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Journalist Gets Blasted By the Pentagon's Pain Ray — Twice
dsinc writes "Wired's Spencer Ackerman voluntarily subjected himself to what the U.S. military calls the Active Denial System, an energy weapon commonly known as the 'Pain Ray' that turns electricity into millimeter wave radio frequency and blasts targets with heat. He describes it thus: 'When the signal goes out over radio to shoot me, there’s no warning — no flash, no smell, no sound, no round. Suddenly my chest and neck feel like they’ve been exposed to a blast furnace, with a sting thrown in for good measure. I’m getting blasted with 12 joules of energy per square centimeter, in a fairly concentrated blast diameter. I last maybe two seconds of curiosity before my body takes the controls and yanks me out of the way of the beam.'"
The device has been tested now on over 11,000 people, with only two serious injuries to show for it. However, the device has limitations: rainy weather decreases its effectiveness, and its "boot-up" time is 16 hours, making it useless for breaking up unexpected, impromptu mobs.
Boots faster than windows...
Pre star-wars era or pre star trek era weaponry ?
What electrical components take 16 hours to boot up?
What mechanical operation requires 16 hours of prep?
Any insight? I read the article, and it had very little in the way of information.
Would a foil suit help? Can we reflect it back at the source somehow?
But, will it work on a grizzly bear or other forms of wildlife?
Life is not for the lazy.
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Ok, I get that this baby is running on beta hardware. But 16 hours? Can anyone here venture a guess as to why? No matter how sllloooowww the CPUs, or how inefficient the code, 16 hours isn't plausible.
So, it must refer to something the hardware is doing. Still, 16 hours? Thermodynamics is normally quicker than that for a machine that can fit on a truck. That's an awfully long time for it to be heating up or cooling down.
Any RF engineers here know a reason for this? My best guess is that components of this device rely on superconductivity, and require very slow peltier coolers to bring the operating temperature down to the range of operation. I've seen radios sold on ebay that use superconductors for parts of the RF elements.
If you ever go to a protest where you expect the government to use one of these on you, bring a buch of corner reflectors.. They can be bought in boat stores, or made cheaply out of paper lined with aluminum foil, and they will send the "pain ray" right back at the operator.
Given the weird operational profile, I can see this being used for psy-op. Flashing people with pain from afar, seemingly for no reason. Is that too MK-ULTRA to think about?
Sounds less effective, most costly, and more dangerous then tear gas.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Everybody knows that you can't get that perfect warmth without tubes.
Wrap yourself in tinfoil and it's completely neutered. Make clothing out of cloth that is conductive and you can make long underwear that will protect 90% of your body, slap on a baklava of the same with gloves and flip them the bird while they get out the mace cannon.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You've got to protect all your exposed skin. Conductive fabric or foil should do quite nicely. (Has to be reflective, though; if it's just resistive/dissipative, then you're wrapped in flaming fabric.
It is unlikely that the military will use non-lethal weapons on a large scale anytime soon. The reason is pretty simple: such weapons kill fewer people but often make for worse PR. A few years ago they were looking at lasers that could temporarily blind people although there would be permanent damage in many cases. That didn't get adopted because having dead people in the long-run is less PR damage than having horrifically crippled people.
Instead of a tin foil hat, may I recommend a tin foil body suit ...
Leave it to the Pentagon to waste money on any weapon system.
Why is it OK in public spaces for law enforcement and the military to use extreme pain from heat rays and Tasers (TM) to force people to do what they want, yet it's not OK in a private cell to force somebody through pain to share information? We can torture people without leaving permanent physical injury, just like with the heat ray. So do we as a society really have moral qualms about torturing people because of the pain, or is it purely a pragmatic decision based on the low signal to noise ratio of intelligence from tortured prisoners?
Sixteen hours warmup might be far too long for use as crowd control, but it's plenty of time for use in interrogations.
Would a foil suit help?
Just crouch under a school desk.
