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

Easily countered

[Ceriel Nosforit]

Self-dimming welder's goggles should be enough to render this weapon useles.

Re:Easily countered

[juhaz]

Ordinary sunglasses will probably be enough to render this thing useless, and they're rather less, um, conspicuous than welder's goggles.

This is against Geneva or Hague convention

[coder111]

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

And this WILL blind people. If used from too far away, it won't be efficient so they'll make it more powerful, then used from close range it will make permanent injuries to the eyes. Similar like tasers aren't supposed to kill people, but they do.

As far as I remember, there was a project in the military to make a similar weapon, using UV laser, but it was scrapped because it was against the international law.

Of course there are precautions that can be used against this weapon, propper googles should do it, but not everyone will have them.

--Coder

Re:This is against Geneva or Hague convention

[mikael]

There was a tactic developed by James Maskelyne towards the end of World War II, that allowed the Suez Canal to be defended against German fighter pilots. He basically took a searchlight and placed a set of tin reflectors on top of the search light, which were then made to rotate rapidly. This had the effect of creating rotating cartwheels of dark and bright patches of light in the area around the searchlight. Any pilot who flew above this area would become disorientated due to the mismatch between the perceived motion from the brains centres of balance and the visual cues seen through the aircraft windscreen (optic flow).

I would guess that this portable system creates enough glare in the eye to make moving bands of light appear on the retina. With a wide enough beam, this will disorientate an entire crowd.

Epilepsy warning?

[ParaShoot]

The LED Incapacitator uses a range-finder to measure the distance to a target's eyes and then unleashes continually changing, multi-color light pulses that both blind and disorient the person. How long until this triggers an epileptic seizure in some poor unfortunate - and worse still, would whoever's wielding it be able to tell the difference between the potentially life-threatening seizure and the normal reaction?