If you thought backscatter full body scans at the airport were intrusive (like former TSA employee Rolando Negrin, whose rage was larger than his extremely small penis), then you’re really going to hate that van pulling up alongside you.  Via Forbes,

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.

The problem, of course, isn’t that the vans aren’t effective in locating Iuds, but too effective in other areas.  When deployed on the streets of our cities, there’s pretty much nothing that can’t be “seen”.  And, the images can be saved, just in case a pretty woman or less-than-average endowed fellow might be the perfect picture for that spaghetti dinner your local police department is planning.

Here’s the sales video for the van, eerily like the evil background setup in a anti-utopian science fiction movie.

Aside from the obvious creepy factor, that badged sex offenders will have some fun x-raying hotties on the street, consider the implications of this development under the Katz test, a reasonable expectation of privacy.  Now that this technology exists and is being employed on the streets, is there any reasonable expectation that anyone, whether walking or driving American roads, that your underwire bra is sacred?  The stop and frisk is no longer an issue, given that we have no expectation that the van that just cruised by hasn’t already detected something odd in our pockets.

And there seems a strong likelihood that it doesn’t stop there, with nice people inside storefronts being zapped as well.  The ramifications are dire already, and no doubt there will be improvements in the technology that will allow even greater intrusion into the boxers/briefs debate.

When Dan Solove argued for pragmatism, and against the perpetuation of the Katz standard in light of changing technology,
I took issue with his formulation.  But technology like this truly reduces the test to a farce.  We are coming awfully close to the point where there will be no reasonable expectation of privacy in light of technological advancement, and this is an awfully good example. 

If we can no longer expect privacy while outside on the street, or even within buildings if they are within scanning range of the ZBV, the concept no longer precludes the government from searching at will.  It’s not that they have good cause, necessarily, but that our expectation of being able to move about without some cop giving us the once over is no longer reasonable.

This isn’t science fiction.  This isn’t the ruminations of some Hollywood screen writer.  The technology exists and has been deployed.  It’s out there, somewhere, as you read this post, and its implications for the state of search and seizure law are outrageous.  While we may not want to accept this as the bar by which reasonable expectations of privacy are measured, and while there are no court decisions as yet using this techno-wonder as the basis for dismissing random frisks and searches, it’s only a matter of time before somebody gets nabbed by one of these white vans and the government recognizes its potential for undermining the Katz prong of suppression motions.

Ain’t tech great?

H/T Karl Mansoor