Published: 11 Jan 10 10:45 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20100111-24493.html
Scantily clad Pirate Party supporters demonstrated over the weekend at several German airports to show their opposition to controversial “naked” scanners planned for security checks.
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Despite the frigid temperatures outside, the protesters assembled nearly naked groups at airports in Berlin, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf on Sunday afternoon. The participants stripped down to their underpants, marching behinds signs that read: “No need to scan us – we’re already naked.”
A statement on the party's website said they opposed the new security scanners because they threaten the “private sphere and the personal rights of passengers.”
Germany's data protection commissioner, Peter Schaar, warned officials last week not to rush the implementation of the full-body scanners at airport security stations following a failed terrorist attack in the US last month. Critics are concerned that the devices, which allow security personnel to see through clothing, have not been improved enough to protect passengers' personal rights.
Naked body scanners are being readied to go mobile and scan you on the street, at football games and any other event where masses of people are congregated, according to a leaked paper written by Dutch authorities.
As we have been warning all along, the tyranny now being metered out at airports was always intended to be rolled out onto the streets, with mobile metal detectors already being stationed at various transport hubs in the UK in the name of stopping knife crime.
Now Dutch police have announced that they are developing a mobile scanner that will “see through people’s clothing and look for concealed weapons”.
According to a confidential document, “The scanner could first be used as an alternative to random body searches in high risk areas. The mobile detector would enable the search to be carried out more quickly and would only be used on people suspected of carrying concealed weapons,” reports Dutch News.nl.
The device would also be used from a distance on groups of people “and mass scans on crowds at events such as football matches.”
“The biggest challenge is making it portable and ensuring it can carry out a scan in seconds,” Giampiero Gerini, a professor at Eindhoven University, told the paper.
The aim is to develop and deploy the device within three years. With police in major American and British cities already carrying out random searches of innocent people under routinely abused terrorism laws, mobile scanners are likely to be added to their arsenal, especially if people have been trained to accept their use as routine in airports.
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”.
“The questions are when is this a useful addition to security and when does it become unduly intrusive and worrying to the public?” said Professor Paul Wilkinson, a terrorism expert.
Since everything that we see being installed at the airports is now gradually being introduced on the streets, how long will it be before mind-reading devices that scan individuals for behavioral psychology, now being discussed for use in airports, are stationed on every major street corner?
The technologies now being prepared not just for the airport, but for our everyday lives, are far more frightening and technologically advanced than anything George Orwell wrote about in 1984. Unless we stand up in unison and say enough is enough, our world will become a literal hi-tech prison grid characterized by a caste system of slaves and controllers.
A group of ppl book a cheap flight. like a $99 Jet Blue. Then when we are about to go thru the body scanners refuse.. take off all of our clothes and unfurl a soft material banner and hold it up for a cameraman stationed nearby who will film to catch airport security reactions etc. This is a bold protest, and possibly dangerous. But a stunt like this will garner national attention. Especially if we can get groups to do it all over the country.
The man is seeing a naked image of the woman similar to the top picture.
The establishment is ensuring that pedophiles and perverts are kept entertained at airport security checkpoints by mandating the mass rollout of naked body scanners that provide detailed images of your child’s genitalia, to be enjoyed by officials sitting alone in back rooms.
Despite official assurances and media talking points that claim the naked body scanners now being implemented in airports worldwide do not show enough detail to be considered a violation of privacy, the true measure of how much of an intrusion they really are is proven by the fact that they break child pornography laws in the UK that bar the production of indecent images of children.
Ministers in the UK will be forced to exempt under-18’s from the virtual strip searches or pass new legislation that protects airport workers from being prosecuted as pedophiles.
“They also face demands from civil liberties groups for safeguards to ensure that images from the £80,000 scanners, including those of celebrities, do not end up on the internet,” reports the Guardian. “The Department for Transport confirmed that the “child porn” problem was among the “legal and operational issues” now under discussion in Whitehall after Gordon Brown’s announcement on Sunday that he wanted to see their “gradual” introduction at British airports.”
“They do not have the legal power to use full body scanners in this way,” said Terri Dowty, of Action for Rights of Children, adding there was an exemption in the 1978 law to cover the “prevention and detection of crime” but the purpose had to be more specific than the “trawling exercise” now being considered.
As the Guardian report highlights, despite the fact that news organizations routinely blur out sensitive areas of the body when showing images produced by the scans, the actual resolution of the images allows airport workers to see “genitalia and breast enlargements”.
Despite the promise that the images would immediately be deleted, Simon Davies of Privacy International warns that scans of celebrities or of people with unusual or freakish body profiles would prove an “irresistible pull” for some employees.
Indeed, the fact that your sons and daughters will potentially be subject to a virtual strip search where the shape and detail of their genitalia will be visible to someone sat alone in a back room begs the question of what kind of people would want to apply for such a job. If such technology is rolled out on a widespread basis, working in airport security will undoubtedly become a pull for perverts and pedophiles who will be given free reign to lust over your naked child’s body. How far will Americans acquiesce in the name of safety?
This compilation of articles proves that people in positions of power have routinely and illegally abused surveillance technologies for their own personal titillation, particularly in regard to young women and children.
A school in Overton County, Tennessee was sued to the tune of $4.2 million in damages by parents after school officials allowed surveillance cameras to be installed in locker rooms of children aged 10-14, with the images showing both girls and boys in various stages of undress.
Another case in Sutherland high school New York found that head school custodian Allen Wemes had kept a pornographic stash of footage filmed by a secret surveillance camera placed in a female restroom.
In June 2004, the director of a tutoring center in Chicago was charged with manufacturing and possessing child pornography after he was discovered to be operating a sophisticated video surveillance system in the bathroom of the Beverly Instructional Center.
These are just a few of dozens of cases in the U.S. alone where officials have been caught abusing invasive surveillance technologies for their own perverted pleasure. If similar technology is to be implemented on a mass scale in airports as is being proposed, we are going to see such violations skyrocket to an industrial level.
A familiar tactic employed to convince the public that the scanners are necessary is the repeated use of images that show concealed weapons, creating the perception that everyone is guilty and needs to be scanned. This is reinforced by the public being made to hold their hands up when they enter the scanner in a symbolic act of submission, when holding their arms out horizontally would be no different.
How much humiliation, fealty and degradation are we prepared to accept in the name of being protected from a menace that the government has proven time and again it has no motivation in stopping? The very people promoting the mass implementation of body scanners stand to reap the financial rewards because they are heavily invested in the technology.
Are we going to allow perverts and pedophiles in positions of power enjoy naked images of our children or are we finally going to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough and start boycotting and filing lawsuits against airports and other institutions that attempt to ram through these revolting and dehumanizing measures?
Published: 11 Jan 10 10:45 CET
