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US Deploys 'Heat-Ray' In Afghanistan
Koreantoast writes "The United States military has deployed Raytheon's newly developed Active Denial System (ADS), a millimeter-wave, 'non-lethal' heat-ray, to Afghanistan. The weapon generates a 'burning sensation' that is supposedly harmless, with the military claiming that the chance of injury is at less than 0.1%; numerous volunteers including reporters over the last several years have experienced its effects during various trials and demonstrations. While US military spokesperson Lt. Col. John Dorrian states that the weapon has not yet been operationally used, the tense situation in theater will ensure its usage soon enough. Proponents of ADS believe the system may help limit civilian deaths in counterinsurgency operations and provide new, safer ways to disperse crowds and control riots, but opponents fear that the system's long-term effects are not fully known and that the device may even be used for torture. Regardless, if ADS is successful in the field, we'll probably see this mobile microwave at your next local protest or riot."
It's been known for over fifty years that microwaves, at just a few milliwatts per square centimeter, cause cataracts. That's why there are rather tight limits on microwave exposure around radar and telecom equipment.
Spraying microwaves around and possibly inducing mass blindness is not going to look good in the history books.
Rather than high-tech indiscriminate non-lethal weapons, the US should invest much more in intelligence gathering and infiltration. Which is difficult, but just because slapping a shiny new weapon into the battlefield is easier, doesn't mean it's better.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The cops or soldiers that use them will work out how to make the weapon have far worse effects than were intended.They *always* do.
For example, trapping fleeing civilians against a wall or fence so that they can't esape, or more than one beam focussed on one person. (Incidentally, one technique with plastic bullets or baton rounds is to ricochet them off the street, so that they shatter and rebound up into the victims face)
Like tasers, they say that they're a 'non-lethal' alternative to guns, but in reality they still use guns the same as they always did, but now use tasers when they would just have grabbed someone & handcuffed them, or just spoke to them.
Because we al know when the cops show up to bust up a crowd of 1,000 protestors, no one gets hurt.
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Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
This is totally horrible.
Just like tasers, this will give nincompoops of military the freedom to hurt civilians and innocent people on the grounds that it won't 'harm' or 'kill' them.
It just gives them more incentive to be trigger happy against the civilians because the aggressors (read: military or police personnel) won't fear consequences of being court martialed for murder and there will be less public outcry against 'harmless' methods of crowd control.
This is just an alternative to the golden military rule: "Double check your fucking target", turning it into "Shoot your fucking target, if it happens to be the wrong one, just apologize".
They will just redefine "injuries" to a meaning around or beyond causing permanent damage to vital organs by intentional misuse.
Terms like "pre-existing medical conditions" in the press can also get that number down even if your family has a forensic pathologist.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Oh, yes, because the politicians in power are always right and anyone who disagrees is a bused-in mercenary who creates gratuitous mayhem.
That means you point it at 1000 people and one of them will be injured. In what way? Skin burns or toasted cerebral cortex?
If some over-aggressive soldier leaves it on too long, does that make the number .2% or 10%?
How long do we have to point it at people to change that to 100%? 1000 times too long or just a few seconds too much?
Lots of things can be used for torture, but the list of things that leave no evidence of torture behind is much shorter.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
The "safer" a weapon is, the less the restrictions and controls over it's use, and the more often it is used.
As we have seen with tasers, people begin to see them as a tool which achieves their objective with minimal repercussions. There follows a normalisation process resulting in usage becoming considered appropriate even in situations where other forms of violence would be considered unacceptable. Like when trying to stop a student making a scene as he is leaving the premises as requested. Tasers were touted as a less violent option to bullets, instead they seem to be used as a more violent option to wrestling (and, if you go by Youtube, talking).
Even if the technology is 100% safe and cannot result in permanent injury, it is still the exercise of pain and violence in controlling civilians and must be very tightly controlled. Instead there seems to be very little interest in the misapplication of violence by officials if nobody dies.
Seriously, making people feel like they are on fire in order to "disperse crowds"?
... in Afghanistan they smile and wave as you drive by. Then they whip out their cell phones and trigger the IED. How's your heat ray against that?
If this is just an excuse to see if a new gizmo works by harassing a few villagers with it, it'll make an excellent recruiting tool for the Taliban.
Have gnu, will travel.
And so the use of force to perpetrate democracy, freedom, and capitalism continues unabated, it seems. Brought to you by the same group of people responsible for the fair-minded genius of ACTA.