They were good enough to protect school children from nuclear bomb-blasts in the 1960's (kids in school had regular drills for nukes and had to do this), so they should handle the mass of weapons of destruction that get barfed out of the sick minds of the (mostly) American (ueber alles) kill works.
They should use the pain ray as a less lethal alternative to culling badgers.
The proper resistance mantra is:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear... I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
"Zero to scream in six seconds"
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/03/japanese-speech-jamming-gun/
Taking the "scream" out of pain.
Good 2012 Ted Talk on the "Moral Dangers of non-lethal weapons"
http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_coleman_the_moral_dangers_of_non_lethal_weapons.html
making it useless for breaking up unexpected, impromptu mobs
So? Plan on having mobs. ;)
Microwaves cause eye lesions, which have occurred at military radar sites. the 11,000 subjects better have their eyes checked.
That's at least one major lawsuit per protest broken up. Good luck getting any major civilian police force to risk that. The only place this has any use would be a battlefield, where lawsuits are irrelevant.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
That "16 hour" start-up time is probably bogus. It's not in the article. If it's real at all, it probably refers to how long it takes to drive the thing from some base to the target area. The military often figures response times like that - from when it's called for until it gets there and starts shooting.
There's a smaller version, the Silent Guardian, with only about 250m of range. This is about the size of a WWI tripod-mounted heavy machine gun.
If this technology had been available in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement would never have happened.
... you have to pay cash for uninsured medical bills.
You might want to start saving up for that cataract operation. You've got about five years.
Next we will have the government using this technology to create "agonizers" and "agony booths" Star Trek style as in the episode "Mirror, Mirror".
1/64th of an inch. That's still the cornea of you eye, which I've always been told is very sensitive to damage, especially high heat. (I didn't see anything saying this device was generating heat, or only the sensation of heat.)
The people it's been tested on knew it was coming, were not crowded or otherwise movement restricted, and knew what the target area was and how to get out of it. Even under those conditions, one of their test subjects still got hospitalized.
Do you really think a mob will have any of those advantages? They can't even effectively get out of the firing zone of known and visible lethal weapons. There will be confusion, panic, knockdowns, and tramplings.
Again, it's effects and target area have no visible effects. People will walk into it unknowingly, and those in it will have no idea which way to go will get them out, if they are even able to do so and aren't panicked.
This thing fails the basic test for dispersal weapons because of this, making it more of a punishment or torture weapon than anything else. You should probably just go back to firehoses, pepper spray, and tear gas.
...that the bootup time is hardware locked in the v1.0 controller IC and will be modified down by one tenth of one order of magnitude every new product purchase cycle...
Sixteen hours? Anyone else picture Goku charging up the Kamehameha attack on Dragonball Z?
The reporter said that the injuries that were sustained were 2nd degree burns because the people didn't get out the way quick enough.
But what if you can't get out of the way? If you are trapped you could easily sustain 2nd or 3rd degree burns over quite a bit of your body - and that sort of thing is potentially lethal.
This device is non-lethal in the sense that a bullet is non-lethal. I shoot someone in the hand they probably don't die. I shoot someone in the head and they will probably die.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I bet this was what was hitting picard when that dude pressed the button on his torture pen.
If you think our government or some other government won't use this technology to torture prisoners then you are very naive.
I think it would be really cool for the geeks of the world to be running around with pocket versions of these things.
"Next time on Jackass! The boys are paid a special visit by the Boys in Uniform and their special new toy!"
I'd watch it.
If you peaceably assemble for redress of grievances, you will face cruel and unusual punishment, sans any form of judicial action. Laaaaand of the Freeeeeee, and the Hoooome of the brrraaaave. Congratulations, USA.
Small magnetron, waveguide, battery & inverter. Aim at police, their horses, possibly their vehicles.
Occupy ISM.
You should probably just go back to firehoses, pepper spray, and tear gas
Not a chance. The profit margin on their use is MUCH lower..
