The U.S. Senate voted 98-0 yesterday to criminalize the impossible.
The proposed new law, an amendment to an FAA bill introduced by Democratic senators Nelson and Schumer, would make it a felony to save, copy, collect or distribute in any form the images generated by the TSA-operated full-body scanners at airports.
Curiously, these are the very machines the American public was specifically and repeatedly told lack any of those capabilities in the first place:
"The TSA says it does not store the images from the body scanners and there is no way they could ever be copied."
So why the need to add one more new crime to the bloated U.S. Criminal Code (one that provides for penalties of up to a year in jail and a $100,000 fine for a violation, no less), unless the government is blatantly lying to us about what those machines can or can't do?
We repeat the assertion we recently made about this provision - if such a scan showed a weapon or a suspected explosive device, that information would be evidence of a crime and would undoubtedly be of vital importance in the subsequent investigation and criminal prosecution of the suspect - evidence DHS would in no way allow to be lost to eternity because of the lack of a "save" command.
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3 comments:
Passing this law opens the door for new and improved scanners that do have a save command. Because then Big Brother can say we're being babies to complain since there's already a law about misusing the images.
Good point--even though you can say "we searched because the machine suggested something was there," you've got to have the evidence to search. So there has got to be a "save" command there somehow....
There have been reports of images that couldn't have been saved showing up on the internet.
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