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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!
Now I know it's just a joke. _No_ commercial software runs on OpenBSD.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
"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 is just the first step. Eventually, you will look like this
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Almost more disurbing... check out the JuJu in the Products section of the company's site. Creepy!
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
It has to be. There is no way you could achieve injection this way without causing some real injury. Assuming you could get this to work at all, would it really "feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second?" I don't think so... ever been shot with a BB-gun? That hurts a lot more than a mosquito-bite even if it doesn't break the skin.
Full body Aluminum foil get-ups just got more popular.
Insert Witty Remark Here ===>____________________________
That is not a "GPS Chip" on the website, it is a tiny microchip used to ID dogs and cats. The website is surprising slim on any details and to me appears to be a complete farse.
It's fake. The "GPS Pellet" is nothing more than a picture of a common transponder (RFID). Even if they could get the GPS electronics that small, and fit a tansmitter in there, the battery needed for more than a few minutes of GPS calculations would be significantly larger than the capsule.
Furthermore, the GPS signal doesn't go very deep through human tissue, it degrades as it goes, and a transmitter strong ernough to be received more than a few hundred yards away would be comparable in size and power consumption to a cell phone.
Interesting concept. It's not impossible, but it's not cost effective now.
-Adam
Snake Plissken: Got a smoke?
Malloy: The United States is a non-smoking nation! No smoking, no drugs, no alcohol, no women - unless you're married - no foul language, no red meat!
Snake Plissken: Land of the free.
After looking at the "GPS-chip Verichip(r)" all I could think was that if that hit me with enough force to penetrate my skin it would hurt a lot more than any mosquito bite I've ever gotten. Maybe if the mosquito had malaria and I was hospitalized for a couple of weeks the pain would be equivalent.
Even assuming wire a LOT finer than typical magnet (coil wrapping) wire, that looks like one hell of a big device. Maybe you are required to bend over so they can inject it as a suppository.
Just a little late for April 1st...
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
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.
This can't be real.
The image of the rifle in question looks like CGI from a video game -- if it was real, why not just use a photo rather than a photo-realistic synthetic graphic?
And their other product, with the silly cartoons, is even more implausible. But let's not get distracted by the obvious fake -- the gun is more interesting anyway.
As a hypothetical exercise, could this kind of coverty GPS planting work? Let's say that the GPS beacon / transmitter is small enough to be mistaken for an insect's sting, so no bigger than a grain of sand. What then?
I don't believe for a minute that this is real, but I had no problem believing that various Three Letter Agencies would love to treat this as a prototype for devices they would like to build. How close are we to being able to approximate this with current technology?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
GPS antennas must be pretty big, because the signals from orbit are pretty weak.
Small projectiles are less stable. A projectile the size of a grain of sand could barely cross a room.
The kinetic energy required to overcome air friction would make the impact pretty serious, if you could magically overcome the instability problem, and magically make the tiny projectile carry that much kinetic energy without vaporising it.
As for tracking the thing, where's the transmit antenna? RFID tags have a short range, and they're a lot bigger than a mosquito-sized impact. No antenna means no signal range.
And as other posters have noted, there's no room for a power source, the GPS signals don't penetrate well, etc. etc.
Ardent Pedantry R Us,
Flumph
Its based on an essay in Abuse your illusions called "How I crashed a Chinese Arms Biazaar With A Rifle That Doesn't Exist"
My favourite use would be tagging girls in night clubs and then stalk them. So much easier than asking for phone numbers.
I can't believe I fell for it. The site is such an obvious fake. These guys are laughing their collective butts off at our readiness to don the tinfoil hat and march into battle.
Mod me down... after replying to such a fake, I don't deserve Karma.
Now, what do we do about Timothy, the editor, and gbjbaanb, the submitter?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I'll try to dig up a link with the real story about this.
Xel'Naga
If you recieve the mark of the beast involuntarily, you can still switch sides, right? ...right, guys?
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
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.
Jakob Boeskov, the purported "CEO" of "Empire North", is a satirist. Here is a link to his personal homepage, along with an explanation of the FAKE GPS Sniper Rifle (emphasis is mine):
:)
http://www.backfire.dk/JB/indexreal.html
"Giant balloon sculptures, voodoo-cursed technology and blueprints for hi-tech weapons smuggled into Chinas first international weapons fair - in the world of Jakob S. Boeskov the amazing meets the political in a unique mix.
Coming from a background in comics, Copenhagen based artist Jakob S. Boeskov seems destined to work with satire and pastiche. Using a palette of different media such as web, paintings, writings, 3D drawings and animations, as well as collaborations with musicians, writers, voodoo priests (!) and industrial designers he "hacks and bends" media, reality and technology to give a startling and shocking view of life in the 21st century.
