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Riot Control Ray-Gun for Use in Iraq
team99parody writes "An 'Active Denial System' weapon that 'fires a 95GHz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds'
is scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006
according to CNET and the print version of New Scientist. It was recently tested on people playing the part of rioters at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico where they asked the subjects to remove glass and contact lenses to protect their eyes. Hopefully real rioters will get the same courtesy. Police and the Marines are working on portable versions. Sandia Labs also has a nice writeup on this system with pictures of smaller versions of the weapon."
It's only logical. Our right to peaceably assemble is in the process of being eviscerated, which means that future efforts on the part of the citizenry to protest the increasingly hateful policies of this government will become more and more confrontational, and which in turn sees the government resorting to ever more punitive policies in response.
Prediction: the ray-gun is on the streets in America in time for the 2008 Republican National Convention.
I can't wait to hear what they consider to be acceptable levels of casualties as the result of using this thing on people.
The thing I regret most in this life is that of all the science fiction movies I loved watching as I grew up, Soylent Green ends up being the one that most closely depicts the future.
(I'd rather take my chances on the Nostromo.)
--
Why didn't you know?
Wheres mine?
If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
--Kurt Vonnegut
I Wonder whether its usage can contribute to cancer down the track?
"The problem with our economy is that our budget is balanced by people who aren't" - A.E.N.
But New Scientist magazine reported Wednesday that during tests carried out at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, participants playing the part of rioters were told to remove glasses and contact lenses to protect their eyes. In another test they were also told to remove metal objects such as coins from their clothing to prevent local hot spots from developing on their skin.
In real life obviously there are going to be people wearing lenses or carrying metal objects so what gives???
Is Iraq just the guinea pig for our experiments now?
While I certainly support non-lethal weapons in use of riot dispersion, this does not seem safe at all (and certainly, I do not want to be aimed at with microwaves!)
That's the way to win "hearts and minds" of people angry at the US occupation forces: zap them with rayguns. We'll teach them how the 21st Century US welcomes them with "compassionate conservatism", by frying them with rayguns. After sizzling whole towns, there's no way they'll ever listen to insane jihadists telling them that the Great Satan has burned them with hellfire, that we're all better off in a medieval fiefdom under god. Yeah, sticking Iraqis into a microwave oven is exactly the way to get them to calm down, stop their civil war, and break out those flowers they're supposed to be greeting us with.
--
make install -not war
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
by tin foil?
Wait, isn't that terrorism? Using this thing could increase terrorism? Fucking wonderful.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Nonlethal weaponry is a horseshit myth.
The term they should have used (and what law enforcement uses now, after more than a few wrongful death lawsuits, is the term of "Less lethal". Did any of the Kirtland Air Force Base participants have a pre existing heart condition? I bet they didnt let pregnant women participate.
Im so glad that when every time one of these proportedly nonlethal weapons pops up its run under a FULL and accurate barrage of labratory and set up tests, which almost never reveal the compounding issues that lead to death in real world enviroments.
The news.com article asks a few of the many lurking questions to this system. We all know this device is going to Iraq to go through real world testing before its used here in the US. Someone is counting on all the "little kinks" that are more than likely deadly will be ironed out under the public eye.
I find it highly ironic that our testing of this indescriminant weapon will be used in our even more indescriminant war.
Terrorists dont use large crowds as weapons, if you stop and think at why this weapon would be needed, its ultimately crowd control on our home front. Now why would we need that? Lakers winning again? I highly doubt it. Someone had a plan when they initated and funded the development of this, and it doesnt look like a good one.
There is truth in humor.
Why the heck are mods modding this flame-war up!?!
What could be more on-topic than a flame-war?
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
No, they'd rather people not shoot protesting crowds. If the crowds are using lethal force or threatening the position of our troops, our troops will use lethal force back with or without our magic ray gun.
Seriously, from a practical standpoint, what will happen the first time we fire this thing into. say, one of al-Sadr's regular 10k+ angry-mob protests? Everyone with glasses risks going blind; everyone with metal on them gets burns. Everyone with a pacemaker risks getting their heart stopped. It'd be almost a guaranteed new Sadrist revolt, plus easily increasing other Shia and widespread Sunni insurgency recruiting, while not killing any insurgents. Of course, the effects don't apply just to the crowd; beams keep on going.
But lets take this further than the obvious anger that the US using some sci-fi style technology on a country that has no ability to resist it would inspire. Everyone who gets cancer within a few months of such a usage within half a dozen blocks of the site will blame it on the US's new "pain-ray". Everyone who miscarries? The same. Everyone who gets a headache, who has a heart attach, who comes down with a nasty disease... it'll all get blamed on the device.
