Posts Tagged ‘Body Scanners’

Brain Hacking is a reality – now what if they mixed that with TRAPWIRE?

August 27, 2012

By Dark Politricks

For those of you who haven’t heard about TRAPWIRE it is a system that has the ability to grab video from far-flung CCTV and surveillance cameras located in stores, casinos and other businesses around the country and then uses sophisticated facial recognition software to identify people of interest.

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points by CCTV cameras in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence.

Mixed with huge NSA and CIA super computers this information allows the powers that be to identify people who are on the run, have illegally entered the country, are possible terrorists or “domestic extremists” or maybe they just want to track a person of interests movements as they move around their town.

This system makes no distinction between good people and bad – it scans us all.

If you have ever seen the TV programme “Person of Interest” in which a computer programmer developed a system after 9.11 that does exactly what TRAPWIRE does then it doesn’t seem so far fetched as some TV commentators have stated.

Now add the ability to track “people of interest” all around the country as they move from car, on to the road and then back home with CCTV, GPS in your phone (and triangulation from phone masts if GPS is turned off), constant tracking on the Internet, XRays at airports and now train stations and you have a surveillance state that people like George Orwell could only dream of.

Now add that to the story that scientists can now “hack your brain” and steal information such as PIN numbers and Bank details and you can see how this already scary brave new world could turn into a nightmare for the common man.

In a few years time these scientists will probably be able to integrate parts of their new “brain hacking system” into systems like TRAPWIRE and you can imagine the possibilities. As a TRAPWIRE linked camera spots you having an argument it can detect your levels of stress and adrenaline, score you for possible signs of malcontent and then send in the boys in blue to taser and pepper spray you until you submit to their will.

It might seem far fetched but then I would never think our countries would implement a global surveillance system that tracked everybody, stored our details on huge super computers and logged our every move.

Although scientists are at the beginning of their “brain hacking” mission I am sure the NSA and other state agencies would be very interested in their work and who knows how much further they have really gone – all redacted due to “National Security” of course. Who knows this technology could already be in use without our knowledge.

When our leaders tell us they have prevented terrorist attacks and we find out that really they were dupes and patsies led on by the FBI to commit crimes they wouldn’t have done on their own, we really have no idea if we are really under threat at home at all.

Do we need all this high tech and very expensive computer technology monitoring our every move or is it just because “they can” that they are doing it?

What I do know is that there hasn’t been a major terrorist attack by al-Qaeda in the USA or Europe for quite a few years and bin-Laden is dead as well as numerous number 2’s who seem to get killed every other week by a drone strike.

Drone strikes by the way that seem to kill more civillians that terrorists and only create more and more people who will want to hurt us in the future. Also drones that have somehow made their way back home to fly the skies of the USA – do they think they will be fighting terrorists in the streets of America in the near future?

When you next laugh at “conspiracy theorists” who think that they are being watched, monitored and that the state is trying to make the domestic population the enemy just remember that all of the following are TRUE:

The NSA is building a spy center the size of a city in UTAH that will have bottomless databases storing all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

ECHELON has been a reality for many decades, listening into our phone calls and electronic communications for trigger words and signs of malcontent.

The USA has turned from the home of the free to a semi-dictatorship in which American citizens can be locked up indefinitely without charge, killed abroad (or at home) without any judicial process on the say so of the President. Also since 9.11 America is still living under “emergency laws” which give the President almost dictatorial powers including 500 dormant legal provisions, including those allowing him to impose censorship and martial law.

-NSA employee William Binney revealed this year that the NSA has a dossier on virtually every American – very Stasi like of America to do this don’t you think?

-The Internet is constantly monitored and new laws mean that server log files are kept for years in case they need to be reviewed at a later date. This is on top of repeated attempts by governments to introduce laws to implement “kill switches”, and ways to shut down websites they don’t like.

Almost 900,000 Americans have hold top-secret security clearances. How many others hold lower security level clearances?

All European banking details are handed over to the USA after the EU found out the American intelligence services, including the CIA and other agencies, had been accessing European banking data illegally via SWIFT anyway – so they just made it legal so that it could continue – that’s how much they care about your privacy people!

