UK SCIENTISTS have created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in British laboratories.
The hybrids have been produced in secret over the past three years by researchers looking into possible cures for a wide range of diseases.
The revelation comes a day after a committee of scientists warned of a nightmare Planet of the Apes scenario in which work on human-animal creations goes too far.
Last night a campaigner against the excesses of medical research said he was disgusted that scientists were "dabbling in the grotesque".
Figures seen by the Daily Mail show that 155 "admixed" embryos, containing both human and animal genetic material, have been created since the introduction of the 2008 Human Fertilisation Embryology Act.
This legalised the creation of a variety of hybrids, including an animal egg fertilised by a human sperm; "cybrids", in which a human nucleus is implanted into an animal cell; and "chimeras", in which human cells are mixed with animal embryos.
Scientists say the techniques can be used to develop embryonic stem cells which can be used to treat a range of incurable illnesses.
Three labs in the UK – at King’s College London, Newcastle University and Warwick University – were granted licences to carry out the research after the Act came into force.
All have now stopped creating hybrid embryos due to a lack of funding but scientists believe that there will be more such work in the future.
The figure was revealed to crossbench peer Lord Alton following a Parliamentary question.
Last night he said: "I argued in Parliament against the creation of human-animal hybrids as a matter of principle. None of the scientists who appeared before us could give us any justification in terms of treatment.
"Ethically it can never be justifiable – it discredits us as a country. It is dabbling in the grotesque.
"At every stage the justification from scientists has been: if only you allow us to do this, we will find cures for every illness known to mankind. This is emotional blackmail.
"Of the 80 treatments and cures which have come about from stem cells, all have come from adult stem cells – not embryonic ones.
"On moral and ethical grounds this fails; and on scientific and medical ones too."
Josephine Quintavalle, of pro-life group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: "I am aghast that this is going on and we didn’t know anything about it.
"Why have they kept this a secret? If they are proud of what they are doing, why do we need to ask Parliamentary questions for this to come to light?
"The problem with many scientists is that they want to do things because they want to experiment. That is not a good enough rationale."
Earlier this week, a group of scientists warned about Planet of the Apes experiments. They called for new rules to prevent lab animals being given human attributes, for example by injecting human stem cells into the brains of primates.
But the lead author of their report, Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, from the Medical Research Council’ s National Institute for Medical Research, said the scientists were not concerned about human-animal hybrid embryos because by law these have to be destroyed within 14 days.
"The reason for doing these experiments is to understand more about early human development and come up with ways of curing serious diseases, and as a scientist I feel there is a moral imperative to pursue this research," Prof Lovell-Badge said.
"As long as we have sufficient controls – as we do in this country – we should be proud of the research."
However, he called for stricter controls on another type of embryo research, in which animal embryos are implanted with a small amount of human genetic material.
Human-animal hybrids are also created in other countries, many of which have little or no regulation.
AUSTIN (KXAN) - A woman who refused a full body patdown from TSA agents at Austin-Berstrom International Airport in December has been found guilty.
Claire Hirschkind was being screened in the security area of ABIA when a TSA agent asked her permission for a full-body patdown.
According to her attorney, Sam Bassett, Hirschkind consented to the patdown but said she did not want screeners to touch her breasts or crotch area.
Bassett said the central argument in his clients case was determining If the order given by the TSA agent was lawful.
A TSA agent who testified in Thursdays court hearing said Hirschkind did not agree and refused to any kind of patdown.
Airport police and the TSA agent testified Hirschkind was asked to leave the area and she refused. Bassett said his client did agree to a llmited patdown.
Hirschkind refused to leave the area and was placed under arrest for the December 22, 2010 incident around 6:30 a.m.
A judge found Hirschkind guilty for “knowingly failing to obey a lawful order from airport security.”
Hirschkind was also ordered to pay a $50 fine during Thursday’s ruling.
According to the city of Austin prosecutor only one other case of this kind has been tried in Travis County. That case involved a man who claimed to be a citizen of the Republic of Texas. The man represented himself in that case.
The Pakistan Taliban releases a video, posted on Liveleak.com, showing masked militants savagely shooting more than a dozen Pakistani security personnel in firing-squad style in the northwest part of the country last month. WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGES. Rough Cut (no reporter narration).