His recent works has been created within the framework of his self-styled "sci-fi art" (or "fictionist") concept where he takes "an imaginary product from the future" and tests it out today, in a real environment. He did this most notably in his MY DOOMSDAY WEAPON project where he created "the most horrible weapon in the world" (- a piece of "pre-crime technology" designed to mark demonstrators with GPS (Global Positioning System) chips "before the crime is committed"). Jakob S. Boeskov brought drawings of this weapon to China Police 2002, Chinas first international weapons fair, where the international weapons dealer elite and greeted this nightmarish weapon with much enthusiasm."
Happy April Fools Day, 11 days late!
from www.jakobboeskov.com
For this daredevil project Jakob S. Boeskov infiltrated an armsfair in Beijing with "the ID Sniper - the worlds most horrible hi-tech weapon" Too fantastic to be true? No its not! Read parts of the story here:
In June 2002 Jakob S. Boeskov travelled to the belly of the dragon to meet the enemy eye to eye - infiltrating China Police 2002 the first international weapons fair in China. He brings with him four hundred fake business cards, a promotional poster of a horrible hitech weapon, and the worst stomach cramps ever. Tag along to the Kingdom in the Middle and meet robot salesmen, enthusiastic Chinese entrepreneurs and singing teenage policemen.
Basically, the idea was to come up with the most terrible weapon imaginable, and to test it in a real environment. We had three days to finish up the weapon. Our fake company, Empire North, already had a logo and a slogan ("The Logical Solution" aping the Nazi classic "The Final Solution") but we had no weapon yet. Genius designer Von B and I worked overtime, and in two days we had the ID Sniper ready.
The day before I was leaving, BLACK BOX editor Mads Brügger called designer Von B and asked him to change the design, because "it was too far out and he couldn't be responsible for what happened, if I was found out."
Changing was not possible at this late stage. I guess he knew that. Maybe he was just, more or less elegantly, trying to shake off his share of the burden. I can understand it, because we were all becoming afraid. Afraid of what would happen if I was found out, and afraid of what might happen if the weapon was taken seriously. Would it be copied? Would we be responsible for the production of one of the most inhumane weapons in the history of man? We justified our project by telling ourselves that right now, a few people were walking around with socalled VeriChips implanted in their bodies, chips manufactured by the company Applied Digital Solutions. We kept reminding ourselves that right, now prisoners in Sweden are doing time at home wearing GPS chip wristbands. It would merely be a question of time before the technology would be used preemptively on suspicious persons, and as we repeatedly told ourselves, all new technology has been used for military purposes, and this technology would too, we concluded. Why not bring it out prematurely, so at least we could have a small part in getting a thorough discussion about this kind of technology? With this question, we basically came up with a brand new art concept. Let's for now just call it scifi conceptual art, defined like this: take the essence of an imagined future, turn it into a concept and present this concept in present day reality. Report the reactions.
Would this new concept lead to a brave journey, searching for truth or would it just be a highly irresponsible prank? There was only one way to find out, and that was to do it.
This is how it was done.
FACTS
THE ID SNIPER RIFLE AS PRESENTED ON THE EMPIRE NORTH POSTER
GPS microchip based identification rifle
Empire North is proud to present the preliminary showcase of the ID Sniper Rifle a brand new tool in longterm riot control, and antiterror management. Please notice that some aspects of this cuttingedge technology are still in its outmost infancy, and more research is needed before the ID Sniper Rifle is a reality. Hence we are welcoming investors and business partners to join us in the important quest of developing the ID Sniper Rifle.
What is the ID Sniper Rifle?
To put it short, the idea is to implant a GPS microchip in the body of a human being, using a highpowered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito bite, lasting a fraction of a second.
At the same time, a digital camcorder with a zo
AccountKiller
Indeed. So-called "non-lethal" projectile and chemical weapons are not really non-lethal. That's propaganda: it's what the police call them to make them sound safe. Aw, a fluffy little bean bag. Aw, a plastic bullet. How much can a little thing like that hurt.
The reality is organ damage, serious wounds, broken bones, spinal injury, miscarriage, blindness, and death. And that's when the police don't deliberately aim for maximum injury, or fire at point blank range - the sadistic bastards.
Some weapons manufacturers more accurately label those same weapons "less lethal", meaning they still kill people, but they're not specifically designed for killing.
Such weapons are meant to be used by professional, trained officers in the correct way: such as aiming at people's legs, or the ground, and from a minimum distance. They come with specific instructions to this effect, and warnings of what will happen when these instructions are ignored. Police officers routinely ignore them.
When a police officer aims the same projectile weapons at someone's head, or at their neck, they are intending to kill that person or break their spine, and sometimes they succeed. Disturbingly, police actually do that in crowd control situations.
Even when they hit your back or legs, they can cause severe organ damage and/or broken bones.
And we haven't discussed the chemical weapons, yet. Exercise for the reader.
Here's a fairly good and accurate article.
-- Jamie
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