New Radar Sees Through Walls

artemis67 writes "A small Israeli company has developed a radar system that uses ultra-wideband technology to produce three-dimensional pictures of the space behind a wall from a distance of up to 20 meters. The pictures, which reportedly resemble those produced by ultrasound, are relatively high-resolution and are produced in real time. Wow, it sounds like the potential benefits of this device are huge, saving lives of soldiers, firemen, or police; the potential for privacy invasion, however, is similarly large."

Comments

terrahertz imaging

[bobthemuse]

Isn't this similar to the terahertz imaging previously discussed? Also seen here and here?

Behind walls eh?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Well what kind of walls? Drywall? Brick? Craypaper?

The material the wall is made out of has a marked impact on the permeability of EM waves. And the frequency you select to get through the wall may pass straight through your intended target of viewing as well.

Walls...

[eli173]

Just as long as it lets me see where this pipe/conduit/wire goes in my wall. (And where the studs are...)

Or looky here, we've got termites in this wall.

So when does the hand-held consumer version of this come out?

Don't blame the tools

[Alan Cox]

It seems odd to me that the same people who can follow that the DMCA is problematic because it bans the tools not the abuses of the tools can't make the connection when its non-computing related.

Peering through neighbours walls (with this technology or drilling peepholes) is the offence. Would you argue that drills should be regulated because they could be used this way ?

If anything the main reason to regulate it is likely to be because long exposures to low levels of radio frequency radiation seems to do bad things to human beings so operating one might require training, care and exposure limits.

I'd also disagree its just a military tool. It has clear civilian usages including earthquake searches (because it can visualise spaces not just people so gives more info) and even boring stuff like inspecting buildings. Having had a large hole hacked in my house to see if a crack was structural I can certainly appreciate the civilian value of having tools to inspect it effectively without the mess, and the dust, and the redecorating.

Radar Units

[geomon]

I use one quite a bit. The ground-penetrating radar is probably not much different than this device in physical principles. That means it is subject to the same problems as my GPR:

1) high clay content can wash out any signal,
2) metallic objects (aluminum foil has been mentioned) can render the device useless, and
3) too many objects can interfere.

There have been numerous examples posted here where you just spring a few moving decoys around the building and now the operator on the outside has just as much valuable information as they had without the $20KUSD device attached to their arm.

This thing is a boat anchor.

Re:Our gratitude

[geoffspear]

That's why we have that whole "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden of proof thing.

If they have a low-res recording of you building a bomb, your defense attorney can reasonably argue that the blob the jury sees could be doing anything. I doubt such images would ever even be considered admissible by the courts if they were of such low quality.

Re:Our gratitude

[geoffspear]

The reasonable doubt provision does not aim to provide "perfect justice". Perfect justice would be if everyone who committed a crime was convicted and everyone who was accused of a crime he or she did not commit was acquitted.

Fortunately, the authors of the US Constitution believed, as I do, that it's "good enough" to let some people who commit crimes get acquitted if the government can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they're guilty, to ensure that not a single innocent person is convicted.

The real problem is that our law schools produce people who can, as Socrates was accused of doing, make the weaker argument appear to be the stronger, and convince juries to convict people who not only aren't guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, but who are later proven beyond any doubt whatsoever to be not guilty when new evidence or new techniques of analyzing evidence are used. Just having one person on death row exonerated by DNA evidence shows that the system is horribly broken.

Of course, the sort of "strict constructionists" who believe that the government should never, ever, even think of overstepping the authority granted to it in the Constitution are, ironically, the exact same people who think it's a "technicality" when an alleged criminal is set free because the Constitution includes specific provisions to protect the People from abuse by the government.