Free Republic

As Americans pack their bags for holiday travel, a new report is raising key questions about a pilot program that scans the faces of international travelers. The report, from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, criticizes the scope and execution of Homeland Security’s biometric exit pilot program. The program, currently running at nine airports around the country, uses facial recognition technology to identify passengers leaving on international flights. Homeland Security says the program, which it plans to expand, can catch travelers fraudulently using another person’s personal documents. But the report questions whether Homeland Security is vested with the power...

WASHINGTON, D.C. Jan. 12, 2011 - A federal court granted the Department of Homeland Security's motion to conclude one of EPIC's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits. The decision stems from a 2009 lawsuit brought by EPIC, a leading privacy organization to obtain information about the controversial airport body scanners. As a result of the lawsuit, EPIC has already obtained the technical specifications and vendors contract for the screening devices that generate naked images of air travelers. According to EPIC, the documents show that the devices can store, record, and transmit images. "The documents show that the TSA was not...

The silence from academia on the number one homeland security story—airport scanners— has been somewhat surprising but recently broken. At George Washington University “Law professor Jeffrey Rosen said the scanners are unconstitutional and has signed onto a lawsuit that hopes to block use of the scanners in airports across the country,” Asthaa Chaturvedi wrote in The GW Hatchet today. “Rosen serves on the advisory board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research center that has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the use of the scanners.” “He penned an editorial in the Washington Post Sunday, calling...

A woman has complained that new US airport security measures saw her picked out for further screening because of her breasts. Eliana Sutherland was flying from Orlando International Airport and said she felt violated by security workers. It was the latest revelation to hit the Transportation Security Administration which imposed the checks and whose officers have been on the receiving end of a series of allegations. Her claims come after thousands of Americans reacted furiously to the imposition of new airport security measures, including full body scans and hands-on patdowns. And experiences like those described by Sutherland could see increased...

Nearly a decade after 9/11, airline flight is still a major theater of the War on Terror. After nearly a decade, we should ask, who are the functional terrorists? You have an alternative, if you wish to travel by airline. You may either experience voyeurism of a sort no neighborhood peeping Tom can accomplish, that which actually sees through your clothing, or, if you prefer, you may subject yourself to the groping of your sexual anatomy. "Subject" is the operative word. We are being trained and operationally conditioned, as if in a Skinner Box, at being subjects of our government....

Despite many promises from federal agencies to the contrary it seems that some of those “naked” body scanners can and have stored images. In fact the US Marshal Service admitted to storing tens of thousands of those images at a single courthouse in Florida. In order to prove these “naked” body scan images could be made public Gizmodo.com, a tech blog, filed a FOIA request and received 100 of them. Thankfully for the people being scanned the machine used by the US Marshals produced a lower quality image and are far less detailed than many of the machines used at...

HAWTHORNE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- OSI Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: OSIS), a vertically-integrated provider of specialized electronic products for critical applications in the Security and Healthcare industries, today announced that Deepak Chopra, Chairman and CEO, was selected to accompany US President, Barack Obama, to Mumbai and attended the US India Business Entrepreneurship meeting, which was held by the US India Business Council (US IBC). The goal of the meeting was to promote further trade between US and India.

Airport Body Scanners Violate the Teachings of Islam, Says Muslim Group Thursday, February 11, 2010 By Susan Jones, Senior Editor (CNSNews.com) - A group of Muslim scholars says it supports airline safety, but it is "deeply concerned" about the use of airport scanners that show nude images of the human body. “The Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) emphasizes that a general and public use of such scanners is against the teachings of Islam, natural law and all religions and cultures that stand for decency and modesty,” the group said in a Feb. 10 statement posted at Islam Online. "It...

<p>EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J. - A scanner the government is testing for airport screening reveals much more than meets the eye to be comfortable for most passengers.</p> <p>'Nice Bombs Ya Got There' Susan Hallowell, director of the Transportation Security Administration's security laboratory, sacrificed a large measure of her own modesty Wednesday to demonstrate the problem.</p>