First the Taser, Now the “Pain Ray”?
Better crowd control through high technology.
Mike Booen, vice president of Raytheon’s advanced security and directed energy systems, has “a vision”: “We want to get to the point where it is a hand-held device.”
“It” is the assault intervention device (AID). Development in that direction is underway.
An AID is a pain-delivery device that will be soon tested on “unruly” inmates at the sheriff’s detention facility in Castaic, California, where an inmate brawl broke out late August, injuring two officers. The currently 600-pound, seven-foot device fires a directed beam of millimeter waves that penetrate 1/64th of an inch into the skin — about four times the thickness of a piece of paper — where pain receptors are located. The invisible beam reportedly causes an “unbearable burning sensation” that incapacitates the target but stops immediately once the AID is turned off. The “pain ray” is being provided free of charge to the sheriff’s department courtesy of a program through the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). Along with Pennsylvania State University, the NIJ will be monitoring the “test case.” Presumably, if the it is successful the devices will be installed in other prisons.
According to Raytheon and its targeted market of corrections officers, the AID causes no lasting damage. (Taser International makes similar claims about its product despite the growing list of deaths related to Taser use by law enforcement.)
The U.S. military may disagree with Raytheon’s claim.
Deployed in Iraq
In July 2005 the Department of Defense announced that “active denial technology” (ADT) would be deployed to Iraq for crowd control by the U.S. military. Fifteen vehicles equipped to emit millimeter-wave electromagnetic energy would be able “to stop, deter and turn back an advancing adversary from relatively long range” without causing injury.
ADTs and AIDs are two expressions of the same technology. What exactly does the technology do? Traveling at the speed of light, an emitted beam within seconds can heat the skin to 130° F; at approximately 122 F the pain reflex makes people pull away and thus disperse. They are not burned, it is claimed, because of the shallow penetration, short time span of the beam (three seconds), and the low energy levels employed.
Yet on November 7, 2007, Wired reported, “Seven months after an airman was burned in a test of the nonlethal heat beam, the Air Force has released a heavily redacted version of the mishap report…. The military has bent over backwards to demonstrate to the public that the Active Denial System (ADS) … is a well-tested nonlethal weapon, and not a scary microwave weapon with unknown health effects…. That’s why the Air Force Safety Center’s decision to sanitize the report is a big setback.”
Indeed, many aspects of the ADT program are classified and impossible to verify. Questions simply remain unanswered. An example: The design range of the weapon is 700 yards; if victims at half that range receive three to four times the power, would they also be unharmed? (Raytheon takes a similar nondisclosure stand on many aspects of the AIDs, appealing to its need to maintain industrial secrets; for example, the product data sheet does not specify the power output.)
Ultimately, the military dropped its plans to use the ADT. In July Wired reported that the single system deployed to Afghanistan was recalled without being used once. An explanation from the military of why it abandoned the multimillion dollar devices has not been forthcoming.
ACLU on the Scene
Happily, a backlash against the use of AIDs in the prison system is growing, and information is becoming somewhat more accessible. The American Civil Liberties Union has shed more light on the Air Force incident. Apparently “a miscalibration of the device’s power setting … caused five airmen in its path to suffer lasting burns, including one whose injuries were so severe that he was airlifted to an off-base burn treatment center.” Moreover the ACLU pointed to the lack of information on long-term effects, including the risk of cancer. The ACLU could have also pointed to a 2000 study conducted by a Texas Naval Health Research Center on rhesus monkeys exposed to 94-GHz millimeter waves. Corneal damage occurred. The AIDs use 95 GHz.
Because of the unknown health risks, as well as the proven ones, Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project, has stated that the use of AIDs is a clear violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” and the due-process clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The potential for abuse of AIDs in the hands of prison guards should be apparent. Remember how many police officers have misused Tasers, employing them on children, the elderly, and the disabled who posed no physical threat. The prison system is already under attack for rapes committed by prison staff, primarily by guards, who do not seem to believe prisoners have civil liberties.
