Court Rules Government Can Keep Naked Body Scanner Images Secret

Admission that images can be stored, transmitted proves TSA lied


Steve Watson

Infowars.net
Friday, Jan 15th, 2011

"A federal judge has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security can keep images produced by x-ray body scanners out of the public domain, in a blow to privacy group The Electronic Privacy Information Center’ s (EPIC) efforts to release more than 2000 of the images that show intimate details of airport travelers’ bodies.

Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled that the DHS does not have to comply with the Freedom of Information Act request to disclose the naked images of those who were screened at airport checkpoints, nor does the government have to release any other related materials.
The judge granted the government’s motion to conclude the lawsuit, issuing a 15-page explanation noting that the images are used to train employees and any public disclosure of such material could reveal vulnerabilities in the technology, thus threatening the agency’s security.
Such disclosures could “provide terrorists and others with increased abilities to circumvent detection by TSA and carrying threatening contraband onboard…” Urbina wrote.
The images EPIC requested “are so closely related to TSA’s rule or practice that their disclosure could reveal the rule or practice itself,” the judge added.
Citing substantial public interest in the release of the images, EPIC Lawyers John Verdi and Marc Rotenberg noted that the government has already released some scanner images into the public domain, therefore there is no justification for keeping the rest under wraps.
“The body scanner program is presently the subject of substantial debate in Congress, between international delegations, and in the media,” the attorneys wrote in papers submitted last year.

Though the ruling is technically a defeat for EPIC, the justification that the images are used for training purposes proves that the machines can indeed store and transmit images, a fact that was vehemently denied by the government during the roll out of the technology into airports across the country.
EPIC has therefore essentially achieved it’s aim of exposing how the government misled the public and then actively lied to the media on several occasions to quell a backlash against the invasive technology."

Read whole story here... http://www.infowars.com/court-rules-government-can-keep-naked-body-scanner-images-secret/ WARNING: Some nudity.