DHS Conducts ‘Drive-by’ Surveillance. What’s Next?

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Pajamas Media:

It was Adolf Hitler who first used science and technology to monitor people, places, and things. Closed-circuit television, or CCTV, was developed for the Third Reich by Siemens AG to observe V-2 rocket launches and operators at the Peenemünde Research Center in Germany. In the 1940s, CCTV used strategically placed video cameras to capture footage and then broadcast it back, allowing for real-time surveillance.

Flash forward 70 years and surveillance systems have, like it or not, become broadly accepted as part of 21st century life — from traffic cameras, to nanny cams, to business cameras. But then, last fall, after passengers at airports became the subjects of body cavity searches through an X-ray technology called backscatter, people cried foul. Being observed is one thing. Having body parts examined is just spooky.

Now, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, has made public a series of government contracts that reveal that the Department of Homeland Security has been paying millions of dollars to develop and implement several radical programs that allow for an even broader, even spookier form of covert surveillance, namely “drive-by” surveillance from innocuous looking vans. In its own words this allows the Department of Homeland Security to conduct “covert inspection of moving subjects,” which includes people, places, and things.

According to a former Homeland Security officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, DHS has been conducting this “drive-by” surveillance of American citizens since at least 2007, using a technologically advanced vehicle called a Z Backscatter Van, or ZBV for short. The corporation that makes the surveillance van, American Science and Engineering Inc. (AS&E), received a $17.5 million service contract from the U.S. government for the ZBVs in the winter of 2007.

“The system’s unique ‘drive-by’ capability allows one or two operators to conduct X-ray imaging of suspect vehicles and objects while the ZBV drives past,” says AS&E on its website. “The ZBV can also be operated in stationary mode by parking the system and producing X-ray images of vehicles as they pass by,” it adds. Screening can also be performed remotely while the system is parked. “The system is unobtrusive, as it maintains the outward appearance of an ordinary van,” says AS&E.