A MILITANT WALKING IN FRONT OF THE LINE-UP, SAYS: "They are enemies of Allah's religion. They are apostates. They are from Pakistan (paramilitary) levies, police and army. They have been arrested in our operations. In Swat, they made six small children stand in a row and martyred them. They are the enemies of Allah's religion. Allah says: 'Kill them when they come into your hands.' Allah says: 'I will punish them through your hands'. They are enemies of Allah." PAN TO MORE GUNMEN JOINING/A GUNMAN, SHOUTING: "Stand in a line. I say stand in a line!" A GUNMAN SHOOTING AT FALLEN SOLDIERS' HEADS, SAYING: "Shoot these enemies of Allah's .These are the enemies of Allah's religion." MILITANT SHOOTING AT FALLEN SOLDIERS AS OTHERS SAY: "This one here, this one here."
Researchers from Japan's Ministry of Defense have developed an unmanned aerial vehicle with a difference. It's a radio-controlled sphere about twice the size of a basketball, designed to land in hazardous environments without breaking. Rob Muir reports.
It's developers call it the "Futuristic Circular Flying Object" and it's designed to go where humans can't. The unmanned aerial vehicle has been built for search and rescue operations; to fly in and out of buildings weakened by earthquakes or other natural disasters, using its onboard camera to transmit live images of whatever it sees. It can hover for up to eight minutes and fly at 60 kilometres per hour...although it does slow down for open windows. Stair cases are easily negiotiated by a skilled operator and if the airrcraft's lithium polymer batteries lose power, the sphere has been designed to simply roll to a stop, minimising the risk of breakage SOUNDBITE: FUMIYUKI SATO - TECHNICAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE, JAPANESE MINISTRY OF DEFENSE, SAYING: "Because of the spherical shape of the object, it can land in various positions and tumble to move around on the ground.." Fumiyuko Sato, a researcher from Japan's Ministry of Defense invented and built the unmanned aerial vehicle from parts purchased off the shelf at consumer electronics stores. It boasts eight manoeuverable rudders and three gyro sensors to keep it upright. And it's extremely lightweight, thanks to its carbon fiber and styrene components. Sato's invention is a proto-type, but he believes it has a big future. SOUNDBITE: FUMIYUKI SATO - TECHNICAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE, JAPANESE MINISTRY OF DEFENSE, SAYING: "When fully developed, it can be used at disaster sites or anti-terrorism operations or urban warfare," And in the meantime Sato says, there's the pure fun of testing it. Rob Muir, Reuters
Police to begin iPhone iris scans amid privacy concerns
By Zach Howard
CONWAY, Mass (Reuters) - Dozens of police departments nationwide are gearing up to use a tech company's already controversial iris- and facial-scanning device that slides over an iPhone and helps identify a person or track criminal suspects.
The so-called "biometric" technology, which seems to take a page from TV shows like "MI-5" or "CSI," could improve speed and accuracy in some routine police work in the field. However, its use has set off alarms with some who are concerned about possible civil liberties and privacy issues.
The smartphone-based scanner, named Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System, or MORIS, is made by BI2 Technologies in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and can be deployed by officers out on the beat or back at the station.
An iris scan, which detects unique patterns in a person's eyes, can reduce to seconds the time it takes to identify a suspect in custody. This technique also is significantly more accurate than results from other fingerprinting technology long in use by police, BI2 says.
When attached to an iPhone, MORIS can photograph a person's face and run the image through software that hunts for a match in a BI2-managed database of U.S. criminal records. Each unit costs about $3,000.
Some experts fret police may be randomly scanning the population, using potentially intrusive techniques to search for criminals, sex offenders, and illegal aliens, but the manufacturer says that would be a difficult task for officers to carry out.
Sean Mullin, BI2's CEO, says it is difficult, if not impossible, to covertly photograph someone and obtain a clear, usable image without that person knowing about it, because the MORIS should be used close up.
"It requires a level of cooperation that makes it very overt -- a person knows that you're taking a picture for this purpose," Mullin said.
CONCERNS
But constitutional rights advocates are concerned, in part because the device can accurately scan an individual's face from up to four feet away, potentially without a person's being aware of it.
