NYC trying to fast-track legislation to police ownership of air-quality detectors and Geiger counters

Ken sez, "The Village Voice has a great overview of a uber-nanny NYPD's deputy commissioner (of counterterrorism, natch) attempt to fast-track a piece of legislation that would make mere possession of many sensors, from Geiger counters to asbestos detectors, illegal without a police permit. Send you to jail, illegal, too. Luckily, dozens of university researchers, public-health professionals, and environmental lawyers were somehow alerted and showed up at the city council session, blocking the quick enactment with old-fashioned argument and analysis. The commissioner is still dead set on taking away your ability to test for pollutants without a license (it's For the Children?!), but they pledge to 'accommodate all the concerns' as they draw up the new bill."

When the Environmental Protection Agency promised that the air surrounding Ground Zero was safe, Vallone said, independent testers proved that such assurances were utterly false. Would these groups really have to get a permit before they started working? "It's a good question, and it has come up prior to this hearing," Falkenrath replied. "What I can assure you is that we will look extremely carefully at this issue of the independent groups, and get the opinion of the other city agencies on how to handle that, and craft an appropriate response." And if people use these detectors without a permit, Vallone asked, do we really have to put them in jail? Afraid so, Falkenrath answered.
Councilman John Liu was considerably less impressed. Why, he asked, should a community group like Asthma-Free School Zones have to tell anyone, much less the police department, that they're testing for air pollution? "We have no interest in regulating air-quality sensors around schools," Falkenrath promised. "That's not what this is about."

Link (Thanks, Ken)

(Image: PICT4460.JPG, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Gothick_matt's Flickr stream)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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The Snowden Principle

ill lich

How would you know if your air-quality-detector is broken in NYC?

OH! . . . it’ll read “clean.”

(Actually that probably applies to most major cities).

I understand why they’re doing it, but it sure makes them look like Big Brother. They should try a different tack– petition the Federal Government for better standards for detectors sold in the US, OR offer some kind of free/cheap testing station so people can know if their detectors are accurate. If they are trying to stop false alarms this would help, and without making them appear so evil. Of course, cops rarely understand that they appear evil when they do these things.
Takuan

Stupid, evil, whatever. Why should they care?

United Nuclear has already been raped by the feds for selling supplies so kids could learn chemistry as they did decades ago – back when the USA produced scientists. Maybe they can help out here, until they are raided again anyway.
http://www.unitednuclear.com/geigers4sale.htm
LibertyVini

The American Industrial Hygiene Association (www.aiha.org), of which I am a couldn’t be prouder member, has weighed in on this on their website, and has sent an official letter to Mayor Bloomie and the city council in opposition to the ordinance. I blogged this here; http://www.libertyguys.org/home/detail.asp?ArtID=1686
Takuan

“There are currently no guidelines regulating the private acquisition of biological, chemical, and radiological detectors,” warned Falkenrath, adding that this law was suggested by officials within the Department of Homeland Security.”

I’m sorry, but if this passes, there is no hope.
acx99

America is broken.
Comedian

I wonder when this practice of having the police suggest legislation to create new crimes began?

If the police get to suggest & craft legislation, does that mean there is a police state?

Maybe we should consider a ban on spending any public monies to have law enforcement officers work on coming up with new laws.
Squashy

We must work to prevent the spread of detectors of mass destruction.
Rick

Greetings, Comrades!

The Glorious Union of Soviet Capitalist Republics welcomes you!
Antinous

I know that it’s not the main point, but doesn’t the name Falkenrath just sound like a supervillain?
fencesitter

It would be ironic if it covered smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, otherwise, what a great loophple.
amuderick

When I first heard about this I figured it was the work of some uninformed low-level bureaucrat and would quickly die. After this latest meeting, I see it is the work of a high-level bureaucrat who should know better.

The regulation of passive sensing equipment is truly unprecedented in our country. It is wrong on so many levels. It is totalitarian and evil.

It also shows an incredible level of ignorance in regards to the fact that law enforcement and counter-terrorism really are minor aspects of our economy. Thankfully they are not yet the unquestioned rulemakers and this should die a quick death.

Just think of all science-fair students building sensors of various kinds. I suggest undercover police officers travel the show floor and make the necessary arrests before our future generation become a danger to themselves with their inquisitiveness.
Ahforgetit

When it is a criminal offence to possess an environmental sensor, only criminals will possess environmental sensors. Is someone trying to hide something?

(half in jest, there, but half not)
Takuan

writes like one
http://hsgac.senate.gov/_files/091206Falkenrath.pdf
certron

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” – Tacitus
Thorzdad

Well, we wouldn’t want those pesky independent monitors to be able to contradict the official announcement of a dirty bomb being released in Manhattan, and the resulting nationwide declaration of martial law, right before the election…would we?
~removes foil hat, takes a deep breath
gollux

Making the world safe for the children of corporate executives and politicians. All hail corpocracy.

Democracy and the myth of an educated and informed populace is a political theory whose time has passed.

