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Terahertz? It’s killing me! But that’s what the new scanners the NYPD is testing use to see whether or not someone’s packing heat. More specifically, it looks for the outline of something blocking the body’s natural emissions of terahertz radiation — something shaped like a gun perhaps. This, from nydailynews.com: “The department will begin testing the high-tech device for use on the street. The device is small enough to be placed in a police vehicle or stationed at a street corner where gunplay has occurred in the past.” The new equipment won’t be used to scan people about to board planes. No, the new gizmos are intended to peer at (and under the clothing of) anyone walking down the street, minding his or her own business. Mayor Mike and his army appear ready to turn the Big Apple into a giant Fourth Amendment-free zone. Alan Gottlieb, please call your office.

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88 COMMENTS

  1. Time for everyone in NYC to walk around with metal body protection armor under their coats and shemagh head scarves. It will drive the Bloomberg boys in blue nuts.

    PS There are also cooling and heating vests on the market. This could be fun.

    • Seems to me that an Altoids box (or similar) with a 6″ piece of half-inch steel pipe glued to it would be an effective Freedom Pistol if someone wanted to crank out 1000 units and crowdsource a denial-of-service attack every time NYPD announced that they would be running a checkpoint.

      Just be sure to have cameras rolling when the flash mob converges!

  2. interesting how these just happen to be employed after their state government uses emergency powers to rush gun legislation through.

    • This has been in the works for a while. I think Robert even had a post on it.

      Having some experience with sensors I can imagine given all the cellphones and other gizmos people carry these days there are going to be a lot of false alarms with this system. I believe SCOTUS has already held that remote sensing does not constitute ureasonable search, however a high false alarm rate that would essentially lead to the old stop and frisk practices would be sufficent for this system to fail the 4th Amendment test.

      • Might be time to re-address that issue. This goes beyond the unconstitutional Terry frisk and the five senses.

        I wonder if the justices sometimes forget that, at some point in time, this might happen to them? I think if you can imagine yourself on the receiving end of something like this, maybe the decision would be different.

        • They’ll use any positive, true of false, to initiate a SWAT raid.

          This is EXACTLY what tyranny looks like.

        • In all depends on the false alarm rate. If it is high then the device will be no better than the already outlawed stop and frisk tactics that have been disallowed by the Courts. If FA rate is zero (not likely) than yes it would constitute legitimate probable cause.

      • I think SCOTUS held that remote sensing DOES constitute a search. At one point, the police were using infrared technology to identify occupants inside houses and possible other misconduct (like pot growing). The police argue that it was no different than peering through an open window, which is not a search. I don’t think that played to weel with the Supremes and the practice was banned, at least for the purposes of using such devices to gather evidence of a crime.

        • You’re right on this. The case was Kyllo v. US. 533 US 27.

          SCOTUS found that the use of thermal imaging technology which was not available to the public to peer into a home was essentially the equivalent of an officer entering the home and conducting a search. Since the officer had no warrant, this was an unreasonable search within the meaning of the 4th amendment.

          Since this technology is not available to the general public, I wonder how this will pan out in the Courts…

        • Thanks for remembering Kyllo.

          But post (un) Patriot Act, freedom doesn’t matter. All that matters is “being safe”.

          Someday we’ll charge the shrub with treason along with obo…

    • > This has been in the works for a while.

      There was talk about NYC implementing some type of radar to scan the public for concealed guns back in 1999, or the late 20th century for you youngsters.

      Obviously, the technology would have been older back then, and I don’t know if it was ever implemented.

    • Brave talk for a keyboard commando.

      What makes you think that New Yorkers have an interest in foiling this system?

      Especially if doing so will result in the inconvenience of being stopped by the police?

    • “911 What is your emergency?”
      “Emergency Dispatch!!! I need Police, 2 black males are pointing guns at the convenience store clerk”

    • its not the guns radiation signature, its the cast shadow of the gun blocking your body’s radiation signature.

  3. Yeah…I feel really bad for people living in NYC…can we just let them break away from the US and become their own little dictatorship? We could even build a wall around the city and mine all the bridges like in Escape from NY….

  4. Amendment IV

    The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . .

    • But dude, the 4th Amendment was written to protect rich white slave owners from having their slaves taken away in the night by freemen!

      Its history, I swear. I read about it in Public School.