Experts also say that before police administer an iris scan, they should have probable cause a crime has been committed.
"What we don't want is for them to become a general surveillance tool, where the police start using them routinely on the general public, collecting biometric information on innocent people," said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the national ACLU in Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, advocates see the MORIS as a way to make tools already in use on police cruiser terminals more mobile for cops on the job.
"This is (the technology) stepping out of the cruiser and riding on the officer's belt, along with his flashlight, his handcuffs, his sidearm or the other myriad tools," said John Birtwell, spokesman for the Plymouth County Sheriff's Department in southeastern Massachusetts, one of the first departments to use the devices.
The technology is also employed to maintain security at Plymouth's 1,650 inmate jail, where it is used to prevent the wrong prisoner from being released.
"There, we have everybody in orange jumpsuits, so everyone looks the same. So, quite literally, the last thing we do before you leave our facility is we compare your iris to our database," said Birtwell.
One of the technology's earliest uses at BI2, starting in 2005, was to help various agencies identify missing children or at-risk adults, like Alzheimer's patients.
Since then, it has been used to combat identity fraud, and could potentially be used in traffic stops when a driver is without a license, or when people are stopped for questioning at U.S. borders.
Facial recognition technology is not without its problems, however. For example, some U.S. individuals mistakenly have had their driver's license revoked as a potential fraud. The problem, it turns out, is that they look like another driver and so the technology mistakenly flags them as having fake identification.
Roughly 40 law enforcement units nationwide will soon be using the MORIS, including Arizona's Pinal County Sheriff's Office, as well as officers in Hampton City in Virginia and Calhoun County in Alabama.
Rare 'Double Eagle' Gold Coins Ruled Property of U.S., Not Collector's Family
A US mint gold coin is pictured in this undated file photo. (Tim Hawley/Getty Images)
By ELLEN TUMPOSKY
Ten rare $20 gold coins that could have been worth more than $40 million to a Philadelphia family are the rightful property of the U.S. Treasury, a Philadelphia jury has ruled.
The "Double Eagles"—currently at Fort Knox-- had glistened for years in a safe deposit box belonging to Joan Langbord, 81, the daughter of jeweler Israel Switt, who the government contends illegally obtained the coins in the 1930s.
The coins were among 445,000 Double Eagles made in 1933 when they were worth their face value of $20 each. They have an eagle on one side and a goddess of Liberty on the other side and are made from designs by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
In that Depression year, panicked citizens who didn't trust banks were hoarding gold, so President Franklin Roosevelt acted to save the banking system and ordered that gold coins be turned in for cash. He decreed that the newly minted Double Eagles coins should be melted down into gold bullion.
"Those coins were all in a vault and were supposed to be melted. They were never issued," says Jacqueline Romero, assistant U.S. attorney in Philadelphia.
She says that the 10 Double Eagles were stolen property, taken from the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia in the 1930s in an inside job, probably by a crooked cashier.
Rare Double Eagle Coins Were Stolen From Mint, Court Rules
"They didn't go out through the front door," says Romero. "This was clearly a crime. The people of the United States were robbed." The U.S. Secret Service probed the case in the 1940s, she says, and every coin they found in circulation traces back to Switt.
But the criminal case was never prosecuted because the statute of limitations had run out by the time the Secret Service got involved, she says. The government did recover at least nine coins and melted them down.
But somehow, 11 survived — the 10 that were in Langbord's deposit box and one that was the subject of litigation in the late 1990s. It is believed to be the Double Eagle purchased by King Farouk of Egypt in the 1940s.
Because the U.S. government issued an export license for the Farouk coin in the 1940s, it lost the court fight to recover that Double Eagle.
The coin was sold to an anonymous buyer at a Sotheby's auction in 2002 for $7.5 million, the most ever paid for a coin, according to Robert Hoge, curator of North American coins and currency at the American Numismatic Society.
Hoge says that the "very desirable" 10 Double Eagles that were the subject of the Philadelphia case would have fetched millions each at auction. Romero estimated the coins would go for more than $4 million each. Both agree that they would sell for less than the King Farouk coin because had 10 coins come on the market, the rarity of the pieces would be reduced.
