100 Strip-Scan Images Leaked to Internet

Remember the promise that the images were not retained, and couldn’t be made public? Voila!

From Dateline Zero - Gizmodo filed a freedom of information request to force U.S. Marshals to give up images improperly retained from security checkpoint scanners. These machines were from a courthouse in Florida and show lower-res pictures than those produced by the Transportation Security Administration’s newer machines. Nevertheless, this is a hundred people who didn’t expect to be “naked” on the internet today.

Rob Beschizza makes this observation at Boing Boing: “Beyond the usual issues of authoritarianism, tiresome security theater and illegal searches, it’s also creepy how government intrusion can simply make the private public.”

From Gizmodo (full article available online):

At the heart of the controversy over “body scanners” is a promise: The images of our naked bodies will never be public. U.S. Marshals in a Florida Federal courthouse saved 35,000 images on their scanner. These are those images.

A Gizmodo investigation has revealed 100 of the photographs saved by the Gen 2 millimeter wave scanner from Brijot Imaging Systems, Inc., obtained by a FOIA request after it was recently revealed that U.S. Marshals operating the machine in the Orlando, Florida courthouse had improperly-perhaps illegally-saved images of the scans of public servants and private citizens.

SEE RELATED: Federal Gov’t has been storing strip-scan images