New York City’s war on freedom could be adding a new weapon to its arsenal, especially if NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has his say. The head of the New York Police Department is working with the Pentagon to secure body scanners to be used throughout the Big Apple.

Terahertz Imagining Detection scanners can measure the energy that is emitted from a person’s body up to 16 feet away, and can detect anything blocking it, like a gun.

If Kelly gets his wish, the city will be receiving a whole slew of Terahertz Imagining Detection scanners, a high-tech radiation detector that measures the energy that is emitted from a persons’ body. As CBS News reports, “It measures the energy radiating from a body up to 16 feet away, and can detect anything blocking it, like a gun.”

What it can also do, however, is allow the NYPD to conduct illegal searches by means of scanning anyone walking the streets of New York. 

According to Commissioner Kelly, the scanners would only be used in “reasonably suspicious circumstances,” but what constitutes “suspicious” in the eyes of the NYPD could greatly differ from what the 8 million residents of the five boroughs have in mind.

The American Civil Liberties Union is objecting due to many concerns. 

“It’s worrisome. It implicates privacy, the right to walk down the street without being subjected to a virtual pat-down by the Police Department when you’re doing nothing wrong,” Donna Lieberman of the NYCLU says to CBS.

The scanners also raise the question of whether such searches would even be legal under the US Constitution due to 4th Amendment statutes. 

To the NYPD, it might not matter. In the first quarter of 2011, more than 161,000 innocent New Yorkers were stopped and interrogated on the streets of the city. Figures released by the NYPD in May of last year revealed that of the over 180,000 stop-and-frisk encounters reported by police, 88 percent of them ended in neither an arrest nor a summons. Additionally, of those searches, around 84 percent were either black or Latino. Nearly nine out of ten stops do not find any violations. 

With the installation of the Terahertz Imagining Detection scanners though, those invasive physical searches wouldn’t just be replaced with a touchless, more intrusive monitoring, but will only allow New Yorkers one more reason to fear walking the streets. About 2,000 cameras are in Manhattan. 

CBS News adds that the plan puts the NYPD in direct cooperation with the Department of Defense, who is working on testing the scanners to find a way to bring them to the streets. Such a joint effort opens up questions about other endeavors the Pentagon could have planned out with the NYPD in the past. Last year a report surfaced linking the NYPD to the CIA, as documents linked local police department and government spies to installing secret agents into Muslim majority areas in New York.

By using scanners such as the Terahertz Imagining detectors, however, the consequences could be biologically catastrophic, with the scanning technique tied to problems with the human body’s ability to operate. According to MIT’s Technology Review, the THz waves used by the scanners “unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication.”

Europe has already banned U.S.-style body scanners at airports due to health concerns.

—RT