This is not the Onion, this is from CNN: Air Force chief: Test weapons on testy U.S. mobs
POSTED: 7:56 p.m. EDT, September 12, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.
The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.
"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."
The Air Force has paid for research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service is unlikely to spend more money on development until injury problems are reviewed by medical experts and resolved.
Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people if they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices. "Testy US mobs?" Protesting, say, the Iraq war? Bad immigration bills? An Air Force that wants to cook US citizens for "good public relations"? Michael Wynne would be a great test subject. We could all laugh when he staggers to the ground, incapacitated by painful invisible rays.
omgwtfbbq!!!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
BBQ is right!
Of course other technologies have already been tested thusly. An LRAD or "long range acoustic device" shown here at work at the Superdome: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4857417
Science and our taxes at work. We're so ingenious.
A cluster of noisy teen-agers clad in Bart Simpson T-shirts, the uniform
of the moment, gathered in the convenience store parking lot to show off
their modified Mohawk haircuts and just hang out on a hot August night.
Then came the audio assault from loudspeakers outside the store in this
town 45 miles south of Seattle: Mantovani and other easy-listening music.
On the hot August night, it had the same effect on the youths as a cross
held firmly in front of Dracula.
"There's no words or anything," complained 14-year-old Felix Mendiola.
"It's all violins and I don't know what."
His reaction was intended. The Southland Corporation, owner of 7-Eleven
stores and Hoagy's Corner Delis, is trying to shoo away undesirables
with a sound that would not be caught dead in a boombox.
In recent years, music has been used to encourage people to shop, ignore
pain, or fall asleep. Here, in a shopping strip of a town bordering a
freeway, it is being used to make people go away.
"We call it a nonaggressive deterrent," said Ron Conlin, who is in
charge of the program for Southland in the Pacific Northwest. "The idea
is that none of these kids want to hang out in a place that plays
elevator music. I mean, I wouldn't hang out in a place where all I heard
was mood music."
Chasing teen-agers from convenience stores with the kind of music used
to massage office workers was pioneered by Southland in British Columbia.
"A bunch of us got together and tried to figure out what we could do to
curb loitering," said Liz Mallender, a Southland spokeswoman in
Vancouver, "and we came up with such things as using high-intensity
halogen lighting - you know, the kind that makes people look awful - and
using garbage cans with pointed lids."
"Then somebody suggested we start playing classical music outside."
They found that it was impossible to buy canned Bach and Beethoven, so
they settled on easy listening music, the ubuquitious fixture featuring
such aural assaults as the Rolling Stones set to strings, and punk rock
made hummable.
Now, 10 of the 7-Eleven stores in British Columbia use the system.
"It has really worked well," Ms. Mallender said. "The kids found that
it's uncool to be anywhere with that kind of music."
Mr. Conlin also wanted to use classical music, on the hunch that Mozart
is a better deterrent than Mantovani. But he could not find a system
that delivered true classical music.
On this evening, the first night of the program, he was experimenting
with country music and - hits from the 1960's. It seemed to be working.
"That old 60's stuff just drives me crazy," said Felix, who is partial
to rap and an occasional head-banging riff of heavy metal.
"I hate country-western 'cause all the songs are about somebody whining
that they're heartbroken," said 15-year-old George Vance, who was
hanging out with Felix.
Loitering is a serious concern in Tillicum, a community of mobile homes
and apartments set between three military bases. On weekend nights, as
many as 100 young people, in cars and on bikes, gather in the parking
lot of Hoagy's Corner. They say there is no other place to go.
Last summer there was a shooting. But whether bad music will deter
loitering and violence remains to be seen.
No matter what is emanating from the speakers here, 17-year-old Walter
Dumas plans to keep coming to Hoagy's. "I just ignore it," he said.
But Felix and his friends are already eyeing the Kentucky Fried Chicken
outlet a few blocks away as a future hangout.
"I'm out of here, dude," he said. "They want to listen to that stuff,
they can have it."
What's the Buzz? Rowdy Teenagers Don't Want to Hear It
By SARAH LYALL
Published: November 29, 2005 New York Times
BARRY, Wales - Though he did not know it at the time, the idea came to Howard Stapleton when he was 12 and visiting a factory with his father, a manufacturing executive in London. Opening the door to a room where workers were using high-frequency welding equipment, he found he could not bear to go inside.
