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Police Use James-Bond-Style GPS Bullet
mrspoonsi writes "The BBC reports that police in the U.S. are now using 'GPS bullets,' a device they can shoot at fleeing vehicles in order to track them. They're designed to make high-speed chases safer. The pursuing police car presses a button, a lid pops open, and a GPS bullet is fired which becomes attached to the fleeing car. The car can then be tracked from a distance in real-time without the need for a high-speed pursuit."
Not slashdot's fault... This is news from around 2009!
http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-7000/first-gps-projectile-tracking-device/
I had a sucky sig.
ghost in the shell invented it first
Well, we might find Scorpio's lair finally!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Not to mention one very important point....
It's fired from a fucking cop car
What on Earth is stealthy about that? It's compressed air but that does not mean you would not hear the thunk on your car. It's also on the outside of your damn car at a level that can be seen with the most inattentive of inspections. How long could it go unnoticed?
There are no civil liberty issues here at all. It's abundantly clear that it's only viable during a high speed pursuit. Civil liberties my ass. If the cops are chasing us down without due process, and we have legitimate reasons to fear them following us, we are a hell of a lot more fucked. At that point civil liberties would be a luxury.
The StarChase system is a pursuit reduction technology that contains a miniature GPS module encased in a tracking projectile/tag and a launcher mounted on a police vehicle. It is neither a bullet nor a weapon as the BBC story claims. It doesn't use gunpowder, it uses compressed air. The word bullet does not appear anywhere on the company's website - except where another ignorant journalist has used it. You'd think the BBC would be better and more educated than the Des Moines, Iowa local news. You would also be incorrect in that assumption.
You can argue that 'weapon' means 'tool used to achieve a goal' - but come on, this is the BBC we're talking about. You put the words "American police" and "bullet" together and quite naturally scare words like "weapon" come out. Look at the quote on the page: "There are other ways to track vehicles and this could raise some civil liberties issues." What does that even mean? Fleeing from the police, endangering the lives of everyone on the road and all the BBC can think of is how the criminal's rights might be violated...somehow. Unfortunately this mental rot extends throughout the entire organization and its journalists are simply no longer able to think straight. I doubt anyone even thought for a second about the bias. Sad, because once the BBC was a paragon of honesty. Look back at newsreels and 80s broadcasts and you will see a very different organization.
There are guns that fire projectiles with compressed air and have been since at least the 18th century. This is the Star Chase system, to me it looks like a compressed air gun and that fires a bullet like projectile so the BBC is essentially right. It seems to me that you are getting worked up over nothing because you don't like the BBC and have no made up 'EU wants circus performers to wear hard-hats' type story to get worked up over this morning.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
If you read your own link, the StarChase website refers to it as a cannon ffs.
I think we can forgive the BBC for toning it down to bullet from cannon shell.
It costs $5,000 (£3,108) to install and each bullet costs $500 (£312).
Apparently the exchange rate was updated while they were in the middle of writing that sentence.
This is why I keep the back of my car coated in vaseline. Checkmate, Johnny Law!