-All the technological tools we use such as Facebook, iPhones, Google and Microsoft have been found to breach our privacy by illegally storing our data or selling it to advertisers and even uploading it to police tools so they can know where we have been.

-This comes on top of our knowledge that all the major tech companies have links with US intelligence agencies including Microsoft implementing back-doors into their PC’s so that the NSA can access your computer whenever they want and Google helping the CIA develop their search algorithms to help them monitor the web in real time.

We are walking into a surveillance state by consent as kids growing up today have no concept of privacy and constantly put pictures and data online that years ago would have been kept personal. Now it is sold to advertisers and to government agencies for tracking social groups and networks and their possible intent.

-The UK government has reneged on promises to roll back Labour’s surveillance society by committing themselves to rolling out a super computer system to track UK citizens online in real time. As the Sunday Times revealed: “Internet companies will be told to install thousands of pieces of hardware to allow GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, to scrutinise “on demand” every phone call made, text message and email sent and website accessed in real time.

-Within the next couple of years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will instantly know everything about your body, clothes, and luggage with a new laser-based molecular scanner fired from 164 feet (50 meters) away. From traces of drugs or gun powder on your clothes to what you had for breakfast to the adrenaline level in your body agents will be able to get any information they want without even touching you or you knowing about it.

Now imagine if these super computers all had the ability to read your mind as well from a distance. How scary would that be?

Passengers laid bare as full body scanners are introduced at Heathrow and Manchester airports

February 3, 2010

Anny Shaw
UK Daily Mail
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

The introduction of full body scanners at Heathrow and Manchester airports has today caused outrage among civil liberty campaigners who say that they are an invasion of privacy.

Campaigners claim the scanners, which act like a mini radar device ’seeing’ beneath ordinary clothing, breach privacy rules under the Human Rights Act.

The exemption of under 18s from being scanned, which was in place during the trial of the machines in Manchester amid fears the scanners could breach child protection laws, has also been removed.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) also warned that using profiling techniques to single out Muslims, Asians and black people for scanning at airports could breach race and religious discrimination laws introduced by the government.

Full article here

Obama Pledges Another $215 Million For Virtual Strip Search Scanners

February 2, 2010

But historical record clearly shows that devices are a completely illegal violation of human rights

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Paul Joseph Watson

Prison Planet.com

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The Obama administration has announced that a further $215 million dollars will be spent on installing virtual strip search naked body scanners, meaning the devices will be in no less than half the nation’s airports by next year, but the historical record clearly shows that the scanners are a completely illegal violation of human rights.

“The $215 million proposal to acquire 500 scanners next year, combined with the 450 to be bought this year, marks the largest addition of airport-security equipment since immediately after the 9/11 attacks. There are only 40 body scanners in a total of 19 airports now,” reports USA Today.

Privacy advocate Marc Rotenberg pointed out that the scanners were yet another expensive instrument of the war on terror being used against the American people.

“We’ll have another Homeland Security Department program for the war on terror used almost exclusively on Americans,” said Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

As we have highlighted, the naked scanners are a boon for the military-industrial complex and people like former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, who vigorously promoted their use in the aftermath of the staged underwear bombing, having a huge financial stake in seeing them rolled out nationwide.

Despite the seemingly breakneck speed at which airports are rushing to adopt the scanners, some are proving to be less enthusiastic.

Durham Tees Valley Airport in the UK has refused to commit to installing the scanners despite the British government ordering all airports to adopt them before the summer season.

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The fact that the scanners are nothing less than a virtual strip search has been played down by the government and the media due to the potential for legal fights that could see the devices banned as a breach of human rights.

Despite official denials that the images produced show details of genitalia, journalists who have investigated trials of the technology have reported that details of sexual organs are “eerily visible”.

Indeed, as we have previously highlighted, when the scanners were first introduced at Australian airports in 2008 it was admitted that the X-ray backscatter devices don’t work properly unless the genitals of people going through them are visible. “It will show the private parts of people, but what we’ve decided is that we’re not going to blur those out, because it severely limits the detection capabilities,” said Melbourne Airport’s Office of Transport Security manager Cheryl Johnson.

