What a crock. Freedom, remember that? Wasn't even that long ago when America was the (self-named) Home of the Free.
NYPD Seeks an Air Monitor Crackdown for New Yorkers
A city councilman and the cops don't want you to have that Geiger counter without their permission[Click to read more village voice > Runnin' Scared: NYPD Seeks an Air Monitor Crackdown for New Yorkers by Chris Thompson]
Damn you, Osama bin Laden! Here's another rotten thing you've done to us: After 9/11, untold thousands of New Yorkers bought machines that detect traces of biological, chemical, and radiological weapons. But a lot of these machines didn't work right, and when they registered false alarms, the police had to spend millions of dollars chasing bad leads and throwing the public into a state of raw panic.
OK, none of that has actually happened. But Richard Falkenrath, the NYPD's deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, knows that it's just a matter of time. That's why he and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have asked the City Council to pass a law requiring anyone who wants to own such detectors to get a permit from the police first. And it's not just devices to detect weaponized anthrax that they want the power to control, but those that detect everything from industrial pollutants to asbestos in shoddy apartments. Want to test for pollution in low-income neighborhoods with high rates of childhood asthma? Gotta ask the cops for permission. Why? So you "will not lead to excessive false alarms and unwarranted anxiety," the first draft of the law states.
Sounds more like they just want to squelch citizens reporting on industrial toxins, asbestos, and other urban blights. Less information for us means less work for them, in other words.