Strategically, this is an awful decision.
Point of interest. Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.
We have given up on winning their hearts and minds, instead we will cook their hearts and minds with experimental ray-guns. God Bless America!
with all our technology, science, power and resources, all we seem to do is come up with more and more fucking evil disgusting ways of hurting people? This is fucking sick.. Does nobody else see this?
Yeah! tell me about Quake, and Doom, and Half Life, and Counter Strike, and Halo, and Unreal...
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
This will nicely wrap up our hearts-and-minds campaign.
Government, as an institution, is supposed to exist to solve (or at least mitigate) the people's problems.
The average person, when placed in a position of power, wishes to use that power to improve his own situation. Such a person, in a government position finds that the best way to increase his personal power is to increase the size and importance of his domain of power -- which, as we've seen, is based upon "solving" some problem that the people have.
The best method they've found so far is to create the problem with one hand while solving it with the other. Move more responsibility from the people to the government, and justify more work. Create more complications and loopholes in the tax codes, and work harder to bust tax evaders. Make more things illegal, and make law enforcement look good. It's a justification to do more, to take more of your money for your own good. It is evil. It's a million acts of small, petty evil in the guises of kindness and service.
As to the bit about the Republicans -- it's been said before that the US is run by two parties: the party of Evil and the party of Stupidity. I agree with that assessment, but I think that the roles change day-to-day. Neither one is any better than the other.
We geeks are also pretty good at distinguishing fantasy from reality.
Besides, Counter Strike is the only game you list that has any basis of fact, all the others are in totally fictional environments.
The whole point of violence in games, particularly with kids, is you don't stop them playing these games because they are just fun pure and simple. It's bad parents that use PS2s and XBoxes as "babysitters", leave their kids on them for hours on end and don't spend time with them balancing out in-game violence with real-life love and attention.
So let's have none of this "game violence" BS...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The real question is, can we trust the weapon operators to use this responsibly?
Probably not. Last year the police in the US managed to shoot one of their pepper-spray paintballs through an bystanding girl's eye, killing her. And that's a "non-lethal" weapon you can aim!
The thing in the article covers an entire area. Do you think the operator is going to check and make sure that nobody in the crowd is wearing glasses, jewelry, or contacts? That's impossible!
Even in theory, this isn't a non-lethal weapon at all... It's quite obvious that this is intended as a means of disarming (have we forgotten that guns/knives are metal?) and/or killing large groups of people immediately without collateral damage; just like a neutron bomb, only more controllable and cheaper.
-Grym
I have anti-globalization activist friends who were in Miami in 2003 protesting the FTAA meeting going on at the time. They tell me that the cops (other than having their own embedded journalists, getting extremely favorable corporate media coverage, beating people senseless and blinding some people with pepperspray) used some sort of microwave weapon on them and it made them throw up. For more info on that protest, check out a movie called the Miami Model http://www.ftaaimc.org/miamimodel.
I'm surprised they haven't deployed water cannons over there - those would seem to be infinitely less lethal than machine-guns or even this microwave laser they're proposing. However, given the heatwaves and lack of electricity for cooling, there's a danger people would riot just to cool down.
Of course, a lot of the dissaffection is as a result of a lack of amenities in an extremely unforgiving climate. On that basis, it would probably be much more cost-effective simply to give every household their own generator and supply them with fuel until the power situation has been stabilized. Probably kill a whole lot fewer people, too. Might even win a few friends.
For the safer parts of the country, they could even run a water delivery service. Drop off a 20 or 50 gallon tank in the morning at the front door, picking up the empties in the process. No different than what a million milkmen do every day in England - except the getting shot at part, and the size of the bottles.
That wouldn't eliminate problems, but it would reduce a LOT of the tension. And if you reduce the tension, you reduce the risk of riots and other violent protest. Containment is better done by meeting legitimate complaints, rather than suppressing them. Suppressing them only risks building the tension up more, which increases the risk of massive confrontation.
Things are bad enough, over there, why go out of our way to make things worse, when it is cheaper, easier and quicker (not to mention more ethical) NOT to?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
True, but the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency. E = hf, where h is Planck's constant. That's why hard ultraviolet light (~1 PHz or 1,000,000GHz) has enough energy to knock electrons out of orbit and cause mutations in DNA, while 95 GHz microwaves do not have enough energy to do so, no matter how many photons you crank out.
Tinfoil. Tinfoil hat, dungarees, under your normal clothes. And you can carry tinfoil placards that reflect microwaves back to police.
Dyslexics have more fnu.
we geeks are pretty much pacifists and don't care about this stuff.
You misspelled apathetic.
