Alan Travis reports: The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned. Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to “virtual strip-searching” and have called for safeguards to…
Category: Surveillance
Can the Police Now Use Thermal Imaging Devices Without a Warrant?
Orin Kerr writes: In Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), the Supreme Court held that it violated the Fourth Amendment to direct an infrared thermal imaging device at a home without a warrant to determine the home’s temperature. This post asks whether that result is still good law. I realize that probably sounds…
TN: Court spectator seized and forced to undergo urinalysis – lawsuit
Liz Potocsnak reports on a lawsuit arising from the seizure and urinalysis of a spectator in a Tennessee courtroom. The judge was eventually censored for his “routine practice” in his courtroom, and now the individual is suing: A judge in Dickson County, Tenn., had officers pull a spectator out of his courtroom “on a hunch,”…
Buying You: The Government’s Use of Fourth-Parties to Launder Data about ‘The People’
Simmons, Joshua L., Buying You: The Government’s Use of Fourth-Parties to Launder Data about ‘The People’ (September 19, 2009). Columbia Business Law Review, Vol. 2009, No. 3, p. 950. The full-text article is available as a free download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1475524 Abstract: Your information is for sale, and the government is buying it at alarming…