X-RAY VISION

A Surprising Supreme Court Ruling Sheds Light--And Other Beams--On The
Latest Snooping Technology.

The technology that the nine justices of the Supreme Court wrestled
with last week was relatively crude: a heat-sensing gun pointed at a
house in Florence, Oregon, by federal agents on the lookout for
homegrown marijuana. In 1992, a cop using the device had spotted a lot
of excess heat coming off high-intensity grow lights. Police searched
the house, found more than 100 plants and arrested one of its
occupants--a small-time marijuana grower named Danny Kyllo. Kyllo
appealed the case all the way to the highest court, arguing that by
using infrared technology to pry into his home, the government had
conducted an unconstitutional search.

To the surprise of many court watchers, the majority ruled in Kyllo's
favor. And the dissenting Justices in the 5-4 decision made it clear
that even if they were willing to accept "off-the-wall" technologies
like infrared guns--which can pick up signals only from the outside of
a building--they viewed with alarm newer "through-the-wall" devices
that can see inside.

Through the wall? Yes, indeed. A whole new generation of surveillance
technology has been developed since Kyllo was busted. Some of these
new devices are already turning up at airports, prisons, border
crossings and crime scenes. And while none of them is quite up to the
standards of, say, Superman, they can see through clothing and peer
into private homes well enough to raise thorny privacy issues for all
of us. Among the leading contenders:

X-Ray Vision:

Today's preferred technology for looking through things is the same
one Wilhelm Roentgen used to photograph the bones in his wife's hand
in 1895, although the newest X-ray devices are considerably more
powerful. Last September, for example, the U.S. Customs Service placed
an order worth more than $25 million for 15 truck-based X-ray
inspection systems made by American Science and Engineering, Inc., in
Billerica, Massachusetts. Using a technique in which images are made
from X rays scattered back from objects (rather than passing through
them), AS&E's systems can spot--with extraordinary clarity--guns,
drugs, plastic explosives and other contraband, even when hidden, say,
in the middle of a fully packed banana truck. One of the company's
products, called BodySearch, reveals ghostly images of weapons and
whatever else--including genitals--might be hidden underneath your
clothes.

Radar Flashlights:

Gene Greneker, a radar expert at Georgia Tech, was fiddling with a
radar gun he had developed for monitoring marksmen and archers during
the 1996 Atlanta Olympics when he noticed something odd: whenever
someone walked on the other side of his laboratory wall, a deflection
appeared on the radar screen. One thing led to another, and now
Greneker is trying to smooth out the final kinks in his Radar
Flashlight, a device that looks like an oversize hair dryer but can
penetrate 20-cm-thick nonmetal doors and walls. When radar waves
encounter moving objects, like a hostage taker's nervous pacing or
heaving diaphragm, the motions are translated into a bar of led lights
in which the height of the bar corresponds with the amount of movement
in the room. In more sophisticated radar detectors, like the
RadarVision 2000 prototype made by Time Domain Corporation of
Huntsville, Alabama, the crude led display is replaced by dancing
circles and colored blobs that show both the location and trajectory
of moving objects on the other side of an opaque barrier.

Beyond Bar Graphs:

Some firms are pushing for yet more clarity. Using shorter-wavelength
radar waves measured in millimeters, not centimeters, Millivision in
Amherst, Mass., makes a device that goes well beyond colored blobs.
"What we are doing is real imaging," says Richard Huguenin, chief
technology officer. "You see a picture." Actually, it's more like a
shadow. The human body, as it turns out, naturally emits millimeter
radiation that goes right through clothes. So anything blocking that
emission, such as a concealed gun or wallet, shows up as a shadow in
the images produced by Millivision's prototype scanners. Huguenin
acknowledges the privacy concerns, but he argues that the technology's
public-safety benefits outweigh them. "You can tell the boys from the
girls" with his device, says Huguenin, "but you usually can anyway."

The Supreme Court was clearly more troubled by the privacy issues than
Huguenin. The majority opinion explicitly used the heat-detector case
to draw what Justice Scalia called a firm, bright line blocking the
use of this and future imaging technologies to peer into the home or
any other place where an individual might have a reasonable
expectation of privacy.

But the court also left the police a couple of outs. The first is to
get a search warrant. If the cops have good reason to peer inside a
house, they can always go to a judge and get permission--just as they
do today with a wiretap. The second is to wait for the technology to
become ubiquitous. If everybody owns a through-the-wall imager, the
court suggested last week, then nobody can reasonably expect any
privacy anywhere, even at home.