"Gold coins are beautiful. Gold as a substance has a lot of interesting and provocative qualities," Hoge says. "People are always struck by the weight and density of gold."
Romero acknowledges that the government case on the coins was totally circumstantial, but says: "The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming that Mr. Switt was involved in the theft."
The Langbord family's lawyer, Barry Berke, argued in court that the coins could have been obtained legally during a window of opportunity in 1933, and that the government was obliged to prove otherwise to win its case.
Nonetheless, the jury found in favor of the government after five hours of deliberation Wednesday. "The jury got it," says Romero.
Family Loses Fight Over Rare Double Eagle Gold Coins
Berke would not comment on the case, and Joan Langbord — who has said she discovered the coins in her safe deposit box in 2003 -- and her two sons are not commenting either. An appeal is likely and may focus on the contentious issue of the admissibility of the Secret Service records from the 1940s probe.
If the government sustains its case, the coins are likely to survive in their present form, says Romero. "I believe that they're going to put them on display for the benefit of the people of the United States," she said. "They're truly national treasures."
In the meantime, Hoge says, coin-lovers can see the "Farouk Double Eagle" at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, where it is on display in a custom-made, bulletproof case. It was given on loan by the unidentified buyer who paid $7.5 million at Sotheby's.
"We don't know who it is, but we certainly appreciate the thoughtfulness of the buyer," says Hoge. "It's very mysterious."
NEW YORK (WABC) -- Palms have taken on a new meaning at some doctors' offices and hospitals. More unique than fingerprints, palm readings are helping keep patients straight and safe.
It's palm reading, indeed, but not the fortune teller kind. More than 8,000 patients at the NYU Langone Medical Center have already had their palms read as part of their medical visits. The goal is to have every single patient at the hospital and in their doctor's waiting room be "palmed." It's one of the way technology is coming into the medical environment.
When patient Michael Baldwin visits his doctor at the medical center, check in is a breeze. All he needs is his palm, as he's one of the first patients to take part in the new program. It is called Patient Secure, and it uses palms to identify patients and their records.
Palm prints, it turns out, are more than 100 times more unique than fingerprints, so that is the basis of the new security system.
"What it does, through your veins in your palm is blood flow," Dr. Andrew Brotman said. "And it actually monitors the blood flow. And everybody's got a unique blood flow and a unique vasculature. That's how it works."
Patients at doctors' offices are now being scanned. They're also being scanned when they're admitted into the hospital.
One problem scanning resolves is the issue of patient identification. At the medical center alone, two or more patients share the first and last name more than 125,000 times.
"If you have the wrong person, there could be significant safety issues," Dr. Brotman said. "This allows one to come in and immediately have their vasculature scan on their palm, and you get the right person without creating what we call a duplicate medical record."
The federal government is requiring electronic adaption of patient records. This is one beginning.
The goal is to scan every single one of the million patients seen at the medical center yearly.
If an unconscious patient is brought in by ambulance, a mere scan of their palm could give doctors immediate information.
Full Speed Ahead For Facial Recognition Technology
Face.com has been used to tag over 25 billion faces in over 7 billion photos since launching in late 2007. Facebook users had been using the Face.com facial recognition app to tag friends in photos for two years before Facebook stepped on the Israel-based company’s toes by making facial recognition a default feature for photo tagging this year.
Face.com has a nice head start as interest in facial recognition technology heats up. Photo-sites like Picasa and Facebook are making it widely available commercially for easy people-tagging; bars will be using it so that you can check out the gender ratio at your favorite watering holes via smartphone before deciding where to go; digital billboards are using it to target passersby with relevant advertising; and over 40 police stations around the country are adopting an iPhone tool, MORIS, that will allow them to identify criminal suspects with a face scan.
CEO Gil Hirsch, 37, says he isn’t worried about Facebook making his app irrelevant. “Our technology is better,” he says. Plus the social networking site is not the company’s only outlet. They offer a facial recognition technology API that over 20,000 developers are using for their own projects, such as FindYourFaceMate.com, an online dating site with the narcissistic premise that we get along best with people who resemble us. The site matches you with doppelgangers of the sex you’re interested in.
