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Mobile backscatter machines coming to a street near you

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

DHS Conducts ‘Drive-by’ Surveillance. What’s Next? The government flouts the Fourth Amendment in the name of security, by Annie Jacobsen, describing Homeland Security's contracts for mobile backscatter machines already used at airports and by Customs in ports and border crossings to inspect vehicles parked on the street. Now, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, has made public a series of government contracts that reveal that the Department of Homeland Security has been paying millions of dollars to develop and implement several radical programs that allow for an even broader, even spookier form of covert surveillance, namely “drive-by” surveillance from innocuous looking vans. In its own words this allows the Department of Homeland Security to conduct “covert inspection of moving subjects,” which includes people, places, and things...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on March 09, 2011 (boomark / email).