Homeland Security Funds LED Light That Blinds, Disorients

katzmeow writes "Ryand Singel's Wired blog notes that Homeland security has developed an LED flashlight that uses 'powerful flashes of light to temporarily blind, disorient and incapacitate people.' The idea is to use it to incapacitate people — 'arrest them' — on airlines, borders, etc. without using traditional weapons. The company's president Bob Lieberman says the tool is perfect for confronting 'border jumpers.' 'You don't want to hurt or kill them, just take them into custody,' says Lieberman. 'With this, they don't need to know English to comply.' The 'light saber' can even be scaled up to bazooka size for subduing crowds."

Comments

Nice

[okinawa_hdr]

"subduing crowds"...I don't like the sound of that.

Re:Nice

[tttonyyy]

"subduing crowds"...I don't like the sound of that. But given the choice, would you rather be subdued by:

a) rubber bullets
b) tear gas
c) water cannon
d) wall of shields and batons
e) bright lights

I know what I'd chose! :)

Of course we're missing the uber-overlord crowd-suppressor; the rubber bullet firing tear gas cannon super-bright torch baton.

Re:Nice

[CmdrGravy]

I like the fact that it can be used for subduing crowds without having to talk to them, everythings much simpler when you don't have to engage in any dialouge with enemy.

Re:Nice

[badfish99]

I wouldn't like to be subdued by any of them, thank you very much.

But, if you're going to give the police a weapon, there's an argument that a gun is better than any of these. Everyone knows that a gun is lethal, so a policeman is going to think carefully before using it on anyone who is not immediately threatening his life.
But if the policeman has got a simple non-lethal weapon like this, he's got a strong motivation for "subduing" anyone who happens to disagree with him or who doesn't instantly obey his orders. What better instrument of oppression than a police force that is always instantly obeyed for fear of something like this?

Re:Nice

[OfficialReverendStev]

But then what happens when the officer does need to subdue someone? If all he has is a gun, lethal force is his only option. Let's say he's being attacked by somebody with a baseball bat and they're swinging really hard. He could blind and subdue them or shoot.

I'm not a cop nor do I know any personally, but killing someone, no matter the cause, is something that would haunt anybody for the rest of their life. I would think that any cop would rather have, maybe in addition to their sidearm, a non-lethal means to protect themself.

Re:Close your eyes.

[PopeRatzo]

Great idea. Take a moment what a crowd of Mexicans running frantically North with their eyes closed and their arms in front feeling their way.

I don't know about you, but the way I'm imagining it would look is freakin' hilarious.

When you think about it for more than a moment, it's really not all that funny.

Re:This is against Geneva or Hague convention

[MrMr]

As far as I remember, intrenational laws of war forbid using weapons that blind beople.

No problem there: The US has not (yet) officially declared war on itself, so using this on US citizens is perfectly fine for the time being.

Universal Language

[kaleco]

'With this, they don't need to know English to comply.'

Ah yes, the universal language of violence.

Decapacitating crowds...

[St1086lichnaya]

Because crowds need to be subdued, obviously... If they ain't happy, it's the govt's obligation to find out what it's doing wrong!

Re:No guarantee of safety when breaking the law

[arth1]

Yes, but "reasonable force" is a fluid term. In the UK, it apparently means shooting an unarmed guy, then when he's on the floor, step on his arms and shoot him in the head, over and over again.
A better term would, in my opinion, be "minimal force". At least that doesn't expect police men to be reasoning beings.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:This is against Geneva or Hague convention

[yani]

So what we have here is a non-lethal weapon designed to harmlessly incapacitate an individual, allowing law enforcement to take them into custody without exchanging gunfire or risking serious injury or loss of life. You are completely missing the point. Your last comment completely describes what the Taser is meant to be, but the whole point is that once someone in authority has a means to "subdue" a person with what they think is a method that cannot result in any permanent physical damage, they lose control, and inevitably cause more damage than would have been done with a lethal weapon which has clear and serious consequences. We've seen this with Tasers already.

Picture it, one crowd is protesting with a police force armed with lethal weapons, and non-lethal weapons that leave bruises, the other is protesting with a police force armed with LEDs. The first is not going to fire on a crowd except in self-defense, to do otherwise would be crazy, it would also be a bit difficult to go around and give everyone a bashing. The second is getting impatient and gets out an LED bazooka, and decides to put the brightness up a bit because it's a bright day, oh and they aren't sure if everyone had their eyes open the first time, so they fire it a few times just to be sure.

Or more likely, a middle-eastern looking youth is spotted in a library on a university campus, when asked for his student ID he says he doesn't have it, and won't leave. Someone calls security, security approaches him and tells him to leave. The youth says he won't leave, the security personnel get pissed off and pull out their handy LED weapon, and hold it a centimeter or so from his eye. They repeatedly flash him as he shouts out at them.

As for your claim that a very bright light source with a relatively high divergence from a large distance can not cause permanent damage, I think you need to look directly at the Sun a bit more.

Re:I'm sure...