Attempts to keep this under wraps by lying about the images produced are an effort to head off challenges to the legality of the devices. Historically, civil lawsuits where an individual has been strip searched by a member of the opposite sex have proven to be successful in North America.

Courts have consistently found that strip searches are only legal when performed on a person who has already been found guilty of a crime or on arrestees pending trial where a reasonable suspicion has to exist that they are carrying a weapon. Subjecting masses of people to blanket strip searches in airports reverses the very notion of innocent until proven guilty.

Barring people from flying and essentially treating them like terrorists for refusing to be humiliated by the virtual strip search is a clear breach of the basic human right of freedom of movement.

The legal foundation of the naked body scanners needs to be undermined and eroded by lawsuits before they are rolled out on the streets, as has already been proposed by major western governments.

UK Airport Refuses to Commit to Controversial Body Scanners

February 2, 2010

Rob Merrick
Darlington Northern Echo
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

ONE of the region’s airports is on a collision course with the government over controversial body scanners that produce a naked image of passengers.

Durham Tees Valley Airport (DTVA) is refusing to give a commitment to install the Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT), which Gordon Brown has insisted is vital to defeat terrorists.

The prime minister backed the scanners – which allow security staff to detect explosives hidden on a passenger’s body – after the Christmas Day attempted bombing on a flight to Detroit.

Earlier today, the department for transport (Dft) ordered all airports to install them before the summer holiday season, stating they must be in place “in the coming months”.

Full article here


No Genitalia Measurement, No Fly

February 1, 2010

Naked body scanners compulsory, refuse and you’ll be treated like a terrorist

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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 1, 2010

Naked body scanning will now be compulsory at two of Britain’s biggest airports after the government announced people who refuse to let security thugs ogle their genitalia will be treated like terrorists and barred from flying.

“It is now compulsory for people selected for a scan to take part, or they will not be allowed to fly,” reports the BBC.

That ’s right – no optional pat down as we were told, if you think that having strangers leer over your naked body is an invasion of privacy and refuse, you’ll be treated the same way as a suspected terrorist.

Manchester Airport’s head of customer experience, Sarah Barrett, told the BBC that the scanners do not allow security staff to see passengers naked. This of course is a complete lie. The images produced by the scanners provide high resolution crisp images of your genitalia. This was confirmed by London Guardian writer Helen Carter who investigated trials of the scanners at Manchester Airport and said genitals were “eerily visible” in the images.

Indeed, as we have previously highlighted, when the scanners were first introduced at Australian airports in 2008 it was admitted that the X-ray backscatter devices don’t work properly unless the genitals of people going through them are visible. “It will show the private parts of people, but what we’ve decided is that we’re not going to blur those out, because it severely limits the detection capabilities,” said Melbourne Airport’s Office of Transport Security manager Cheryl Johnson.

Despite objections on the grounds that the images produced violate child porn laws, the UK government has simply gone ahead anyway and overturned a previous ban on under 18’s being forced to use the scanners. This will now give free reign to the kind of control freak thugs who like to sexually harass 13-year-old girls to ogle your naked daughter’s breasts while sitting alone in a back room enjoying themselves.

“A rule which meant under 18s were not allowed to participate in the body scanner trial has been overturned by the government,” according to the BBC report.

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This now sets the precedent for every other UK and US airport to follow the same guidelines, meaning that if you want to escape from Airstrip One or the United States of Amerika, you must submit to a virtual strip search. There seems little doubt that the naked scanners will eventually be rolled out at other transport hubs and after another staged terror attack, on the streets, in shopping malls, at sporting events and any other places of public congregation, as has already been proposed.

Three years ago, leaked documents out of the Home Office revealed that authorities in the UK were working on proposals to fit lamp posts with CCTV cameras that would X-ray scan passers-by and “undress them” in order to “trap terror suspects”.