Click-Click-Click
Much is made of the fact that the AID “is designed to emit a burst of no more than three seconds with each trigger pull.” But the machine is also designed to emit rapid and repeated bursts, much like a computer game. What stops a prison guard from going click-click-click as fast as he can pull the trigger, which is called a “joy stick”? What stops the guard from AIDing a prisoner who merely disobeys or otherwise angers him?
The debate may be engaged but the bottom line is that an experimental weapon designed for crowd control by the American military in Afghanistan and Iraq will now be tested in America against its own citizens. Just as torture was declared legal when used by military interrogators, the use of “pain rays” by law enforcement may become de facto legal unless a constitutional challenge succeeds.
If Booen’s vision of a handheld pain ray comes to pass, it is probably only a matter of time before the device takes its place beside the Taser on a police officer’s belt. Then the streets of America would be less safe from its own police, and the average person may look back at Tasers as the good old days.
Comment by Chris Whited on 21 September 2010:
greetings and salutations Mr Officer……….omg death murder kill Mr. Officer
Comment by David Orel on 21 September 2010:
We have the most civilized military on Earth, what other countries bother developing non-lethal weapons? Lethal is good enough for them.
Comment by Mike Hill on 21 September 2010:
Mr. Orel, you misunderstand. Our military merely tests the device on the enemy before it is used on the civilian population at home for crowd control.
Comment by Joe Black on 21 September 2010:
Umm is “civilized military” an oxymoron? Comments like yours Mr Orel make me sick.
Comment by James Madison Fan on 21 September 2010:
The long term side-effects such as cancer and blindness as well as the potential to flash fry and entire crowd of civilians is entirely unacceptable. They already have OC spray which has data on it as far back as ancient China as well as bean bags rounds, rubber bullets, tasers, tonfa, water canons, and a host of other “less than lethal” weapons so I’m at a loss why they need yet another.
Comment by John Swayze on 21 September 2010:
“Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force; like fire it is a dangerous servant — and a fearful master.”
—George Washington, 1797
Comment by Wendy McElroy on 21 September 2010:
Does anyone know of another instance of a military weapon allegedly intended for an enemy population being tested by law enforcement on a domestic population?
Comment by James Madison Fan on 21 September 2010:
There were supposedly studies done on civilians and military personnel when the A-Bomb/Nukes were new and the effects of radiation were not so well understood.
I’m not sure which accounts have been proven accurate and which ones are urban legend but I’ve read about cereal being dosed with rads and distributed in super markets in New York, the Nevada test site “accidentally” setting off a bomb when they were aware the winds would carry the cloud over population centers such as LA (which explains Pelosi, Boxer, Diane Fineswine), as well as soldiers being lined up at different distances from an atomic explosion and the long term effects of exposure relative to distance monitored.
Comment by Samuel on 21 September 2010:
I think it’s really stupid how prisons are organized to “spread the wealth around” to guards, prison builders, weapons manufacturers, and various other contractors. But I digress. Judge: I sentence you to 5 years in a federal penitentiary with no possibility of avoiding being subjected to various strange tests of weapons programs so that big military industrial corporations can save a lot of money because no sane person would volunteer for that kind of stuff. Convict: But that’s unusual punishment! Judge: No. It hasn’t gone to trial yet. I have a long list of other things that haven’t gone to trial yet. Would you like to pick some other right to have violated?
Comment by Wendy McElroy on 21 September 2010:
Thanks JMF. That’s roughly in the same area and it gives me enough info to follow-up for an article I’m sketching. Cheers to you!
