by Mike Gray
. . . and some people aren’t at all happy about it—the American Civil Liberties Union, for one such organization. (No surprise there.)
The system is supposed to be a far less harmful version of the Active Denial System (ADS) previously deployed in Afghanistan by the U.S. Army. ADS was designed to send out millimetre-wave energy that would, when it struck a person’s body, instantly cause excruciating pain without harming their body—in essence, a gigantic “hotfoot” that would induce an unthinking reflex action: Get the *#@@ out of here! The advantage in controlling a crowd of rioters should be obvious.
But the potential for abuse should also be obvious. If the Red Chinese government had had an ADS back in 1989, the political uprising would have been over in five minutes flat and the world might never have heard of it.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is using the system at the Pitchess Detention Center in a trial sponsored by the National Institute of Justice (of the Department of Justice):
The LASD unveiled the 7½-foot-tall millimeter wave weapon late last week, partially as answer to the 257 inmate-on-inmate assaults at Pitchess so far this year, and the 19 additional assaults on deputies. Sheriff Lee Baca believes the modified pain ray can break up these incidents before they get out of hand. With a range of 80 to 100 feet, the heat beam can blast prisoners that a Taser couldn’t hit. “This device will allow us to quickly intervene without having to enter the area and without incapacitating or injuring either combatant,” Baca says in a statement.
But there’s also a political dimension involved here. After being deployed to Afghanistan, objections were raised to using it on Afghans, probably from the Afghans themselves, and ADS was withdrawn; the implication is that the military yielded to political correctness, forcing them to change the ROE (Rules Of Engagement):
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department not only found those concerns overblown; they used the military’s long-standing reluctance to zap Afghans as fodder for the plan to zap Pitchess’ prisoners. “I already had contacts at [Active Denial maker] Raytheon who were reeling from the short-sighted, self-serving cowardice of people who were more interested in saving face than saving lives, and leveraged it right into getting it into our jails,” [said] former LASD Cmdr. Charles “Sid” Heal. [From Wired.com’s Danger Room]
But the ACLU doesn’t like it:
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California criticized Sheriff Lee Baca’s decision in a letter sent Thursday, saying that the technology amounts to a ray gun at a county jail. The 4-feet-tall weapon, which looks like a cross between a robot and a satellite radar, will be mounted on the ceiling and can swivel. It is remotely controlled by an operator in a separate room who lines up targets with a joystick. The ACLU said the weapon was “tantamount to torture,” noting that early military versions resulted in five airmen suffering lasting burns.
Cmdr. Bob Osborne, who oversees technology for the sheriff’s department, said the concerns were unfounded. He said he stood in front of the beam more than 50 times and that it never caused any sort of lasting damage.
“The neat thing with this device is you experience pain but you are not injured by it,” Osborne said. “It doesn’t injure your skin, the beam doesn’t have the power to do that.”
He said the device would be a more humane way of dealing with jail disturbances. Unlike hitting inmates with batons or deploying tear gas, a shot from the beam has no after effects, he said. [From Yahoo News]
As with all technology, crime-fighting devices can be two-edged swords, helping or harming, depending on the intentions of the users.
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Wikipedia article about the Active Denial System.
Nineteen Eighty-four, a work about misapplied technology, at Amazon.com: book – film.
Brave New World, also a work about misapplied technology, at Amazon.com: book – film.
THX-1138 at Amazon.com.