Dutch authorities have also announced their intention to use mobile body scanners in “high risk areas” and “mass scans on crowds at events such as football matches.”

Experts agree that naked body scanners would not even have stopped accused underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding Delta Flight 253. Maybe the fact that he was on a terror watch list, had no passport, and was accompanied by a suspicious well-dressed man should have provided some kind of warning.

The blatantly staged Christmas Day incident has been ravenously exploited to the full by the same mouthpieces for the military-industrial complex that own a stake in the body scanners, and now we the browbeaten public are being forced to suffer yet another disgusting indignity as we move one step further to a society that outstrips George Orwell’s worst nightmare.

TuneUp Utilities 2010

Compulsory perv scanners upset everyone

January 27, 2010

John Ozimek
The Register
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

The debate over use of scanners in UK airports is rapidly turning into knock-about farce, as the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) takes a firm stand on some people’s right to privacy – whilst government disrespects everyone’s rights and prepares to hand over loads more dosh when it eventually loses the argument at the European Court.

Following the botched “pants bombing” and Gordon Brown’s commitment to do something about the menace within, there has been increasingly heated debate between those who believe that scanners are the answer, and those who believe that the added protection they give is minimal – and certainly not worth the massive incursion into civil liberties that their use will bring about.

The Department of Transport has been beavering away at new guidelines supposedly designed to mitigate any sensitivities the travelling public might have. The Chairman of the EHRC, Trevor Phillips, has been writing to the Home Office raising objections to the breach of privacy he feels will inevitably follow.

The Home Office declined to make public Mr Phillips’ concerns, but as the broad outline of those concerns is available on the EHRC’s website, they may be being a little over-discrete.

Full article here

Airport scanner companies queue for business after ‘underpants bomber’

January 18, 2010

Andrew Clark
London Guardian
Monday, January 18th, 2010

The alleged “underpants bomber” who tried to blow up flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day has triggered a vigorous commercial race to cash in on a $600m (£370m) opportunity to fit airports with full-body scanners detecting concealed explosives.

Unnerved by terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s apparent ability to evade detection on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the US government has pledged to install imaging machines that snap images of passengers’ naked bodies to spot hidden objects that can pass through metal detectors unnoticed. Britain, the Netherlands and other nations are following.

Investors have been quick to spot a rapid profit. One Californian firm specialising in imaging machines, Rapiscan, has seen its shares in its parent company, OSI Systems, leap by 27% since Christmas. American Science and Engineering, is up by 16% and has deployed its chief executive to have his own body scanned on live television.

Analysts say that installing scanners within the US could cost $300m – paid for, in part, by economic stimulus money. As the US urges other nations to scan passengers on US-bound flights, the outlay could double internationally.

TuneUp Utilities 2010

View the original article at London Guardian

Watchdog Warns About Airport Body Scanners

January 18, 2010

Pete Norman
Sky News
Monday, January 18th, 2010

The UK’s equality watchdog has written to the Home Secretary over concerns about the proposed introduction of body scanners at airports.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) claims the devices risk breaching the Human Rights Act right to privacy and is calling on the Government to justify the measure.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said there would be a “gradual” introduction of scanners at airports.

It followed the alleged attempt to down an American plane near Detroit on Christmas Day.

TuneUp Utilities 2010

View the original article at Sky News

National Security: The Big Fraud

January 16, 2010

Sheldon Richman
Campaign For Liberty
Saturday, January 16th, 2010

The handwringing about the would-be Christmas Day airplane bomber and the politicians’ tiresome declarations that it will never happen again miss the point: As long as the U.S. government pursues its imperial program of invasion, regime change, occupation, and sponsorship of corrupt governments in the Muslim world, Americans will be targets for avengers. This does not excuse the killing of innocents — it merely points out an inevitable chain of events.

It’s either foreign intervention and retaliatory terrorism or nonintervention and security. There’s no third way.

We can’t eat our cake and have it too. Every empire has reaped a terrorist whirlwind. “Terror” is the tactic that the weak use against the strong. The U.S. government unleashes the most powerful “conventional” weapons known to man, including pilotless killer drones operated like videogames thousands of miles away. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab sewed an explosive into his underwear and ended up burning himself.