Comment by Steve Moffett on 21 September 2010:
If a cop (or anyone else) used such a device on me, I would be forced to draw my (lawfully permitted) concealed weapon and defend myself. While experiencing such excruciating pain, I would have to consider my life to be threatened, and therefore I would be justified in using my firearm to defend myself. When experiencing such pain, how am I supposed to know that they’re not using a death ray on me? Sounds ridiculous, but if they can create such a weapon and control its output so that the burns are minor, then it is also possible that they can manufacture more powerful weapons that really are a “death ray.” With that knowledge, how am I supposed to know whether the weapon being used against me in lethal or non-lethal? And don’t try to tell me that just because an officer of the law is using it, it must therefore be the non-lethal kind. Again I say, if someone were to use such a weapon against me, I would have to consider it a lethal threat, and I would be forced to respond with lethal force myself.
Comment by Michael Metz on 21 September 2010:
The more I read about the anti-Federalist papers the more confused I get about how George Washington, who was quoted above as saying, “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force; like fire it is a dangerous servant — and a fearful master” got talked into being a Federalist.
Comment by Laurie on 21 September 2010:
Here in Canada we have similar concerns – witness the taser incident (2009) at the Vancouver International Airport, where a Polish Citizen was tasered by RCMP officers, and died as a result.
More recently, our Conservative Prime Minister came out with the weird and rediculous remark, that he wants to build more prisons to house the criminals who commit the unreported crimes! Think about that one….
Comment by Chris Sullivan on 21 September 2010:
Back around 1994 or so USA Today ran a story of some department of the U.S. government giving radioactive cereal to pregnant women to
see the effect on their babies.
I have the paper somewhere in my mountains of junk, but can’t put
my hands on it at the moment. There is also the case of the CIA experiments on soldiers by giving them LSD. These were not civilians, but they were still used as guinea pigs without their permission.
Back in 1987, there was a murder/cannibalism case in which the perpetrator, Gary Heidnik, had supposedly been involved in the LSD
experiments. It was a sensation for a few days, but disappeared quickly after the revelations of the LSD experiment connection.
Pingback by First The Taser, Now The ‘Pain Ray’? | Gizmodo Australia on 21 September 2010:
[...] Republished from The Freeman Online [...]
Comment by Jimmi on 21 September 2010:
Steve,
Don’t you know? Your are expected to submit unto death.
Comment by Jimmi on 21 September 2010:
Samuel,
Did you ever hear the historical account of how parasitic cysts from pigs were fed to condemned prisoners a few months before their executions? They were then autopsied after their executions to prove that some parasites came from cysts. Don’t see anybody volunteering for that one either.
Comment by Drik on 22 September 2010:
Aren’t these the same prisoners that Presbo is working to have voting for him? Where currently, by virtue of flouting the laws of this country, they are not eligible to vote.
Prisoners.
Good enough to burn as long as they vote democratic.
Comment by James Madison Fan on 22 September 2010:
Samuel & Jimmi,
I have difficulty finding much sympathy for prisoners on Death Row. Usually they did something heinous to get there and if my daughter were the victim the criminal should thank his dear and fluffy lord the government is concerned with cruel and unusual because my visions of his untimely demise would be far less kind.
Except for a few exceptions (Texas) most Death Row inmates die of natural causes pending some appeal anyway so all the outrage over a trivial minority of the despicable seems misplaced to me. There are far greater outrages that don’t get half the attention.
Steve Moffet,
It is illegal to draw a gun or fire on a cop even if the cop is shooting at you with a lethal weapon much less a “less than lethal” weapon so even if you win, you lose. I guess prison is better than dead but the rules are set up in such a way cops get to do whatever they want.
In some places it is actually illegal to use video to record their inappropriate behavior and you can be charged with a felony if you submit video in an effort to validate a self defense plea. Here’s a link to an article from the Freeman:
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/are-cameras-the-new-guns/comment-page-1/#comment-27463
Chris,
I remember the LSD experiments. Apparently someone at the Pentagon read too many Captain America comic books as a kid because they were attempting to create a “Super Soldier” that was very strong, easy to manipulate, lacked any sense of self preservation, etc. They tried different coctails using sundry drugs. They gave up on the experiments because the subjects were too unstable under the influence of the narcotics so they became “loose canons” that were as likely to do nothing as they were to attack the enemy or fellow soldiers.
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