Howard Stapleton, inventor of the Mosquito, with a speaker mounted on the wall behind him, at a store in Barry, Wales, where boisterous teenagers once gathered. The device projects a very shrill and very annoying tone that only youths can hear. Then they flee.
"The noise!" he complained.
"What noise?" the grownups asked.
Now 39, Mr. Stapleton has taken the lesson he learned that day - that children can hear sounds at higher frequencies than adults can - to fashion a novel device that he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble.
The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Mr. Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.
So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to the Spar convenience store in this town in South Wales. Like birds perched on telephone wires, surly teenagers used to plant themselves on the railings just outside the door, smoking, drinking, shouting rude words at customers and making regular disruptive forays inside.
"On the low end of the scale, it would be intimidating for customers," said Robert Gough, who, with his parents, owns the store. "On the high end, they'd be in the shop fighting, stealing and assaulting the staff."
Mr. Gough (pronounced GUFF) planned to install a sound system that would blast classical music into the parking lot, another method known to horrify hang-out youths into dispersing, but never got around to it. But last month, Mr. Stapleton gave him a Mosquito for a free trial. The results were almost instantaneous. It was as if someone had used anti-teenager spray around the entrance, the way you might spray your sofas to keep pets off. Where disaffected youths used to congregate, now there is no one.
At first, members of the usual crowd tried to gather as normal, repeatedly going inside the store with their fingers in their ears and "begging me to turn it off," Mr. Gough said. But he held firm and neatly avoided possible aggressive confrontations: "I told them it was to keep birds away because of the bird flu epidemic."
A trip to Spar here in Barry confirmed the strange truth of the phenomenon. The Mosquito is positioned just outside the door. Although this reporter could not hear anything, being too old, several young people attested to the fact that yes, there was a noise, and yes, it was extremely annoying.
"It's loud and squeaky and it just goes through you," said Jodie Evans, 15, who was shopping at the store even though she was supposed to be in school. "It gets inside you."
Miss Evans and a 12-year-old friend who did not want to be interviewed were once part of a regular gang of loiterers, said Mr. Gough's father, Philip. "That little girl used to be a right pain, shouting abuse and bad language," he said of the 12-year-old. "Now she'll just come in, do her shopping and go."
Robert Gough, who said he could hear the noise even though he is 34, described it as "a pulsating chirp," the sort you might hear if you suffered from tinnitus. By way of demonstration, he emitted a batlike squeak that was indeed bothersome.
Mr. Stapleton, a security consultant whose experience in installing store alarms and the like alerted him to the gravity of the loitering problem, studied other teenage-repellents as part of his research. Some shops, for example, use "zit lamps," which drive teenagers away by casting a blue light onto their spotty skin, accentuating any whiteheads and other blemishes.
Using his children as guinea pigs, he tried a number of different noise and frequency levels, testing a single-toned unit before settling on a pulsating tone which, he said, is more unbearable, and which can be broadcast at 75 decibels, within government auditory-safety limits. "I didn't want to make it hurt," Mr. Stapleton said. "It just has to nag at them."
The device has not yet been tested by hearing experts.
Andrew King, a professor of neurophysiology at Oxford University, said in an e-mail interview that while the ability to hear high frequencies deteriorates with age, the change happens so gradually that many non-teenagers might well hear the Mosquito's noise. "Unless the store owners wish to sell their goods only to senior citizens," he wrote, "I doubt that this would work."
Mr. Stapleton argues, though, that it doesn't matter if people in their 20's and 30's can hear the Mosquito, since they are unlikely to be hanging out in front of stores, anyway.
It is too early to predict the device's future. Since an article about it appeared in The Grocer, a British trade magazine, Mr. Stapleton has become modestly famous, answering inquiries from hundreds of people and filling orders for dozens of the devices, not only in stores but also in places like railroad yards. He appeared recently on Richard & Judy, an Oprah-esque afternoon talk show, where the device successfully vexed all but one of the members of a girls' choir.
He is considering introducing a much louder unit that can be switched on in emergencies with a panic button. It would be most useful when youths swarm into stores and begin stealing en masse, a phenomenon known in Britain as steaming. The idea would be to blast them with such an unacceptably loud, high noise - a noise inaudible to older shoppers - that they would immediately leave.
"It's very difficult to shoplift," Mr. Stapleton said, "when you have your fingers in your ears."
The low tech answer to the teenage loitering issue is to engage the kiddies with intense questions about Jesus. They'll stay out of your way after that. (though much less effective with Christian gangs of marauding youth)
You can turn the weapon against them by bringing unpopped bags of microwave popcorn to the riot.
Kind of like Real Genius.
unless you actually eat the popcorn, then it turns back against you again.
Ok, that was the final step, Bill.
"popcorn workers lung disease?"
More recently, lung doctors have discovered the lung disease in Southern California flavoring factories that use the butter-mimicking chemical, called diacetyl (pronounced "di-AS-itle")
You have no idea how much I love popcorn. And you mean to tell me that something so innocent, so innocuous, is killing people with lung-binding buttery smelling chemicals?
I think I have officially gone out of my mind.
:(
fret not. just point one of these loaded cobs at them.
geeze bill
with this emotional rollercoaster i'm on, i have to ask:
is it possible for a 28 year old male to go through menopause?
tears of rage and tears of joy and i fucking feel like reproducing!
(verbatim quote from my dear mudder when she started on her own journey to barren-ness)
i'm gonna buck this whole popcorn DFNSE and simply throw metal pots at them.
like in gremlins 2.
Start small--don't eat microwave popcorn (OK, maybe that cob, but notice it's all Ma and Pa but still requires high tech cooking). And use your blog to get out the word that the Secretary of the Air Force wants to fry his fellow citizens before irradiating foreigners.
right, that was the freakin topic. unreal.
what the well dressed demonstrator will be wearing: a faraday cage
Wow, just six cases of blistering. And problem is, may be that its not "hot" enough:
"Microwave weapon 'less lethal', but still not safe
* 16 September 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
The Active Denial System, the Pentagon's "less-lethal" microwave-based crowd-control weapon, produces potentially harmful hotspots when used in built-up areas, and its effects can be intensified by sweaty skin. The flaws call into question the weapon's usefulness in hot conditions, like those in Iraq.
The ADS fires a microwave beam intended to heat skin without causing damage, while inflicting enough pain to force the victim to move away. However, tests of the weapon showed that reflections off buildings, water or even the ground can produce peak energy densities twice as high as the main beam. Contact with sweat or moist fabric such as a sweaty waistband further intensifies the effect.
The safety concerns, revealed in the details of 14 tests carried out by the US air force between 2002 and 2006, were acquired under a Freedom of Information request by Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project USA, which campaigns against the use of biological and non-lethal weapons. Test details released to the organisation last year revealed that volunteers taking part in the tests had been banned from wearing glasses or contact lenses because of safety fears (New Scientist, 23 July 2005, p 26).
Nevertheless, the weapon may be safer than some alternatives. More than 9000 experimental exposures to the ADS have produced just six cases of blistering and one second-degree burn caused by an accidental overexposure. The US army wants permission to deploy the system in Iraq, but the decision has been delayed while tests continue.
From issue 2569 of New Scientist magazine, 16 September 2006, page 27"
The scientists who are working on this (and other high tech weapons that keep shooters at a distance from their victims) should be indentified and shunned in their neighborhoods and churches.
Or whatever--at least asked questions about the value of what they're doing.
Use on fellow citizens
The secretary of the US Air Force, Michael Wynne, said recently that new non-lethal weapons like the microwave ADS should be used on Americans before being deployed to places like Iraq.
"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," he told CNN.
Hammond hopes these comments may stimulate debate on the use of the ADS and other non-lethal weapons. "I think that you would see a strongly negative public reaction and quite possibly an increase in violence if US police were to use the ADS in riot control," he told New Scientist. "I'm sad to say that such an outpouring of concern would probably be considerably more muted if the weapon was deployed in Iraq first."
"Riot control"? Based on the police actions during the Republican convention in NYC, this would be a weapon of "free speech control". And yeah, people would freak.
|
This is not the Onion, this is from CNN:"Testy US mobs?" Protesting, say, the Iraq war? Bad immigration bills? An Air Force that wants to cook US citizens for "good public relations"? Michael Wynne would be a great test subject. We could all laugh when he staggers to the ground, incapacitated by painful invisible rays.
- tom moody 9-14-2006 8:28 am
omgwtfbbq!!!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
- paul (guest) 9-14-2006 11:12 am
BBQ is right!
- Thor Johnson 9-14-2006 5:54 pm
Of course other technologies have already been tested thusly. An LRAD or "long range acoustic device" shown here at work at the Superdome: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4857417
- SHM (guest) 9-14-2006 6:23 pm
Science and our taxes at work. We're so ingenious.
- tom moody 9-14-2006 7:09 pm
- bill 9-14-2006 7:40 pm
What's the Buzz? Rowdy Teenagers Don't Want to Hear It
By SARAH LYALL
Published: November 29, 2005 New York Times
BARRY, Wales - Though he did not know it at the time, the idea came to Howard Stapleton when he was 12 and visiting a factory with his father, a manufacturing executive in London. Opening the door to a room where workers were using high-frequency welding equipment, he found he could not bear to go inside.
Howard Stapleton, inventor of the Mosquito, with a speaker mounted on the wall behind him, at a store in Barry, Wales, where boisterous teenagers once gathered. The device projects a very shrill and very annoying tone that only youths can hear. Then they flee.
"The noise!" he complained.
"What noise?" the grownups asked.
Now 39, Mr. Stapleton has taken the lesson he learned that day - that children can hear sounds at higher frequencies than adults can - to fashion a novel device that he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble.
The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Mr. Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he says, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.
So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to the Spar convenience store in this town in South Wales. Like birds perched on telephone wires, surly teenagers used to plant themselves on the railings just outside the door, smoking, drinking, shouting rude words at customers and making regular disruptive forays inside.
"On the low end of the scale, it would be intimidating for customers," said Robert Gough, who, with his parents, owns the store. "On the high end, they'd be in the shop fighting, stealing and assaulting the staff."
Mr. Gough (pronounced GUFF) planned to install a sound system that would blast classical music into the parking lot, another method known to horrify hang-out youths into dispersing, but never got around to it. But last month, Mr. Stapleton gave him a Mosquito for a free trial. The results were almost instantaneous. It was as if someone had used anti-teenager spray around the entrance, the way you might spray your sofas to keep pets off. Where disaffected youths used to congregate, now there is no one.
At first, members of the usual crowd tried to gather as normal, repeatedly going inside the store with their fingers in their ears and "begging me to turn it off," Mr. Gough said. But he held firm and neatly avoided possible aggressive confrontations: "I told them it was to keep birds away because of the bird flu epidemic."
A trip to Spar here in Barry confirmed the strange truth of the phenomenon. The Mosquito is positioned just outside the door. Although this reporter could not hear anything, being too old, several young people attested to the fact that yes, there was a noise, and yes, it was extremely annoying.
"It's loud and squeaky and it just goes through you," said Jodie Evans, 15, who was shopping at the store even though she was supposed to be in school. "It gets inside you."
Miss Evans and a 12-year-old friend who did not want to be interviewed were once part of a regular gang of loiterers, said Mr. Gough's father, Philip. "That little girl used to be a right pain, shouting abuse and bad language," he said of the 12-year-old. "Now she'll just come in, do her shopping and go."
Robert Gough, who said he could hear the noise even though he is 34, described it as "a pulsating chirp," the sort you might hear if you suffered from tinnitus. By way of demonstration, he emitted a batlike squeak that was indeed bothersome.
Mr. Stapleton, a security consultant whose experience in installing store alarms and the like alerted him to the gravity of the loitering problem, studied other teenage-repellents as part of his research. Some shops, for example, use "zit lamps," which drive teenagers away by casting a blue light onto their spotty skin, accentuating any whiteheads and other blemishes.
Using his children as guinea pigs, he tried a number of different noise and frequency levels, testing a single-toned unit before settling on a pulsating tone which, he said, is more unbearable, and which can be broadcast at 75 decibels, within government auditory-safety limits. "I didn't want to make it hurt," Mr. Stapleton said. "It just has to nag at them."
The device has not yet been tested by hearing experts.
Andrew King, a professor of neurophysiology at Oxford University, said in an e-mail interview that while the ability to hear high frequencies deteriorates with age, the change happens so gradually that many non-teenagers might well hear the Mosquito's noise. "Unless the store owners wish to sell their goods only to senior citizens," he wrote, "I doubt that this would work."
Mr. Stapleton argues, though, that it doesn't matter if people in their 20's and 30's can hear the Mosquito, since they are unlikely to be hanging out in front of stores, anyway.
It is too early to predict the device's future. Since an article about it appeared in The Grocer, a British trade magazine, Mr. Stapleton has become modestly famous, answering inquiries from hundreds of people and filling orders for dozens of the devices, not only in stores but also in places like railroad yards. He appeared recently on Richard & Judy, an Oprah-esque afternoon talk show, where the device successfully vexed all but one of the members of a girls' choir.
He is considering introducing a much louder unit that can be switched on in emergencies with a panic button. It would be most useful when youths swarm into stores and begin stealing en masse, a phenomenon known in Britain as steaming. The idea would be to blast them with such an unacceptably loud, high noise - a noise inaudible to older shoppers - that they would immediately leave.
"It's very difficult to shoplift," Mr. Stapleton said, "when you have your fingers in your ears."
- SHM (guest) 9-14-2006 8:37 pm
The low tech answer to the teenage loitering issue is to engage the kiddies with intense questions about Jesus. They'll stay out of your way after that. (though much less effective with Christian gangs of marauding youth)
- L.M. 9-14-2006 9:22 pm
You can turn the weapon against them by bringing unpopped bags of microwave popcorn to the riot.
Kind of like Real Genius.
- j in jc 9-15-2006 5:16 am
unless you actually eat the popcorn, then it turns back against you again.
- bill 9-15-2006 6:01 am
Ok, that was the final step, Bill.
"popcorn workers lung disease?"
More recently, lung doctors have discovered the lung disease in Southern California flavoring factories that use the butter-mimicking chemical, called diacetyl (pronounced "di-AS-itle")
You have no idea how much I love popcorn. And you mean to tell me that something so innocent, so innocuous, is killing people with lung-binding buttery smelling chemicals?
I think I have officially gone out of my mind.
:(
- j in jc 9-15-2006 5:34 pm
fret not. just point one of these loaded cobs at them.
- bill 9-15-2006 6:19 pm
geeze bill
with this emotional rollercoaster i'm on, i have to ask:
is it possible for a 28 year old male to go through menopause?
tears of rage and tears of joy and i fucking feel like reproducing!
(verbatim quote from my dear mudder when she started on her own journey to barren-ness)
i'm gonna buck this whole popcorn DFNSE and simply throw metal pots at them.
like in gremlins 2.
- j in jc 9-15-2006 7:54 pm
Start small--don't eat microwave popcorn (OK, maybe that cob, but notice it's all Ma and Pa but still requires high tech cooking). And use your blog to get out the word that the Secretary of the Air Force wants to fry his fellow citizens before irradiating foreigners.
- tom moody 9-15-2006 8:13 pm
right, that was the freakin topic. unreal.
- bill 9-15-2006 9:36 pm
what the well dressed demonstrator will be wearing: a faraday cage
- mark 9-16-2006 1:35 am
Wow, just six cases of blistering. And problem is, may be that its not "hot" enough:
"Microwave weapon 'less lethal', but still not safe
* 16 September 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
The Active Denial System, the Pentagon's "less-lethal" microwave-based crowd-control weapon, produces potentially harmful hotspots when used in built-up areas, and its effects can be intensified by sweaty skin. The flaws call into question the weapon's usefulness in hot conditions, like those in Iraq.
The ADS fires a microwave beam intended to heat skin without causing damage, while inflicting enough pain to force the victim to move away. However, tests of the weapon showed that reflections off buildings, water or even the ground can produce peak energy densities twice as high as the main beam. Contact with sweat or moist fabric such as a sweaty waistband further intensifies the effect.
The safety concerns, revealed in the details of 14 tests carried out by the US air force between 2002 and 2006, were acquired under a Freedom of Information request by Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project USA, which campaigns against the use of biological and non-lethal weapons. Test details released to the organisation last year revealed that volunteers taking part in the tests had been banned from wearing glasses or contact lenses because of safety fears (New Scientist, 23 July 2005, p 26).
Nevertheless, the weapon may be safer than some alternatives. More than 9000 experimental exposures to the ADS have produced just six cases of blistering and one second-degree burn caused by an accidental overexposure. The US army wants permission to deploy the system in Iraq, but the decision has been delayed while tests continue.
From issue 2569 of New Scientist magazine, 16 September 2006, page 27"
- anonymous (guest) 9-19-2006 3:13 am
The scientists who are working on this (and other high tech weapons that keep shooters at a distance from their victims) should be indentified and shunned in their neighborhoods and churches.
- tom moody 9-19-2006 3:49 am
Or whatever--at least asked questions about the value of what they're doing.
- tom moody 9-19-2006 4:02 am
Use on fellow citizens
"Riot control"? Based on the police actions during the Republican convention in NYC, this would be a weapon of "free speech control". And yeah, people would freak.
- mark 9-19-2006 4:06 am