A blogger who claimed to have found a way to defeat the “nude” body scanners at airports is the first person to challenge the NYPD’s testing of “terahertz” scanners to take guns off the streets.
Jonathan Corbett of Miami filed suit in Manhattan federal court a day after NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly predicted legal challenges to the anti-crime experiment because “New York is probably most litigious environment in the world.”
Corbett’s self-filed suit against the city says he fears being “violated” by the scanners and seeks a court order barring cops from using them without “reasonable suspicion” or “probable cause.”
“For thousands of years, humans have used clothing to protect their modesty and have quite reasonably held the expectation of privacy for anything inside of their clothing, since no human is able to see through them,” court papers say.
Corbett made headlines last year when he posted a video in which claimed to have smuggled large amounts of metal through airport body scanners, which the Transportation Security Administration said it will begin phasing out due to privacy concerns.
The New York Civil Liberties Union has called the NYPD scanner proposal “both intriguing and worrisome,” but a spokeswoman said it was too soon to say if the group would sue.
A spokeswoman for the city Law Department said: “The NYPD is quite reasonably concerned with people illegally carrying concealed weapons in public. This complaint is nothing more than a set of allegations and should be viewed that way. We will review the claims when we are served with the legal papers.”