Slashdot Mirror
Non-Lethal Sniper Rifle: You're Tagged For Life
gbjbaanb writes "Cool new urban battlefield weaponry for the geeks to fear. The
Id Sniper is a nonlethal sniper rifle that fires tiny GPS microchips into the body of the target. The idea is that a rowdy crowd can be tagged for later 'processing' by law enforcement officials.
Apparently the chip hitting you will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second.
Although it looks, and sounds like a cyberpunk weapon, its for real from a Danish company that has already shown it off at a Chinese Police exhibition.
check out the tracking software." Here's hoping this is cautionary artwork.
Besides the fact that this is invasion of privacy (in the weirdest possible way), what happens when the sniper decides to shoot and it hits your eyeball?
It may be a tiny device but you're either dead or blind either way.
Get paid to code OSS
Dear Editors,
Today is not April Fool's day...........
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
Almost more disurbing... check out the JuJu in the Products section of the company's site. Creepy!
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
it's for real from a Danish company that has already shown it off at a Chinese Police exhibition.
This sentence leads to some interesting concepts:
* If the Chinese authorities had this cyber-weapon at their disposal, would lives have been saved at Tiananmen Square?
* If the demonstrators had been tagged instead of shot outright, would it have been any better for them in the long run?
* Isn't the whole idea incredibly creepy?
Actually, I have my doubts that a map, like the one tracking the terrorist padre in the demo, is currently possible. Remember the distance-squared law, frequently mentioned in other RFID articles?
This sounds more like a James Bond tracking device than anything possible in the Real World.
Something similar that *would* be useful against *real* criminals would be a TollTag gun -- fire a vehicle tracker into the body panel of a fleeing vehicle, and track it as it travels the freeway system in a wired-up town like Houston.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
There is no way you could reliably hit a target with a projectile that lightweight. To put the velocity behind it that you'd need to have enough kinetic energy to penetrate the skin would vaporize anything that small. Not to mention that it would become useless in even a light breeze.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
This was a performance art project...this artist (Danish, iirc) put together this idea, took it to a international arms fair, and then documented the reaction of the crowd...read about it in one of Russ Kick's books.
Sorry folks, nothing to see here, move along, citizens.
Woot w00t w007.
The site was created as part of a hoax to see if the chinese police would actually buy something like this. They did. The whole sordid affair is documented in this book.
About the size of a piece of confetti. Or maybe quite a bit smaller.
What if you had riot control personnel carrying shotguns loaded with shells that shot out clouds of RFID confetti?
Back in the days of punch cards and paper tape some people used the "chad" from those cards in place of confetti. But it wasn't a nice thing to do. Chad, punched from card stock, with sharp edges, is much harder to remove than regular confetti. There is a small amount of oil in punch cards and punch tape.
You can't just brush it off.
If an artifact can make chad hard to brush off, then how difficult could you make it to brush off dozens or hundreds of stealth RFID chad, specially designed to be hard to find and brush off? Your demonstrator only has to miss one for you to be able to read their chip with a reader. When they get on the subway, for instance. Even if they have stashed a complete change of clothes the chip might be in their hair.
Just because you've been GPS-tagged doesn't mean you're guilty.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show