The technology can also be useful for detecting gender or mood or if there’s a face there at all. “One Chatroulette-like client uses it to make sure that there is a face video-chatting and not a….,” Hirsh trails off. “Not a non-face?” I offer delicately, knowing about Chatroulette’s popularity among men who like the idea of anonymous indecent exposure via webcam. “Exactly,” he says.
The key usage, though, still tends to be identity. The company offers “safe alerts” to let users know when new photos of them appear on a given site. “Like Google alerts for your face,” says Hirsch. At this point, the alert is reserved for a contained site like Facebook, rather than the Internet at large – in part for privacy reasons. You probably wouldn’t want someone else setting up a Google alert for your face; on a site like Facebook, the company knows you are who you say you are and limits searches to photos that have been shared with you by contacts within your social network.
The idea for Face.com bubbled up out of meetings of the “Garage Geeks,” an Israeli group of over 3500 tech enthusiasts. They raised money from angel investors and secured a $4.3 million round of venture funding in September 2010.
“This is just the beginning,” says Hirsch. “You’re going to see facial recognition being used in more and more places.”
With increasing frequency it seems agencies of the government are looking to tap into the public consciousness to gather information on everything from how you surf the Web to how they can use information generated by you to predict the future. It's all a little creepy, really. Here we take a look at seven programs announced this year that in some cases really want to crawl into your brain to see what's happening in the world.
U.S. intelligence agency wants technology to predict the future from public events
Publicly available data that could be aggregated and used by intelligent systems to predict future events is out there, if you can harness the technology to utilize it. That's one of the driving ideas behind a program that the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) group will detail at a Proposer's Day conference in Washington, D.C., in August.
The program, known as the Open Source Indicators (OSI), will aim to "develop methods for continuous, automated analysis of publicly available data in order to anticipate and/or detect societal disruptions, such as political crises, disease outbreaks, economic instability, resource shortages, and natural disasters," IARPA stated.
According to the agency: "Many significant societal events are preceded and/or followed by population-level changes in communication, consumption, and movement. Some of these changes may be indirectly observable from publicly available data, such as web search trends, blogs, microblogs, internet traffic, webcams, financial markets, and many others. Published research has found that many of these data sources are individually useful in the early detection of events such as disease outbreaks and macroeconomic trends. However, little research has examined the value of combinations of data from diverse sources."
NASA, DARPA looking for your input for futuristic space exploration dialogue
DARPA and NASA Ames Research Center are soliciting abstracts, papers, topics and members for discussion panels, to be part of the 100 Year Starship Study Symposium to be held in Orlando, Fla., from Sept. 30 through Oct. 2. "This won't just be another space technology conference -- we're hoping that ethicists, lawyers, science fiction writers, technologists and others, will participate in the dialog to make sure we're thinking about all the aspects of interstellar flight," said David Neyland, director of the Tactical Technology Office for DARPA in a statement. "This is a great opportunity for people with interesting ideas to be heard, which we believe will spur further thought, dreaming and innovation."
Apple of my eye? U.S. fancies a huge metaphor repository
Researchers with the IARPA want to build a repository of metaphors. You read that right. Not just American/English metaphors, mind you, but those of Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish and Russian speakers. Why metaphors? "Metaphors have been known since Aristotle as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (for example: The world is a stage; Time is money). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reveal how people in a culture define and understand the world around them," IARPA said.
DARPA wants to know how stories influence human mind, actions
Since it sounds like a not-so-basic science fiction script, you won't be surprised that the scientific masterminds at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are behind it.
DARPA, in a nutshell, wants to know about how stories or narratives or whatever might like to call them influence human behavior. To this end, DARPA hosted a workshop earlier this year called "Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies (STORyNET): Analysis and Decomposition of Narratives in Security Contexts" to discuss the topic.
"Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency," DARPA stated. "Ascertaining exactly what function stories enact, and by what mechanisms they do so, is a necessity if we are to effectively analyze the security phenomena shaped by stories. Doing this in a scientifically respectable manner requires a working theory of narratives, an understanding of what role narratives play in security contexts, and examination of how to best analyze stories -- decomposing them and their psychological impact systematically."