[jollyreaper]

Why is it that the introduction of a non-lethal, safer-than-shooting-a-gun method of subduing a suspected criminal considered such a bad thing? If I were as paranoid of the government as you obviously are, I'd rather have them weilding a temporarily blinding light than to just save batteries and cram a load of C4 up my rear. Seriously, what's up with you people? The problem with less-than-lethals is that they were designed with the idea of "at least now there's an option other than shooting someone." That's fair. But the way they're used is "I don't feel like wrestling you to the ground and cuffing you, have some taser." The assumption is because it's called non-lethal (although it should be called less-than-lethal, most of the time) is that the cops don't think there's any risk associated with it. You're not as likely to kill someone with a taser than a gun, but you're still running more of a risk than if you subdued them the old-fashioned way.

I think the operating rule with these less-than-lethals should be "If you didn't have one of these and you would otherwise be shooting them with a gun, that's when you use these. If you would never have resorted to the gun, stick with the nightstick."

LEDs count as Laser's now too

[Cassini2]

I think you are missing the point that the laser safety regulations are busily being modified to include LED light sources. LED's, while non-coherent, can be focused sufficiently to create similar effects. It is all about how much light energy is hitting a person's retina. The effect can be created with any light source of sufficient intensity. Both a very bright focused LED and a laser can (temporarily) blind people.

Re:This is against Geneva or Hague convention

[yani]

See how it works now? Some police are good, some are bad, and you can generally tell which are which by the societies they live in. I wish I lived in your world. In the real one there is no such distinction and psychology tells us that in a position of authority often the worst comes out in even the best people, the Stanford prison experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_expe riment) is one of the more famous examples of this.

Oh, and let's not get into the differences between THE SUN, a gigantic nuclear blast-furnace bright enough to light up the entire damn SOLARSYSTEM and be seen from BILLIONS of miles away, and an LED light about the size of a pea that runs off a AA battery. Just like the "pointing a laser at your eye" argument the OP made, it's an apples and oranges comparison that is neither germane nor logical. It's an extreme example, but your post implies that only a laser can permanently blind, while this is obviously not true.

There really should be a down-mod for "stupid, illogical thinking" I think it would apply well to your post.
What a logical and clever thought. Thanks.

Re:No guarantee of safety when breaking the law

[TheLink]

There were actually two main incidents.
1) the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes
2) the lying and cover up of 1) by the british authorities (which to me is a bigger danger to everyone else in the UK).

While you can try to claim 1) to be an isolated incident, I don't think you can consider 2) to be one since there is no assurance that such lying and cover ups will not happen again, and so that makes incidents like 1) more likely.

There was no repentance, there was no real coming clean. The police continued trying to justify/defend what they did.

It's just like the CxOs of a company getting caught doing the wrong thing, then issuing a statement "Oh, we made a mistake, we're sorry, BUT actually blahblahblah", then later on your find out that blahblahblah was a lie, then they say "oh we're sorry, but actually blahblahblah2". Where blahblahblah2 is also a lie. So on and so forth.

If you do not know the truth about something, you don't make false statements publicly for nothing.

That sure does not bring to mind "isolated incident".

I do have a higher opinion of the UK police than other police forces around the world that I'm aware of, but that's not saying much nowadays. If they continue as is, they'll just be like the cops elsewhere i.e. lesser/necessary _evils_.

To those who are about to defend the other police forces (there are good cops etc etc). Don't waste time trying to convince me, go find and jail the bad cops. Clean your hands or it'll be hard to use those hands to clean other stuff.

Re:This is against Geneva or Hague convention

[pla]

On the other hand, All police forces everywhere are so amateurish, so untrained and ignorant that they will automatically behave in the most irresponsible and dangerous manner possible when given a non-lethal alternative weapon.

Well gee, that pretty much describes the modern history of the Taser (and before that, pepper spray), doesn't it? "It doesn't kill, so we can aim directly for the balls and fire away over and over". Completely passive student giving you lip? Zap the motherfucker. Some damned hippies refusing to clear the way for the bulldozers? Hold 'em down and apply pepper spray directly to their eyes with a q-tip. Some punk won't pull over? Blind him from the helicopter ("oops, how could we have known he'd hit that bridge truss doing a buck-ten?")

Keep in mind that the folks who decide to work as cops (not necessarily talking about detectives here) don't usually do so due to their extensive education. They look physically intimidating (most places have minimum height requirements) and generally got off on beating random people up in their youth (ie, bullies). Give these guys a weapon that doesn't automatically result in an inquiry when used, and they'll use it as often and at the highest intensity (including "improvised" higher-than-normal settings) possible.

Re:Close your eyes.

[tgd]

Dude, seriously. Do you not understand what the original poster was saying?

They're not blinded by some eye-burning laser or something, the whole joke was that they were running across the border with their eyes closed so they couldn't be zapped by this thing.

This isn't a joke about blinding people, its not a joke about injuring people or burning their eyes out. Its a joke about a bunch of people running around committing a felony with their eyes closed.

And if you've never seen a bugs bunny cartoon with rake gags, then perhaps the entire thing from the beginning to the end went over your head.