Where people might be hesitant to use lethal force due to the consequences, I suspect that they'll be all to willing to use "non-lethal" weapons as soon as things start to look remotely ugly. Or possibly for no reason at all. It's a lot harder to prove that an incident occurred if it doesn't leave bodies behind. Of course, they'll know their actions are wrong and will attempt to make it illegal to record incidents where the weapon is used, much as police departments are trying to prevent recordings of officers now so that there will be no documented proof of police brutality.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There's a missing ingredient in that recipe: a grain of salt. For instance, it says there that this "protects against most RF and EMF based attacks, including: ... Dielectric heating which causes cataracts". WTF? How can it protect your eyes, unless you wrap your head with the treated cloth?
Protection against unwanted electromagnetic fields is a technology called electromagnetic compatibility. Unless you know what you are doing and use complex test equipment, results may not be what you expect.
Actually, I think this weapon, oh sorry, device might have a frightening psychological effect on folk who can't really comprehend what the thing is doing. They know about guns that shoot bullets. But this thing didn't shoot anything, but they're suddenly feeling uncomfortably hot.
"Yo, they're using black magic! Is that allowed by the Geneva Conventions?"
Remember, when the first US troops arrived in Afghanistan, the Afghanis thought that mirrored sunglasses had X-ray vision, so that the soldiers could peep at their wives. Even if the local Taliban leader has a microwave oven at home and tries to explain:
"Do no worry! It is harmless! It is just like my microwave oven here . . . oh, um . . . "
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I just love it. Once, a long long time ago, people were upset that the army uses lethal weapons to disperse unarmed crowds in conflict areas. So the army sits down to develop non-lethal weapons - they cost more than guns, they are usually harder to operate (sorry, no citation) and place the soldiers in more danger (you are safer if you just shoot the opponent).
What happens? Is everyone happy that the army is trying to lower the death counts in those conflict areas? No, people complain: "This is not safe", "this causes cataracts", "this hurts someone in 0.1% of the cases" (notice: injury, not death), "this makes them unhappy", "this causes chronic impotency". I mean, WTF? yes, we want to find safer weapons*, but let's give them some slack, at least they stopped using friggin' bullets in their friggin' heads!
* - Safer weapon - the oxymoron of the year!
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
I imagine if you wear such treated clothing in an airport terahertz scanner, you would fall under suspicion and be taken to a private room for further investigation.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Yeah. Police forces always are, always have been, and always will be, a model of conduct. They only hit with the force needed to violent people, non-violent demostrator or even by-stander who happen to be near are safe and won't be hit without provocation. Police brutality is an oxymoron.
The agressions from police officers caught in camera are just optical illusions.
Really, tell me... where do you live?
Why can't
While such a device is too expensive to replace every instance of goons with blunt objects, it(or its scaled down for trade-show demonstrations counterpart), is a virtually perfect torture device, and people are frankly right to worry.
By all accounts, being hit with it feels like being on fire, except without leaving a mark(and without killing nerves, so the pain isn't self-limiting). The theory is that, if using it on a crowd or people approaching something sensitive, it will be a self-limiting deterrent because they will just move.
If the person it is aimed at happens to be restrained at the time, rather horrible agony of substantial duration could be trivially inflicted, all without the pesky physical damage that the lower-tech goon route usually involves...
The purpose of such clothing is not to afford the wearer absolute protection or provide a cloak of invulnerability, as it were. The purpose is to neutralize the weaponry - which is intended to inflict invisible pain on the recipient. If induction heating causes the shirt to burst into flames, the pain is no longer invisible. That sort of thing doesn't look good for the cameras.
This won't be used in situations where they want to cause death.
No sig today...
unfortunatly the chances of cameras catching you bursting into flames are slim.
The chances or any cameras which do catch you bursting into flames not being confiscated for the sake of national security are even slimmer.
really it was his fault that I fucked him to death with a knife.
His body wanted him to run away faster but he didn't.
So it was his fault!
Does a whining dog sound more pleasurable to you?
I can handle that, if I know it will stop when the training is complete.
Well, maybe they increase the sound level, in order to fight back.
I can handle that, if I know it will stop when the training is complete.
While the non-lethality to people has been tested, I don't know if they also tested the non-lethality to the lawn. :-)
I can handle that, if you kids get off my lawn!
Indeed, even lethal weapons are rather harmless, except for people in certain pre-existing medical conditions. Those conditions are commonly referred to as "being alive."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The argument here is similar to that of taser - that you would injure more people by not having this tool and having to disperse crowd in other ways (i.e. tear gas, water cannons, possible gunfire).
Of course, the problem is that it ends up being used to solve problems it wasn't initially designed for, such as torturing without leaving marks, just like taser did.
