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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.
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
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'll try to dig up a link with the real story about this.
Xel'Naga
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.
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!
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