Pentagon grants DHS permission to test heat ray weapon for use at border
cnn.com
cnn.com
It's safety is basically completely a function of the operator. Since the beam will keep depositing energy (ie heating), if the beam is held on a target, it will incur more and more heating (and potentially harm).
In proper usage, safety is ensured through the combination of operator training, selection of proper settings, and induced compliance. If you have a shitty operator, risk of over exposure increases. The nature of this device means that it's not a barrier, it's a beam.
During earlier testing, they were able to induce second degree burns on a test subject due to incorrect power and duration settings.
Considering the non-tolerance of public protest and the "promise" of non-lethality, I could imagine this becoming a regular tool in population control if things don't change.
Maybe I am too cynical, but I don't think the people making these tools actually care about this either, not beyond the potential for bad publicity.
Will taking the tools of torture away from cops increase risks they face? Maybe. But have they earned our confidence that they will use these tools wisely? No, they haven't.
Racism and disregard for basic human rights has a long history in that border. I'd even say it's part of a subculture. Some people leave water jugs for people crossing the desert, others are horrible people that enjoy inflicting pain on others.
I expect a lot of severely traumatized people from this device
So what happens when it's shot at someone's eyes?
The device works through line of sight, so blocking line of sight from the emitter to your open eyes (for example, by looking away and shielding with your arms) may be helpful.
Testing indicates that test subjects reached their pain threshold in ~5 seconds (typically reacting within 3). Proper application of this device in a riot situation likely involves pulsed application, at sufficient standoff range (between targets and a barrier or your riot police/troops), precisely to reduce the risk of operators feeling that they need to dwell, with the standoff range providing enough buffer to allow operators to feel like they can illuminate, wait for initial reaction, shut off, and then read the full reaction.
In your general scenario, you can replace this weapon with any other riot control tool, and get basically the same shitty situation. Once the government/police/whatever have decided that you are in a riot/mob, then you're not going to be treated as an individual, you're going to be treated as an element of a threat. This is true of dudes with shields and batons, beanbags, water cannons, tear gas, horses, whatever.
There's a perforated metal sheet inside the door of every consumer microwave oven that blocks microwave RF, and permits visible light to pass.
Remove it. Cut it up. Fit it into sunglass frames or goggles or whatever.
So let's make the holes smaller. We want to permit nanometer-wave light to pass while blocking centimeter-wave RF. I'm not seeing a particularly difficult engineering challenge here. :)
> You'd likely be better off with aluminum foil than the door.
Did you think this through at all? Running away and hiding while wearing opaque aluminum foil blinders is kind of a unilateral non-starter.
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Anyway, we also have this: Window film. Let's look at an example.
3M Thinsulate Climate Control 75 is a self-adhesive film that blocks greater than 99% of RF from 100MHz to 4.5GHz[1], which I might suggest is pretty good for protecting the ol' eyeballs from a brief encounter with the blindness machine.
The combination of it and a single pane of window glass provides 74% visible light transmission[2]. I further suggest that this allows plenty of light with which to safely move around.
[1]: https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1704860O/electromagnetic...
[2]: https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1435912O/product-bulleti...
Please be constructive instead of dismissive.
Attenuation of 95 GHz seems likely to be in the realm of 30-40dB, which is also in the realm of letting less than 1% through.
Be happy you are just blind for the rest of your life.
Such a shitty government you have today in the USA, it boggles the mind.
I wish we could identify, grapple with how bad what a terror America has become against itself. Against its history. Against in so many cases reality. There doesn't seem to be any regulating functions in red America, anything other than ever increasing war drums against democracy, against union, again the constitution, the declaration of rights, reason, kindness, and possibility. To make itself the foe of the nation has been the only thing this political faction has been able to lead by, and we are so far past the unhinging, never to come back seemingly, never to be able to have any learning moments, never to recognize a loyal opposition again, never to compromise. Just shrill shrieking bedlam and din forever.
This is where things are moving, however. I do not think it is good.
We should be asking these questions.
Good thing border control isn't full of rejects and nonhackers from the military and real law enforcement \s
Oh, is that all?
> US officials had also considered deploying the system during moments of domestic unrest, including at the end of President Donald Trump’s first term when protests erupted over the murder of George Floyd, according to a former US official familiar with those discussions.
This is for "the border" (because you know we should be able to torture people there), but really this will imperial boomerang back to US citizens in the blink of an eye.
Well, we are talking about US border patrol folks. Trust me, they are the nicest guys around /s.
They're trained to not maim or kill. More training won't fix it. More money and more resources won't fix that systemic rot.
40%, after all.
Yeah, that's going to go well with people aiming this at whoever they think it's "less than" them.
I'm fairly sure this could be (is being?) scaled down to something resembling the pain box used on Paul Atreides in Dune. An efficient "enhanced interrogation" technology is just too tempting for too many in power.
(edit: omitted word)
Possibly the "safeguard" portion of the first patent below indicates this; which may only make sense if such devices are capable of exceeding lawful spectrums, etc. Not sure though.
The others I just threw in. I am not in the right space to vet or read them right now, so they may or may not be relevant. That said, I did once interview a soldier who told me of some off-the-record use of directed energy in Iraq/Afghanistan... describing bodies with relatively intact exteriors with internal damage not fitting of thermobaric weapons, ie vehicles also intact. Terms used were "cooked from the inside". Anecdotal, but disturbing, and certainly physically possible.
1. https://patents.google.com/patent/US7921588B2/en
2. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220082358A1/en
Microwaving people is clearly a net good for society, and once domestic non-border use is approved we'll be able to build America back even more quickly.
/s
You think those didn't start as restricted to some theater of war?
Go read up on the 1033 program. Or the DHS Grant Program, the Justice Assistance Grant program, or the 1122 program.
the reasoning for this is less exciting that you'd like. its illegal in war because war is anarchy, and ypu cant tell what chemical weapons an opponent is using, and so proportional response is the worst variation you can think of.
when theyre used by the cops, you know exactly what they are using, and there isnt a chemical weapon escalation worry
Wait, I'm hearing reports. Reports that literally no city has been burnt to the ground due to protests? None at all? And this HN account is just out of touch?
First the border, I don't see why they would stop there with the tech
Just ignoring climate change, then building a secure perimeter to keep away anyone fleeing from the consequences of it.
The "best" part of energy weapons like that is that they just need energy. Meaning that no one has to constantly restock ammunition. They can even run off renewables.
Making the whole thing scalable. Fully automated energy weapon sentry guns on the border to the global south.
This is going to be the future, isn't it? Jesus Christ.
there are already several recorded incidents of LRADs being used on crowds which do permanent damage but invisible so very handy for authoritarian governments
Stun gun and electro shocks are also advertised as non-lethal. But the name is wrong; it should be called less-lethal at best.
The problem I think needs a solution is a group of mostly good people being riled up with the well-studied herd mentality, laced with people doing bad things. You want to be able to stop the few bad people (without killing, obviously) with minimal disturbance to the good people, but at any time you cannot know who is good or bad (i.e. you can't enter the crowd to target specific people), and at any point the good people can turn and become malicious actors, contrary to how they'd behave in most circumstances.
> tailor-made scenario
Either you have chosen to ignore news from all parts world throughout pretty much all recorded history, or you advocate for needless murder.
the secondary better option is to move away from colonial ambitions where those same vassal states exist to give the US their resources, and must be controlled to doing so, into having their own economic prosperity.
half of this strategy has worked well with mexico already, such that a lot of the southern border immigration isnt mexicans anymore, after nafta destroyed the mexican farm industry and moved the corn to iowa
My guess: 35 seconds.
That and "1984" were required reading when I was in grade-school, supposedly as a warning against the worst possible future outcomes (not as instruction manuals for our "leaders" to follow).
"Future weapons" on the Discovery Channel showed it off back in 2007ish.
It's been in development hell that long because it just sucks in a million ways. Water cannons and other tools just do it's job better, and for less contract dollars.
And that's ignoring anything around microwaving your own citizens being fucked.
edit: okay, first reaction, obviously not contributing to any conversation. This is barbaric and if I paid US taxes I'd be writing my government.
The lobby is louder.