Quite true. However, inventing devices specifically to inflict pain, is something very different from misusing a general purpose device to this end. The whole mentality of painful non-lethal weapons should be questioned: e.g., one could disable people with foam, or by throwing a net over them etc..., which is painless, or one could disable people with painful Tasers. See the difference in attitudes?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
when you work outside the system it would bear down on you and destroy you. That kind of talk will get you dismissed as a nut at best. At worse you become a "domestic terrorist", and there are all sorts of justifications used to violate your rights when you are put in that category.
If some one opened fire every time a "unruly" crowd was knocked to the ground in agony with one of these weapons. It would just be used as an excuse to use such a weapon against "dangerous" crowds.
If you bring costly lawsuits down on the manufacturer of these devices, the police and security forces that use them, and the government that mandated their use I believe you will get a lot further. You must use the system to destroy the system from within. We still live in a day and age where it is possible to find an independent judge. And it is still possible to fight the government in a civil court and win a lot of dough for your trouble.
Once there are a few cases won various local police departments, with their tight budget constraints, are going to be very wary of using their shiny new toys on citizens. A chief of police does not really want to answer to a city council or governor for losing the government a few million bucks in a court case. And ultimately it is the leadership within law enforcement organizations that set policy on when, how and if these devices are used.
For private security, if I'm not trespassing, they have no jurisdiction. If I am at a mall, and I have not been formally asked to leave, then it is a criminal assault. And there are numerous people you can take to civil court for that. I'm not just talking ideals here, there have been a few news articles on pepper spray and taser use on customers (usually in malls or big box stores). If I am not even on private property and it happens, then it is just plain nuts and they have opened themselves up for some serious hurt from any moderately competent lawyer.
I know slashdotters like to go on about how a big company can get away with anything because they can afford infinite amount of lawyers and legal fees. I've worked for big companies that have lost many costly cases against individuals. I even participated in a class action suit against my own (very wealthy and powerful) employer and won. Criminal cases are pretty easy to squirm out consistently of with an expensive lawyer, civil cases are less of a sure thing for the rich and powerful.
This is why I have troll/flamebait comments set to +5.
I didn't mod you down, and I've never met the person who modded you down, but I know that, right now, both of us are having a laugh at your expense. I mean, seriously, who writes something like this with a straight face:
or this:
Seriously.
Dude, if you're that angry over a "troll moderation," or something you read on the internet, it's time to turn off the computer and go outside. Perhaps reevaluate your priorities, or your station in life, because a comment like yours could only be written by someone living a very sad life, in a very small world.
Actually, there was a VERY good suggestion early on in several countries that have police force equipped with tasers, but that was shot down by the corporate lobbyists because it would reduce sales:
Every time police fires a taser, they would have to account for it in the EXACTLY SAME WAY AS IF THEY FIRED A FIREARM. Essentially making taser a proper "use only when there are no means other then firearm to diffuse the situation" kind of a tool, as it was marketed to the public, rather then the current "tase just because you're too damn lazy to even try other methods" situation.
The argument here is similar to that of taser - that you would injure more people by not having this tool and having to disperse crowd in other ways (i.e. tear gas, water cannons, possible gunfire).
I agree with the crowd bit, but tasers are not used to disperse crowds, and tasers also do not reduce injury in a sense because they are situationally quite different. Here in Australia where they have only recently introduced tasers there are already talks of having them banned. When people get given a safe weapon they don't think twice before using it. A quick google search will show case after case of police tasing children. Would they have pulled out their guns and shot them?
When people stop thinking and simply pull out a safer weapon at will (note safer, not safe since tasers have caused a share of deaths recently) the injury rate doesn't improve as more people are exposed to the weapon's use.
Interesting point, as a line of sight area weapon with highly limited targeted ability, is it appropriate to torture innocent people in the background because you are targeted people in the foreground. Will it be child abuse when children are tortured by burning pain.
So a device that inflicts extreme pain and suffering, with no record of who it is aimed at and for what reason and all neatly wrapped up in it doesn't directly cause 'permanent harm' as such tough luck for collateral victims sitting quietly within their own properties.
Using it on ill informed peoples will undoubtedly trigger claims of it generating harmful radiation that will cause sterility in children (that claim can last for many years until it is logically disproved).
Here's betting where ever the device is use it will cause an escalation of retaliatory violence, even in domestic protest, that kind of torture device will likely alter the nature of protest and trigger long term violent retaliatory hostilities. A very bad idea in concept that will inevitably be abused, in the worst possible ways against the most vulnerable people.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen