Day By Day October 18, 2010 – Supermen

The Obama Administration amazes me. They campaign with help of the LEFT who complained for years when George W. Bush was President about warrantless wiretaps and now X-ray vans for domestic use?

As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

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. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

I certainly want to be safe from domestically placed car bombs but has this proven to be a major problem in the United States?

This sounds like an overreach by somebody trying to sell scanners at the expense of our liberty.

Previous:

The Day By Day Archive