Building the Borg: U.S. intelligence agency wants to know how your overtaxed brain works
This one sounds like it comes right out of a science fiction writer's nightmare. A U.S. intelligence agency wants to develop applications based on the way the human brain makes sense of large amounts of haphazard, partial information. Recently Raytheon BBN Technologies was awarded $3 million by IARPA to explore new methods of modeling what it calls the brain's sense-making ability. The research could have commercial and military benefits, such as helping the intelligence community analyze fast-moving battlefield video, audio and text data quickly and accurately, IARPA stated.
DARPA program wants to corral zany social media into a science
Looking to rein in the sort of Wild West atmosphere that can surround social media outlets, military researchers at DARPA are offering $42 million in grants to develop what it calls a new science of social networks.
The general goal of DARPA's Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a social networks science that will develop automated and semi-automated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion, DARPA stated.
From DARPA: "Events in social media space involve many–to–many interactions among numbers of people at a compressed scale of time that is unprecedented. Entirely new phenomena are emerging that require thinking about social interactions in a new way. The tools that we have today for awareness and defense in the social media space are heavily dependent on chance. We must eliminate our current reliance on a combination of luck and unsophisticated manual methods by using systematic automated and semi–automated human operator support to detect, classify, measure, track and influence events in social media at data scale."
FBI wants public help solving encrypted notes from murder mystery
In March, the FBI sought the public's help in breaking the encrypted code found in two notes discovered on the body of a murdered man in 1999. The FBI says that officers in St. Louis, Mo., discovered the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick on June 30, 1999, in a field and the clues regarding the homicide were two encrypted notes found in the victim's pants pockets. The FBI says that despite extensive work by its Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU) and the American Cryptogram Association, the meanings of those two coded notes remain a mystery and McCormick's murderer has never been found. One has to wonder though: If the FBI can't figure this out, who can?
Civil libertarians are raising the alarm over the state’s plans to create a Big Brother database that could map drivers’ whereabouts with police cruiser-mounted scanners that capture thousands of license plates per hour — storing that information indefinitely where local cops, staties, feds and prosecutors could access it as they choose.
“What kind of a society are we creating here?” asked civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate, who along with the ACLU fears police abuse. “There comes a point where the surveillance is so pervasive and total that it’s a misnomer to call a society free any longer.”
The computerized scanners, known as Automatic License Plate Recognition devices, instantly check for police alerts, warrants, traffic violations and parking tickets, which cops say could be an invaluable tool in thwarting crime. The Executive Office of Public Safety has approved 27 grants totaling $500,000 to buy scanners for state police and 26 local departments. The purchases are on hold while state lawyers develop a policy for the use of a common state database all the scanners would feed.
Some ALPR scanners already are deployed on Massachusetts roads. State police have two. Several cities use them for parking enforcement. Chelsea has four scanner-mounted cruisers.
“It’s great for canvassing an area, say after a homicide if you are looking for a particular plate,” said Chelsea police Capt. Keith Houghton. “You can plug it in, and drive up and down side streets. It sounds an alarm if you get a hit.”
He said Chelsea’s information is overwritten after 30 days and is not shared with the state.
EOPS spokesman Terrell Harris said the state wants the scanner information fed into the Public Safety Data Center, where local, state and federal authorities could access it.
“We’re currently working to develop a policy that balances the effective use of this powerful law enforcement tool with the privacy concerns we’re keenly aware of,” Harris said.
The ACLU’s Kade Crockford said the technology, which just allows a faster version of what police do now in running plates, is less of a concern than the state’s plans to store information on average, law-abiding citizens.
“People who aren’t wanted for a crime, all of their information is stored in a database that is shared with another government agency,” Crawford said. “The potential for abuse is very big. We don’t think people who haven’t committed a crime should be tracked by law enforcement.”
The two state police cruisers equipped with scanners patrol the metro Boston area, state police spokesman David Procopio said. He defended police use of the new technology.
“What about the rights of someone who is already a victim to have their assailant brought to justice?” Procopio asked. “There’s a freedom to being able to live your life not worried about being the victim of crime that’s also a freedom worth protecting.”
Silverglate countered, “If you have cameras everywhere, of course you’re going to reduce the crime rate, but you’re not going to have a society worth preserving. To the American people, freedom means something. There is a line to draw in the sand, beyond which you don’t want the government poking its nose. This crosses the line.”
