Latest NYPD Outrage – Forced Iris Scans
The latest scandal involving the NYPD, which seems to have an unlimited ability to do whatever they want with no accountability and total immunity, was reported over the weekend by the Village Voice. So what’s the scandal this time? Forced iris scans of OWS protesters. As the Voice reported this week here and here, NY Criminal Court judges now appear to be forcing protesters to submit to iris scans–a totally illegal and unconstitutional requirement–or else face bail requirements, or possible continued detainment, until they comply.
The scandal relates to an arbitrary policy that a Court superior decided to impose, and then circulate via a memo to judges, arguing that iris scans are a NYPD matter, and that the court should just accept it and require the policy. There is no legal basis for such a claim–so basically we now have people working in the courts who feel they have supreme executive authority to make up any laws they want–and them to force the Court to comply with them–while using the excuse of NYPD jurisdiction as cover. In times like these, the Matrix provides an important response to how we should view this case:
“You gimme that my jurisdiction crap and you can cram it up your ass.”
That’s basically what OWS should be responding with to this latest NYPD and Courts hoodwink. As a good measure of the propagandizing going on around this, all we need to do is take a look at the WSJ coverage of the issue, as found here. Here’s the flimsy justification that the WSJ gives for why this identification is necessary:
“New York City police started using machines to scan the irises of prisoners for the first time Monday, part of a failsafe measure meant to ensure that suspects appearing before judges are not misidentified.”
Right, because now fingerprints and booking photos are so unreliable now given the radical technological changes which occurred over the 2011-12 holiday season. Perhaps if people hadn’t received the latest Revlon “Custom Airbrush Face kit“, or the Edmund Scientific “Fingerprints in Box kit“, we wouldn’t be having these pesky identification problems…
Lest you think this is an isolated NYPD incident, think again. There are other earlier trends pushing things in this direction, including the Iris Scan Security Act of 2005 (HR 4363), which luckily died in committee, but still lurks in the hearts and minds of every good NYPD and judicial fascist dreaming of making 1984 a reality today.
After all, it was Orwell who had the foresight to warn us of the fascists lying in wait around every corner, especially true of the NYPD rats slinking around every other corner of this decaying urban city.
“The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed–would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper–the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”
We’ll be sure to track this story as it develops, as this is surely not the first or last we will hear of it. Hopefully the ACLU or EFF get into the game and file a legal challenge against this clearly unconstitutional move by the NYPD and NY Criminal Courts. But until that happens…
Until next time…don’t look into the light!
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