It is disgraceful that the choice between terrorism and security is rarely publicly discussed in terms of the choice between American imperialism and nonintervention. The empire is treated as a given — even by most so-called progressives — as though it were ordained by history. The American people are expected to believe that the very existence of their society depends on the U.S. government’s policing the globe and using whatever violence it deems appropriate (that is, whenever things do not suit the interests of U.S. policymakers and their economic partners in the “private” sector).

But this picture is precisely upside down. It is the imperial program and the inevitable “war on terror” that threatens Americans’ way of life — not to mention the very lives of people in the lands that “our” government tramples. Government in the United States has long regarded the liberties of Americans as inconveniences standing in the way of bigger, nobler projects. Since the attacks of September 11 — not a bolt from the blue but a roughly predictable consequence of U.S. foreign intervention — the usurpations have accelerated. The “war on terror” functions like a blank check both to justify curtailment of particular freedoms (such as freedom from surveillance) and to instill an embarrassing submissiveness in a people whose predecessors rebelled against similar oppression. Imagine the first few generations of Americans letting themselves be treated the way we are treated at airports. “You may not leave your seat beginning one hour before landing.” “Oh, okay. Whatever you say, dear leader, as long as you protect me.” When the TSA begins requiring passengers effectively to strip in front of the newest inspection devices, who will raise a word in protest?

The sad irony is that none of these measures — and nothing even more severe — will make us safer. What we call terrorism will always be cheap, flexible, and at least one step ahead of the plodding, clueless authorities. Al-Qaeda is not an organization. It’s an idea and an open-ended set of tactics. Clear it out of Afghanistan — and it appears in Pakistan or Yemen or New Jersey. When you step back and take a broader view, the U.S. government looks like a big, pathetic, stupid giant trying to catch a pesky, clever mouse.

The terrorists’ advantage lies in the fact that bureaucracies are institutionally stupid. Do we really need more proof after the Christmas Day incident? Just as the SEC couldn’t see Bernie Madoff’s fraudulent activities even when handed reams of evidence, so the vaunted “national security apparatus” — for which Americans are compelled to pay hundreds of billions of dollars every year — couldn’t stop a kid from Nigeria wearing explosive briefs from getting on a plane, despite warnings from his own father as well as other solid information.

The “protection” forced on us by the U.S. government is an outright fraud. It can never deliver on its promise to keep us safe because big organizations like the Department of Homeland Security (!) are too riven by interagency rivalries, informational distortions, and hierarchical tone-deafness to work effectively. (The same is true for businesses that grow large because of anti-competitive government privileges.) Letting private companies protect themselves at their own expense would have to work better.

Does this mean we must remain vulnerable? No. We’ll find a reasonable degree of safety when America comes home.

“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”Fall Of The RepublicBuy the DVD here

National Security: The Big Fraud  FOTR 340x1692

View the original article at Campaign For Liberty

New Airport Body Scans Don’t Detect All Weapons

January 13, 2010

John Hamilton
NPR
Wednesday, January 13, 2009

The Obama administration’s plan to protect air travelers from terrorists is counting on a technology that is powerful but imperfect, experts say.

The plan will place hundreds of full-body scanners in airports around the country. These scanners use a technology called backscatter X-ray to create images that can reveal weapons or explosives hidden beneath a person’s clothing.

But they don’t detect everything, and they won’t be in every airport.

Other experts, though, say backscatter scanners would probably miss a weapon or explosive concealed in a body cavity.

TuneUp Utilities 2010

And that apparent weakness has provided an opportunity for an Indiana company called Nesch LLC, which is developing another low-dose X-ray device that can find contraband where other scanners can’t.

This machine is called DEXI, for Diffraction Enhanced X-Ray Imaging.

“To my knowledge it’s the only one that very reliably can detect the presence of such substances, explosives or illegal substances that are hidden inside of a human body,” says Ivan Nesch, the company’s president and CEO.

View the original article at NPR