority of people disagree with you, including basically every single social commentator. The only people agreeing with you are those on the fringe extremes.
I'm sorry, but I don't think reasoned debate is possible with you.
You're saying reasoned debate is not possible with me when I call you out on a logical fallacy and you reiterate as a trump card, thinking you've won the discussion? Yeah, have fun with your head in the sand.
A basic fallacy and tautology, I'm sure if I list a thinker you will simply state they aren't respected or are 'fringe'.
Does the Chicago blacksite count extraordinary evidence? There is so much evidence of police illegality, wanton murder, and lack of criminal action at every level, from the bottom to to the top where our country commits torture and does nothing that it is extraordinary for anyone to not belief America is a police state. You life in an oligarchy ruled by a corrupt elite, I can even site academic evidence of such but again, you argue by tautologies so why bother? Open your eyes.
In fairness, lots of police departments would love to have X-ray vans. But probably only the NYPD and a few of its peer departments can afford them. Likely as the tech gets cheaper, Podunk USA's cops will also get them.
They don't care if officers killed in the line of duty, as apparently we have an unlimited numbers of people who would love to risk their lives as a LEO so that other's can remain safe.
Is the system foolproof? No. Do accidents and unjustified firings happen? Yes. Are the measures some people want to take practical or logical? No. People want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. These sorts of events used to happen just as frequently - but didn't have Twitter and social media backlash behind every occurrence. With social media coverage these events seem far more common than they used to be, which leads to more outrage against them. I can understand and to some extent sympathize with where people are coming from - but we need a more practical solution than "try to hit an extremity and pray you don't hit an artery". Arm/thigh shots can be fatal from bleed-out. Life isn't the Hollywood movie that some people think it is.
They are asking officers to have 100% accuracy (take an arm/leg shot on a moving target from a distance? Good fucking luck!) and don't recognize that "target with a knife" is a deadly threat from a surprisingly close distance, whether you have a gun or not [0].
I don't think that people complaining about excessive use of force hurt the point of view that the US is a police state. If anything, these people support the idea that the police are out of control. People are looking for any sort of easing up from the cops, even if it's for violent offenders.
You get a constant drum beat of news articles showing the cops killing people who were unarmed, and public resistance grows, which for most people means nothing, as they aren't about to become criminals. Years of police abuses leads to a lot of people not caring if officers live or die, though-- where we are right now. This is a good thing, because everyone is on the same page: violent police are unliked.
The colder the community gets to police, the faster they will change their tune. Ferguson was a turning point, with many police departments realizing that violence begets violence, and military occupation of neighborhoods as a policy begets violent opposition. Since Ferguson we've seen a lot of police departments start to walk back violence as a policy, and maybe in 10 years we'll be back to community policing.
People see the European policing model (police not murdering tons of people or constantly beating/tasing them, having polite and helpful cops who are members of the community) and are getting jealous and angry. This too is a good thing.
>You get a constant drum beat of news articles showing the cops killing people who were unarmed
Anything that gets views will be a constant drum beat in the media. Media coverage is a bad indicator of reality. I would prefer these numbers stay lower [0]. But these numbers never get brought up by the media. They happen frequently enough that articles could be drummed out once a week, I wonder why they aren't?
>I don't think that people complaining about excessive use of force hurt the point of view that the US is a police state.
I'm arguing that the people who bring up foolish points as solutions are more harmful than helpful. I for one don't like reading articles like this one [1]. This isn't about being a police state - this is about people not knowing how to deescalate things. "Taking arm/leg shots" is not deescalation. Not shooting a violent and armed suspect is not deescalation. More or less asking officers to risk death is not deescalation. Yes - the US is increasingly becoming a police state. No, asking officers to risk death instead of shooting is not going to solve it.
I agree about being members of the community. Public outreach and police interacting with the community in friendly ways goes a long way. We need more of this [2] [3] [4] [5]. It builds trust, it builds a sense of community, and that's something sorely lacking in many places of the US.
I doubt people critical of frequent, excessive use of force by police "don't care about officers killed in the line of duty." But that total is 100 so far 2015 [1], while the number of citizens killed by police in the US is at 953 [2]. Obviously some of those people had weapons, but it doesn't seem plausible they all did, in light of the very well-reported cases of unarmed people being shot. And it also seems odd to me that anyone would be surprised that officers might be injured - it is a dangerous job, and pays accordingly.
Thank you for citing the number differences - and I do agree that it is extremely unlikely each of those 953 cases required lethal force or even called for it. Believe me - I'm equally critical of officers and the increasing militarization of police departments that purchase surplus military supplies.
Though I will ask that you do not make the dangerous assumption that "unarmed = not dangerous" or that being found to be unarmed post-facto made them not dangerous to begin with.
If someone threatens to have a gun and threatens to shoot but is actually unarmed at a distance of 30' and they reach behind them - what do you do? Waiting for visual confirmation of a weapon could leave you dead. The potential of them not bluffing is there.
That scenario is a little contrived but there are many variations and they don't involve the suspect having a weapon or bluffing to have a weapon. What if they don't say anything at all but reach behind them? Does that change the situation?
>And it also seems odd to me that anyone would be surprised that officers might be injured
I'm not surprised at all, it is expected to have risk after all. I am surprised that people are asking officers to take additional and unnecessary risks.
I also don't understand how people can have the same outrage for these kind of shootings (e.g. armed with a knife) that they have for shooting an unarmed person at a traffic stop, etc. At the point where someone decided to wave a deadly weapon around at others, I think they've knowingly forfeited their right to personal safety. Doesn't mean you should just shoot them if they are 15m away, but it does make me feel a lot less bad if they get shot in a position where they could have easily killed someone otherwise.
Wow, the emotional side of HN really comes out on this one. Apparently if you are not vigorously opposed in all facets, you are complicit. How very civil.
"Dose to Cargo: Less than 0.1 microSievert (μSv) per scan (equivalent to 10 microRem (μrem)), at an average speed of 5 km/h (3 mph) at a scan distance of 1.5 m (5 ft). Should a stowaway accidentally be scanned, the effective dose is well below the ANSI specified limit for accidental exposure and is equivalent to flying two minutes at altitude."
[0]http://as-e.com/products-solutions/cargo-vehicle-inspection/...
Edit: Why the downvotes? Pretty objective information...