Seriously, this attitude is why crappy patents and laws like the DMCA are passed uncontested. It's all very nice living with blinkers on your eyes, ignoring the real world, but don't go crying when that world rudely intrudes on your own life.
If you really were a pacifist, then you should be extremely interested in the ways states have of hurting dissenters, since this thing could be used against you or your fellow humans (but not while you're locked in your bedroom playing Everquest)
Not to mention that inhumane weaponry like this is the best propaganda tool for those opposing war.
This shouldn't surprise anyone, really - the whole culture of western government (the US and UK, certainly) is moving away from solving the problems they face, and toward minimising the bother they cause the government.
Too many people protesting outside parliament? Don't find out why they're so angry, just make it illegal for anyone to protest, peacefully or otherwise, within 1km of parliament.
Too many corrupt middle-eastern regimes? Don't try to help get rid of the corruption, just invade one and hope for the best!
Too many terrorist attacks? Don't try to figure out why so many people are willing to die to hurt you, just find a convenient country to blame and invade it!
Too many underage criminals active at night? Make it illegal for *any* children to be on the streets at night, whether they're doing anything wrong or not.
Too many riots and violent protests? Don't worry about it, just develop new and ever more sophisticated ways of punishing those who take part, or even those who are in the same place at the same time.
What's next? Too many people thinking Bad Things? Don't worry...
The whole mindset of the people in control at the moment is skewed - they're not solving problems, they're just hiding symptoms (or, increasingly, brutally suppressing them).
They tested a system to find out whether people were experiencing intolerable heat in New Mexico?
Surely in New Mexico, all you have to do is just stand in the sun?
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
I was at the Force Protection Equipment Demonstation this year where I talked to some of the Marines at the Joint Non-Lethal Warfighting Lab about this exact product. We as Marines are looking at this tool as a lifesaver (literally). If we can roll through a place like Fallujah and use this tool to incapacitate the bad guys in front of us, then that saves their lives and puts less risk on our Marines. We want to and are doing everything we can to improve our non-lethal and less-than-lethal capabilities so that we have more options when we're faced with an enemy.
More importantly, the general vibe that I got from these responses is that you all think that we're a bunch of indiscriminent killers! Guess what...we're not! We don't want to kill if we don't have to. However, when someone is pointing a gun at us, we're not going to sit there and wait them out. For example, we have Marines coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan who are messed up psychologically because they had to shoot a kid who was shooting at them. They had no choice. They did the right thing, but now they're fucked up in the head. The only reason they're fucked up though is because they believe that it's morally wrong to shoot a child. But when that child puts themselves into a situation where they become a combatant, the only response we have right now is to shoot them.
Back to this less-than-lethal ray gun, if that Marine could've incapacitated that child instead of killing him, then the Marine can go home knowing that he completed his mission and didn't have to shoot a child, and that child can go home alive.
I'm really dissapointed in this crowd. I've been a slashdot reader for the last 8 years and I've been pretty impressed with most of the comments up until now. Have a little faith in the people serving on the front lines. We're professionals, just like you try to be at work. We care about honor, courage, commitment, etc. Frankly, if I can use this ray gun to help make my Marines safer and bring them home to my families, then as a commander, I'm all for it.
-- Get your free Mini Mac http://www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=14209873
Browsing at 4: 33 comments, universally bemoaning the near-fascist oppression of the Evil Bush & Co., as well as the obligatory comments about how we shouldn't be in Iraq.
1) Do you people understand what a Riot IS? This is not a bunch of grungy stoners standing around peacably smoking hemp before they are brutalized by the jackbooted police thugs. I've BEEN in a riot, and they are characterized by VIOLENCE. Violence and damage to property, as well as against other people standing around. Many posters have said something about the indiscriminate use of these weapons. Hey dumbass: the point of RIOT CONTROL cops is not to beat your sorry ass down (as much as you may deserve it) it's to DISPERSE the rioters, because people are far less likely to be (rioting) assholes when not protected by the anonymity of the herd around them. If you're a spectator, you're part of the fscking problem. For all the sympathy we're supposed to have for 'innocent bystanders' accidentally caught in this weapon's area of effect, I don't see a SINGLE post suggesting sympathy for the people whose businesses, cars, property, and yes, even LIVES are threatened/damaged/ruined by the rioters.
But then again, why should they get sympathy? They're working a job, running a local business, making a living, supporting a family...you know, all those things that the "anti-globalization protestors" (really fancy way of saying unemployed vandals) are supposedly "protecting"...
2) It's great we're in Iraq, we're accomplishing good things in the majority of the country where the psychotic terrorists aren't an everyday event. And yes, it's JUST as irrelevant for me to make that point as it is to make yours that "we shouldn't be there".
-Styopa