Insert
Their next option is, as the reporter noted, their carbines. If an angry mob comes towards a military base nowhere is there the option of "just ignore them and hope they go away." They WILL be stopped. So something like this allows for a non-lethal, and hopefully not even harmful, option to get them to turn back. They get hit with the pain rays, they run off, problem solved. If those don't work, the next step is to open fire with small arms. That hurts too, but also kills people (at ranges less than 100 yards 5.56mm is fantastically lethal), or injures them at the very least.
The military has been hard at work on devices that will allow them to stop someone without killing them. Stopping someone is easy. Drop a few rounds in their chest, they stop. However killing someone is something you can't undo, and maybe you'd rather not do in all situations. So they want effective weapons that can just stop someone, and not harm them in any permanent way. That is where stuff like this comes from. If you think it shouldn't be allowed, fair enough, just remember what the alternative is. The military already has guns.
This thing is way over the maximum permissible exposure limit as allowed by the FCC unless exposure is limited to 150 mS per 30 minutes or so. Turning that on a crowd may be a lawsuit waiting to happen (as if you could sue the FedGov anyway).
The limits (as shown here) for uncontrolled/public access permit a 30 minute average of 1.0 mW/cm^2. This thing is running 12 W/cm^2. 0.15 secs exposure to this thing is your 30 minute averaged exposure. [The controlled access limit is the same 0.15 sec, but exposure can be repeated after only 6 minutes instead of 30].
Assuming 2MW (the low end of the spec), the antenna gain must be about 55 dB given the 12W/cm^2 at 700 yds = 2100 ft quoted in the article (using this calculator). This magnitude of gain figure is easily attainable at 95GHz and is also is justified given the apparent narrow beamwidth at 700 yds. Guess what the uncontrolled access compliance distance is? 44 MILES!!!.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Hearing an unexpected echo of your scream is not going to disrupt your screaming.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
No, not "surrender", but an actual technological possibility?
The "Kent State" method where lethal weapons completely fail to intimidate and don't have a "non-lethal" mode is a bad idea for those reasons, so we have less-lethal tech from batons and shields to more complex systems.
People decry less-lethal tech but they would decry lethal tech and decry any method of riot disruption.
You are tasked to impose an outcome on rioters. The situation is similar to the LA riots, where lives and property of innoncents are in danger. What do you do?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
1. A chain mail suit, except ideally made of copper or aluminum, would give you some level of protection. The problem is that the suit might heat up. So you'd probably want some kind of water cooling system. Any method of keeping the suit wet should work.
2. Any protest that is anticipating this device could get a whole truck full of dry ice or an industrial fog machine or just some smoke bombs. 95 Ghz EM waves are highly attenuated by such things.
3. A parabolic reflector made of aluminum, even cardboard lined with aluminum foil, would concentrate and reflect the mm wave energy at whatever target you aimed it at. Hopefully someone with a badge and and a love of causing pain. I would imagine that a whole crowd of protesters armed with parabolic reflectors would be a rather nice deterrent to the police.
4. Standing behind a large piece of sheet metal should protect you. Any conductive material, preferably with a high melting point, should do the trick.
5. The 16 hour time could be for battery charging. Maybe whatever generator they are using cannot output enough energy and it needs an additional boost from a large bank of batteries. It's certainly not for charging capacitors. The device behind this is almost certainly a gyrotron which requires a high voltage (probably between 60 - 120 kV) and a powerful magnet, probably a superconducting solenoid. Making a portable power source that can meet these requirements is challenging. I wonder how long they can use the device before draining their batteries.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Wow, That's not healthy to expose living tissue to that much radiation. It would be amusing to use a parabolic reflrector to bounce the energy to the asshole's eyeballs controlling that weapon.
