And we mean really, really watching, like, up close, closer than you think.
One of my guides for analyzing the steady erosion of our civil rights is my Founding Fathers Time Machine Test. You’ve got a DeLorean with a flux capacitor and you get to travel back in time to warn the Founding Fathers about the future, in hopes they craft a stronger and more explicit Bill of Rights. (They were so worried about quartering soldiers in their homes they wasted an amendment that could have been an explicit right to cultivate hemp!) How do you explain to the creators of our precious liberty what is happening to our rights today?
We already had to tell James Madison about the approval of police secretly and invisibly stalking us and tracking our every movement without a warrant. We’ve had to explain to Ben Franklin that our employers are allowed to ask us for our pee and fire us if they don’t like it. We had to break it to Thomas Jefferson that we can be arrested and jailed for growing hemp. George Washington was absolutely livid when we told him hemp farmers have no 2nd Amendment rights. We’ve told John Adams about citizens silenced by the state from expressing unpopular views (he really wasn’t that outraged.) It was most difficult explaining to Alexander Hamilton why we had strip searches of thirteen-year-old girls at school.
Now, courtesy of Forbes Magazine, we have to try to explain to these distinguished forefathers that the state has roving carriages with wizards that can peer through your home, your carriage, your clothing, even your body.
American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview.
The Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBVs, as the company calls them, bounce a narrow stream of x-rays off and through nearby objects, and read which ones come back. Absorbed rays indicate dense material such as steel. Scattered rays indicate less-dense objects that can include explosives, drugs, or human bodies. That capability makes them powerful tools for security, law enforcement, and border control.
Reiss adds that the vans do have the capability of storing images. “Sometimes customers need to save images for evidentiary reasons,” he says. “We do what our customers need.”
And some of you thought the Google Earth Street View was a little creepy.
I’m afraid… this seems to be an invasion of privacy.
I’m also concerned that the book 1984 is not being read by high schoolers these days…
Well, crap. Now I can’t leave the house. I am disabled, and wear medical devices that start at the $3500 level. The unit I am currently hooked up to is $5g…..unfortunately, the machine gets toasted when exposed to xrays. 3 years ago, my unit was ruined by an xray. I had to pull cash from my 401k and sell personal property to pay back the loan I had to take out to replace it. Without out it, I will die. If I wasn’t already @ a medical institution at the time I could have been even worse off.
So, now, I have to worry that I may end up on deaths door just because our unchecked and irrational govnmt thinks its in our best interest to be irradiated just in case.
Boooooooo!
Is there any peaceable way to put the beast back in its cage? If not, are we willing and able to capture it and restrain it by force?
If we don’t by vote or by bullet within five to ten years the United States the revolutionaries founded will be unressurectably dead and buried with most people none the wiser.
As all phases of the USA-PATRIOT Act gradually go online the domestically applied military forces will have no hesitation or remorse in shooting or imprisoning anyone who opposes the governmental agenda. It will make the Memphis lunch counter protests and jailings look like a day at the beach.
I in no way wish to lessen the hard fight the civil rights warriors put up, I am merely making a prediction of numbers killed and falsely imprisoned and the brutality involved. It won’t be dogs and hoses it will be rubber bullets and tazers. And it likely won’t be all one huge conflagration but thousands over the course of months. It won’t get any TV News coverage for what it is, it will be covered as anti-terrorist policing, with the implication being that the citizens harassed were threatening public safety in some way.
Get ready folks.
And you thought Big Brother was just a fictional movie character!
One thing I found disturbing is that the newer x-ray technology is not as dangerous as previous incarnations. They have made huge improvements in that area. When you visit the dentist or other doctors that require this as a routine examine technique, they are not dosing you like they used to. I say disturbing because if put in wide use, or overused,, any advancements quickly cancel out with repeated exposure.
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However. People should still be allowed to choose how much they get nailed with. The people who foster this technology cover a lot of ground in stating it is safer than air-travel etc. If you are not aware, you get some pretty serious radiation exposure, including x-ray, flying around commercial; esp above 20K feet. There are people who have to be careful about exposure for various reasons. Not being able to know where and when they will be zapped is more of the same inhumane action we’re getting used to.
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They also downplay the fact that corruption is a major issue and being able to determine targets for theft with this technology is very high. Many of the areas for it’s use are easily accessible.
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The worse of these is the ones for primarily scanning people passing checkpoints as found in airports and similar locations.
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I personally dont feel safer knowing someone now has yet another tool to passively give a false positive and potentially lead to a lethal encounter with an overzealous domestic army. Every day I am forced to be concerned with that reality. I drive a car knowing I can be injured or killed willingly. But having to figure out how to avoid the random nature of encounters like these is exactly what I was brought up to believe happened in “other places.” I know I am naive in hoping we dont simply become all that we were told we were fighting against with countless lives lost in the process.
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Don’t travel in Mexico. When I was in Mexico a few weeks ago my wife, my unborn child and I had the privledge of being X-rayed while passing an American Science & Engineering vehicle operated by the Mexican Army. I would like to thank Druz Czar Gil Kerlikowske for approipriating US taxpayer money for the x-ray units to keep Mexico safe. My unborn baby would like to thank him for spending his tax dollars to provide him with a dose of X-rays while still in the womb.
OK this is just more of the same thing, Rights being stripped away from citizens due to BS. Not only the health related issues this may cause as Negatron has pointed out but all these invasion of privacy deals we have going on seems to come about in the name of fighting Terrorism. They have turned the use of these anti-terror devices and tactics on citizens because of the war on drugs. In the last few years we have seen an increase in SWAT military type raids while at the same time Judges and legislators have taken away our rights and privacy. This has been slowly happening due to terrorism yet its been transfered over to the War on Drugs without any reaction from the citizens that it targets. Due to the discrimination of cannabis consumers by the entire country and world, set up by these same people in power, they have made a nice excuse for wrongfully using these tactics and devices to seek out and destroy their enemy, cannabis and its consumers! It really makes me wonder and second guess the whole idea we are free and live in a free nation or that there is anywhere in this world where freedom is possible. The truth about rights and privacy is that once we have them taken away we become use to it and dont even think badly about it. Like cameras all over the place, back in 1970s and 80s there was a huge debate and concern for the increase in cameras and we as citizens loosing freedom due to them, yet today we think nothing about the fact every where we go we are on film. Its going to be the same soon with the mess now. SWAT raids will become normal and no one will question if they are right or wrong, they will just happen. Same for the rights we have lost, no warrant wire tapping and now GPS tracking, these things will become normal and our kids wont no any difference and life will go on with the rope tighter and tighter around citizens necks and they wont even know to care! Its becoming a very scary world we live in, I hope and well I dont pray but I hope we can change this before its too late, I hope its not already too late.
So, I’ll go ahead and mention the elephant in the room…Don’t X-rays have very horrible effects on heath?! Has anyone figured in the potential for health damage in these “backscatter” x-rays. It almost seems like people see it called something different from regular x-rays and they assume it must be different and therefore….safe? From the description of how it works, it seems like there are still x-rays penetrating you and reflecting in a way that generates an image…i’m just sayin…