    • When the founders wrote the 4th amendment, they could not have known that in the future there would be guns small enough to fit in your pocket that would be powerful enough to wipe out an entire room full of school children. I support peoples’ right to be secure in their possessions, but there have to be common sense limits. There’s no reason that people need to be ABSOLUTELY secure in their possessions, and if a device like this can save just one child then you’d have to be some kind of fringe absolutist to oppose it.

      • I swear to the sweet baby Jesus himself I can’t tell if you’re serious.

        If you’re not, then well-played, sir.

        If you are, call me a fringe absolutist, I suppose.

        • You bitter, clinging regressives need to stop with the constitutional arguments. It’s a living, breathing document subject to court interpretation and if the courts decide this isn’t a 4th amendment violation then it is isn’t. You don’t have a right to privacy when you step out in public anyway.

          Keyboard commandos.

        • @Michael B:

          “You have no right to privacy when you step out in private.” You’re dead wrong on that, amigo, and if you were right we’d all be lining up for body-cavity searches the moment we left the house. The expectation of privacy is heightened in the home, but is not surrendered when one walks out the front door.

          And to correct another leagle beagle who chimed in earlier, remote searches *are* searches when they violate a reasonable expectation of privacy. In Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), the Supreme Court held that a warrantless infrared scan of the *exterior* of a home was an unconstitutional search.

          Surreptitious full-body scans of everyone on the sidewalk would not hold the heightened expectation of privacy that exists in the home, but they would be an even more intimate violation of privacy by revealing literally what is under each subject’s clothing. Kyllo’s infrared search only showed heat leakage through the walls of his house, but these ultra-short wavelength scanners would reveal everything on his person.

        • Actually, the holding in Kyllo was tied to the facts of the case and therefore pertains to the home, which receives the highest deference in 4th Am law. Cars? Not so much. People walking heavily traveled streets? It has varied. State law is even more diffuse. New York City’s elite want it to be a safe place for finance, walled off from the rabble in the fly-over states, a city fully and constantly under surveillance. They are slowly being granted their wish…until 38 fly-over states bust up their over-sized corrupt banks, pass some EPA regs that make their dense living illegal, force gun freedom upon them, and mandate less financial concentration to reduce systemic vulnerability to terrorism.

  5. I see no reason to visit New York City. Didn’t they arrest a Navy Seal for having a Sig and subsequently throw him in the mental ward?

    • Yep Same guys who shot an unarmed vet on the Belt Parkway while the vet had both hands on the wheel. In front of his girl friend. Never did hear the reason for that killing.

    • New York is starting to look more and more like Nazi Germany, minus an ethnic cleansing. Or at the very least, post czar Russia.

  6. So NY is adding the 3rd amendment to the list of amendments that aren’t followed by NY State? How is being scanned randomly not illegal search of your person?

  7. “Actually we are witnessing the formation of a hybrid system: The wretched political aims of communist regimes pursued by efficient capitalist means. No communist state could make computers good enough for the new watched hive.”

  8. Step 1: buy a roll of fine copper mesh
    Step 2: take the liner out of your jacket
    Step 3: sew metal mesh into your jacket.
    Step 4: sew liner back in.

    Now you are a Faraday cage. You are also reasonably taser proof (you’ll short them out), and have some resistance to microwave weapons.

      • The tech doesn’t “penetrate” anything. This is not radar. This scans for the natural radiation that is emitted from your own body, which is blocked by solid objects, leaving a shadow.

        • I don’t know, Michael. My guess it would have to be something a little more dense than wood.

          Wikipedia’s entry on Terahertz radiation says that it can penetrate fabrics and plastics. I suppose it would depend on the density of the wood in question.

    • Yeah bc the ACLU loves all our freedoms except the 2nd. If this thing was scanning for communist manifestos they’d be screaming about it, but scanning for guns is A-OK? How is this thing even legal? What sick bastard even makes such a device?

    • Actually, it was the ACLU that successfully challenged NY’s stop and frisk policy, gaining a federal court injunction against the practice. A devide like the one discussed here presents the same issues, consitutionally speaking.

    • That because the ACLU doesn’t care about enumerated rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights… they only care about rights that were never conceived as being such when the Constitution was written. The American Civil Liberties Union, is all about their own agenda. Once in a while we get lucky and they actually fight for something good for everyone, such as Constitutionally protected rights.

      • Correction: Fascists

        Capitalists create things for the free market. A private entity predominantly or exclusively serving the states interests is a hallmark of fascism. Read the Wikipedia article on fascist economy if this needs further clarification.

      • > Correction: Fascists
        > Capitalists create things for the free market.

        Capitalists create things to make a profit.

        Capitalism is an economic system that is based on private ownership of capital goods and the means of production, and the creation of goods and services for profit.

        Or, in the case of capitalists like Mitt Romney and George Soros and the rest of Wall Street, merely manipulate money to make a profit. That has become more profitable than actually creating something.

        See also the Fred Reed quote above (January 23, 2013 at 14:18).

        Since the “sick bastards” made a profit from this device, they are capitalists. They have no duty other than to make a profit, even if that means at the expense of our rights.

        As “The Milton Friedman Choir” put it…

        Corporations have no social duty
        Except to those who own their stock

        Corporations are amoral
        Corporate conscience is impossible
        The corporation really has no choice

        So if you want your freedom
        Let the corporate seize the day
        There really is no better way

        To conservatives and libertarians, corporations are a thing of beauty because they have no moral obligations to anyone other than their shareholders. Only from a corporation will a conservative accept a “I am not responsible for my amoral actions because I really have no choice” excuse.

        Since corporations are (legally) people, this lack of conscience, empathy, morality, (to some) a soul *, etc., makes them, by definition, sociopaths. As a reader of “The Daily [Ron] Paul” put it, “we made up fictitious entities and exempted them from the chains that bind normal people.”

        I’m not sure when the political Right started celebrating sociopathy as the highest possible virtue, but I suspect it was in 1957, when a Hollywood-screenwriter-turned-New-York-author popularized the idea that if everyone just acts selfishly, the result is a perfect equilibrium.

  9. I’m getting a little exhausted by the Bloomberg-fuhrer coming out with a new idea to stomp the human spirit into the ground every freaking week. He should follow Barry’s schedule, start taking a lot of taxpayer-funded vacations.

  10. Get taser.

    Build into something with the outline of a gun.

    Route the contacts to the grip of said fake gun.

    Design said fake gun to activate taser when removed from holster.

    Walk about NYC

    Run like hell after some good for nothing nanny state b!t<h violates your rights.

    I'm not anti-LEO, in fact I like my local PD just fine, but anybody that lacks the morals to turn in their badge and walk away with this crap going on is sub human.

  11. i thought police needed a warrant to use thermal imaging to search for marijuana farms so how is this any different? and what is going to happen when retired LEOs who have their conceal and carry that allows them to carry in all 50 walk past that with their ccw? will the nypd then shoot several civilians in attempt to shoot you??

    • Not quite. They need a warrant for a thermal search of a building, but not for fly-over surveillance of fields and forests.

    • And despite the discussion of Kyllo, above (and the dicta in Kyllo) infrared cameras of highest quality are readily available to the civilian market. A nice combination night-sight/infrared camera costs only $14,000… and free shipping. The US is going to have to rethink privacy, whether on the net or on the streets. Technology is out-racing law by leaps. And guns? Look how gun owners are rapidly snapping up super-modern guns, AR’s and….well, OK, AR’s are 54 years old, low tech. OK, it’s invasion of privacy that is the problem, not guns.

      • Absolutely correct. One could argue that gun bans are an invasion of privacy as well as the 2A. Techniology today, especially communications and computer technology, is highly intrusive, usually with few users knowing that they are being spied upon by un disclosed corporations, other users, and the US government should it so desire. Most modern cell phones have GPS devices that can’t be turned off without disabling the phone. Apparently the Obama girls are not permitted cell phomes for this very reason. The FBI took down a mob gang by programming the BGs phones to turn on their mikes when the government wanted to turn them on, thus allowing the government to have “wires” on a bunch of gangsters without their knowledge. Google, Facebook all of them are guilty of changing the rules of the game all the time so as to permit these companies to track your browsing habits surreptitiously, and much much more. I read yesterday that any number of apps for iPhones have tracking features included in the software, some valid some completely unnecessary. Remember Enemy of the State?

  12. I guess since all their school districts and the disadvantaged elderly have all the funds they need why not throw stupid amounts of money towards some useless bullshit. It should work great even though the huge ass smartphones everyone has nowadays are damn near as big as a good pocket heater.

  13. I will wrap tin foil around my junk, it will be funny when they try to locate the Desert Eagle 50 I must be concealing….or maybe the NAA 22short how cold is it in NYC?

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