Welcome to the US Chicken Farm. Sheep have more sense than this, we’ve become a nation of chickens willing to live in the cages our keepers have helped us create. The only thing worse is the chickens with guns known as survivalists.
Blackbird

I think I’m on both sides of the fence on this one. Though I agree a law for prohibition of these items is dumb, and a waste of money, I also can see that they don’t want to have to respond to false alarms (though, in the article they admit they haven’t had to). “Consumer grade” detectors are ‘unreliable’. Some are good, but most only detect ‘radiation’ not a ‘level of radiation’. You could likely get it to go off if you broke open a smoke detector, but there’s no danger from the radiation…

However, if it’s false positives they worry about, they should also instruct the fire department not to respond to any fire calls either, since most of them are false alarms as well.
Wheres my email

How is Cory lying this time?

The law was suggested by the Department of Homeland Security. It would require anyone who detects a terrorist attack to immediately report it to the police, government, etc. And this part of the law is trying to prevent false alarms, of which they expect quite a lot. XD

So I guess he’s not.
Jake0748

WTF???!!! This is SUCH horseshit. What will they take away next? Also, I have no clue what the last line of the article means: “After all, if you let research scientists and community groups do their jobs, the terrorists will have already won.”, can anybody fill me in?
albedo

Falkenrath is no dummy and someone who’s dealing with an almost impossible job when it comes to radiation, chemical & bio terror. Manhattan’s few handfuls of detectors that “conform to standards of quality and reliability” are not enough to cover the entire city. On top of that — given an attack — vaccine supplies have to travel from DHS stores somewhere outside the city to begin immunizing folks around the hot spot(s) following some unpublicized schedule/protocol while coordinating a simultaneous evacuation plan that the populace have been poorly educated on and that — even if we knew where to go — would almost certainly be foiled by transit bottlenecks. The human and economic costs of false alarms and any resulting panic are huge.

Cities, even sophisticated ones like NYC, are given little control — not to mention money — by DHS on the control and disposition of countermeasures such as vaccines. That they would be taking seriously further suggestions to centralize mitigation measures by DHS is surprising. The devices in question are one item that cities are given and NYC has more of them than other cities at several dozen. Whereas I can understand his need to minimize false alarms, this seems the backwards way to go about it.

When one looks at which systems worked during other calamities (e.g., earthquake, Katrina, 9-11) one that worked well and most consistently was the DECENTRALIZED one. Person-on-the-street stories cite countless selfless acts of bravery and ingenuity saving proportional numbers of lives and limbs.

Perhaps Flakenrath and others in his unenviable position should go the other way. Use some of the monies for rad-bio-chem attack prevention at the Federal level to develop/create a distributed network of small (industrial ones are still microwave-oven-sized because of the air throughput they need), *open-source* detectors, to be carried by volunteers and city infrastructure all over (e.g., mobile devices, lapels, automobiles, buses, subways, etc.), that would sniff around the clock and report to similarly distributed grid-computing apps where-when deadly materials are detected and that build-in the false-positives handling made possible by their ubiquity. These are sci-fi at this moment but unleash the dorks to work on the problem! A decentralized approach might minimize the need to try to evacuate/vaccinate an entire city after a small event and may help direct and coordinate appropriate response(s).

The wholesale outlawing of unlicensed detectors is exactly the wrong way to go about this problem.
albedo

@JAKE0748

It’s an editorial joke.
Matt Gibson

Curses! The one day Boing Boing uses one of my Creative Commons photos, and the embedding seems to have gone wrong!
Jake0748

ALBEDO #15, oog, sorry, read the article before having enough caffeine on board.
Rich Gibson

We need to clearly establish that owning and using sensors is a basic element of the First Amendment.

The ability to capture information about our world, whether in audio, photographs, video, or via sensors, is fundamental to the ability to exercise freedom of speech.

I can theoretically (under protest) accept ‘reasonable time place and manner’ restrictions, but the clear assumption must be that we can photograph and take sensor readings at will.

Including using remote sensing technology to capture information which ‘They’ don’t want us to have.
Takuan

pst! wanna buy a Geiger counter? They used to be a thousand bucks for a good one, but now it’ll be ten grand. What’s that? A police permit? Nah, they stopped issuing those. C’mon man, what’s it gonna be? Your wallet or yer family? Tell ya what, I gotta friend see? I can get ya a permit and a detector for 12 grand. … ahh,pleasure doing business wit ya.
jphilby

Back in Cold War days, most cities had dozens of “bomb shelters” (YMMV) equipped with “food” — like crackers — and a nice yellow *radiation detector* with a supply of batteries. Presumably so that you could open the door and see if it was safe out there.

After the threat of nuclear war ended (*mmmph mmmph*), many of these expensive detectors (your tax dollars at work maintaining the illusion of rationality) were “recycled” by sending them to schools for science classes.

By the mid-1980s, one had to look very hard indeed to find a radiation detector. Possibly because it had been discovered that the main threat was not from bombs after all … and mere citizens were threateninig to use them to gather intelligence on SNAFUs (your tax dollars at work, etc.)