I last maybe two seconds of curiosity before my body takes the controls and yanks me out of the way of the beam
The person who was injured in the testing was overexposed. So if used outside the lab your going to have injured people. People will fall down and if the machine is ran to long they will be burned. This is similer to the LRAD system that uses sounds instead of microwaves. It has already been used by law enformcement and has caused hearing loss on someone who fell down.
1. Go to protest wearing a suit made of wire mesh and diodes.
2. Backpack full of inverter/conversion circuitry and rechargeable batteries. Alternative: potatoes.
3. Sell charged batteries to protestors for their cameras, radios, etc. Alternative: sell baked potatoes to protestors.
4. Profit!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Has to be reflective, though; if it's just resistive/dissipative, then you're wrapped in flaming fabric.
So with these things resistance really is futile.
torture is really good for making someone give the answer you want them to give. It is not so good at extracting true information from someone.
Since most prisoners don't actually have useful information and aren't very well-connected, the primary value of torturing them is entertainment. Most civilized people have a problem with that.
Someone in the center of a crowd of ten thousand might have real trouble getting out of the way.
Explain to me why common aluminum foil would not reflect this "heat ray" away. A protest sign covered in foil would make an efficient shield, and a foil hat with a fine copper mesh veil would let you look at them and laugh. This is hardly a high tech countermeasure. The engineers that work on this can't be stupid enough to have not considered this. There's a lot of money involved, so facts can be suppressed in favor of profits. If you could make a very flat reflector, to keep the reflected beam width narrow, you could redirect the beam at any other target you choose. It should be pretty obvious where the beam is coming from, your reflector is essentially a mirror. Think about how a signaling mirror works, it's easy to aim the reflected sun at a rescue airplane, it might be just as easy to cook the officer standing next to the emitter.
I'd pay to get to see Spencer Ackerman zapped with one of these a few times! ;)
We herd you like to bash China, and so that you don't have to point your finger so far, we're putting some China in your USA, so you can be subservient tools while you're being brave and free.
That's why people riot, often enough. To STOP the lives and propety of innocents being mauled.
If the only option your policies left you is to shoot at your own citizens, you should disband, plain and simple. You need to await trial and say "thank you for not lynching me, that's better than anything I ever did for you guys".
Or in the case of the LA riots: don't cover for cops who brutalize the powerless. Why not start there? Why does your brain only kick in when it's bootlick baton time?
Yes, the lives of innocents are in danger. So step one is, remove any and all funding for the breaking up of protests, step two, protest. Stop buying these idiots these idiot toys. THAT is what I would do.
The situation is similar to the LA riots, where lives and property of [innocents] are in danger. What do you do?
Consider it a learning experience, and stop disregarding the rights and wishes of the populace.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
The core of the Active Denial System is a gyrotron, which needs a superconducting magnet.
In a gyrotron, microwave energy is extracted from an electron beam. In order to do this at 95 GHz, and do it efficiently, you want to create a resonate oscillator. A gyrotron, takes advantage of the electron cyclotron resonance for an electron in a magnetic field it occurs at a frequency , 28*Magnetic field (in Tesla) . For a 95 GHz microwave source, you need a 3.4 Tesla magnet. Only why to get there is with a superconducting magnet. Which is the likely reason the system needs 16 hours to be energized, while the magnet is cooled before use.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrotron
Still not buying it, it just can't work except under test conditions.
This article can't be about a real weapon. Microwaves, no matter how powerful, penetrate a few millimeters into the skin. In a crowd this can burn someone immobile but what about the other 9,999 'terrorists'? It's microwaves! A plank of wood would be an effective armor against this radiation. I don't understand.
That's a laugh! "Hold still while I load this thing..."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I admire the dude for subjecting himself to this, but am I the only one wondering if it's "not inconceivable" that this guy develops cancer in 10 years because of this?
My high-power physics is weak, my biology weaker, so I really don't know what I'm talking about. It just seems that the human body might react negatively to having this much energy pounded into it.
(Aside - not kidding - the captcha word I was asked to type was "gigawatt")