ibenez wrote:
Interesting story on how our government is trying to protect us from Nukes... One could take this as an invasion to privacy - I personally like the idea; but perhaps the technology needs to be tweaked a little to not pick up radioactive cats.

My first thoughts is that I don't see this as a civil liberties problem. You are emitting the particles. They don't have to search your car to detect them. They just need a detector on the roadside. There are some contexts where you might have a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to particles you are emitting. Thermal imaging systems are a bit more complicated, as are issues with cellular phone calls, but the amount of personal information potentially disclosed by these tools is far larger than a radiation detector.

This detector is most akin to a drug sniffing dog. I think a drug dog is a search, and my position is likely that warrants should be required for them more often then they actually are for the courts, but in this case I'm balancing am unintrusive search versus the likelyhood that you smoked pot. This search is far less intrusive than a drug sniffing dog and the risk balanced against it is the possibility that you might have a nuclear bomb. Chances are very good that it is "reasonable."

However, if it turned out that it picked up a lot of false positives or that those false positives were particularly problematic for those effected, my view might change. Cancer patients should not be constantly subjected to felony stops. Its a waste of police resources and its the kind of thing that is likely to result in someone getting hurt. A quick google came up with this article, which includes lot more information.

Its likely that good processes and training could enable the police to quickly authenticate false positives as well as tell the difference between a situation that is likely to be a false positive and a situation that really is suspicious. Furthermore, it looks like a lot of similar problems are caused by detectors in Fire Trucks going off, and Fire Departments have to have those detectors because they respond to fires in facilities were radioactive materials might be present, so I really don't see how you could avoid having to deal with the problem of false positives even if you weren't out looking for dirty bombs.

So, on the balance this is probably OK. IMHO.

RE: Danny Westneat | Watch out, you're being watched | Seattle Times Newspaper