Week of August 1 - 7, 2001
Protest Goes 'Star Trek' With Nonlethal Weapons
Tech Wars in Meat Space
by Erik Baard
When Carlo Giuliani's rage at the new world order turned violent during the
recent G-8 summit in Genoa, he was hit with an old-fashioned response: two
bullets that ripped through his head. Police forces are asking themselves
if that kind of death is an inevitable part of street clashes, or if
high-tech nonlethal weapons could offer a way out.
Police in the future may be armed with energy beams that inflict a burning
sensation on skin without causing permanent damage, or even painlessly and
temporarily immobilize a rioting demonstrator. Waves of sound and light
could disorient mobs, and sticky foam could trap them like flies on a
strip. "As things stand, if you dropped Wyatt Earp into today's world he'd
be pretty comfortable," says Captain Charles "Sid" Heal, a nationally
regarded nonlethal-weapons guru with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's
Department. But Earp's bullets aren't the answer to every breach of code,
he says. Save them for a time when inaction will cost a life, and consider
even that a failure for not acting nonlethally, sooner.
Activists worry that cops with gentler means of crowd restraint will be
more likely to nip protests in the bud, preventing any message from getting
out. Already, demonstrations have been wrecked and people injured by tear
gas and rubber bullets.
"The increasing popularity of less lethal weapons is a two-edged sword,"
says David Jackson, a spokesman for CopWatch.com, a Web site dedicated to
tracking police abuses. "On the one hand, their use causes far fewer deaths
than the use of traditional firearms. On the other hand, the perception
that they are 'nonlethal' results in their indiscriminate or improper use
to a far greater degree than such use of traditional firearms."
That's not a bad thing, according to Colonel Andrew Mazzara, director of
the U.S. Marine's Institute for Emerging Defense Technologies at
Pennsylvania State University. "I would assume and hope that the 'trigger'
would be pulled sooner than a lethal weapon," he says.
Faced with that hard line, rabble-rousers are piling gadgets into their own
box of tricks. Protesters now have robots that can graffiti public spaces
at lightning speed. The technology exists for real flying saucers to
project laser messages onto the sides of buildings or display text on their
underbellies with light-emitting diodes.
The Institute for Applied Autonomy, the techno-artist collective that makes
the remote-controlled GraffitiWriter, sees nothing ahead but growth. "[T]he
IAA has identified the already emerging market of cultural insurrection as
the most stable market in the years to come," says their Web site. "IAA
research has examined the primary behavior patterns of this market and is
developing technologies that best serve the needs of the burgeoning market."
The term "nonlethal" is a goal, not a guarantee, because these weapons can
be deadly if used carelessly. Heal counts 11 deaths from bean-bag rounds in
North America alone. That's what scares activists. "Ill-trained,
overzealous, angry cops frequently use pepper spray as an impromptu,
'officially sanctioned' form of torture," says Jackson of CopWatch.com.
Likewise, firehoses and truncheons have broken bones.
Modifications to these weapons on the Penn State radar include a water
cannon made by Jaycor that can deliver an electric charge. New sensors on
muzzles can slow projectiles when a target is too close for safety. Another
new projectile is the Sticky Shocker, a battery-powered device that clings
to its target's clothing with glue and barbs, delivering an incapacitating
electric charge. There are even billy clubs that fire soft projectiles and
ensnaring nets.
Streams of gluey foam, like a souped-up version of the party favor Crazy
String, can also immobilize suspects or create barriers. That was done by
marines in Somalia, who created perimeters of the foam to block mobs as UN
forces withdrew. Problem was, those barriers were easily bridged by laying
down planks of wood and sheets of plastic.
Small explosives that deliver a burst of shockwaves can be used to
disorient an entire crowd, as can LE Systems' handheld "Laser Dazzler,"
which is essentially over-stimulating rave gear that could have been
designed by Dr. Evil. Some speculate that infrasound assaults of
low-frequency waves could confuse people and if applied in greater doses
will produce vomiting, diarrhea, deafness, and death.
A nonlethal-weapons laboratory may sound like another Tower of London, but
any of these ideas might have spared Carlo Giuliani's life. "The standard
is not perfection," Heal says. "The standard is the alternative"-death by
gunshot. "Our immediate retort is, What would you rather be shot with?"
Still, he knows that standards within police forces don't match the
layman's ideal. "Everything changed on a Thursday night in 1966," he says.
"When Star Trek first aired and the phaser entered the public psyche, it
set the standard whether we liked it or not." He's serious. "The phaser as
conceived on Star Trek is portable. It discriminates, meaning you can
target one individual without affecting another. It's reusable and
environmentally benign. It defeats the will and the ability to resist, and
the guy recovers with no aftereffects. It just makes people after nonlethal
tools drool," says Heal.
The federal government has Kirk envy, too. Air force research labs
announced in March the creation of a beam weapon that caused a target to
feel burning pain-as if one had touched a hot light bulb-but without
causing permanent damage. Only the top 1/64th of an inch of the skin is
affected, according to the air force. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is
developing another beam that goes to the core, raising body temperature and
provoking a debilitating fever of up to 105 degrees. Other national labs
have worked toward developing beams that induce grogginess or small seizures.
An outfit called HSV Technologies in San Diego claims it's developing
something more benign and truer to the spirit of a Star Trek phaser set on
stun. "We're on the verge of changing the world as we know it," says Eric
Herr, HSV vice president for research. The company's real-life phaser would
shoot two weak ultraviolet beams at its target, ionizing two channels
through the air. A small charge of electricity at a pulse rate that mimics
nerve signals would trace them as if they were wires, in fractions of a
second. A person struck by the beams would complete a circuit with the
phaser and be instantly immobilized as the skeletal muscles froze up,
tricked into reacting as if the brain were ordering them all to contract at
once. Whole crowds could be stilled by a beam from a hovering helicopter,
he notes.
"No pain, no shock, no sensation whatsoever," Herr says. Power would have
to be increased 150 times before the phaser could induce a fatal heart
attack, Herr says. "I would be disappointed if it were used as a means of
killing other human beings, but we cannot control how governments behave."
Even if the technology isn't perverted into a lethal tool, it might be
exactly the kind of convenient weapon that would make it all too easy for
cops to quell justifiable unrest in the name of maintaining cosmetic order.
Colonel Mazzar dismisses that worry, saying nonlethal weapons don't
threaten the right to protest. "It is the exploitation of perceived civil
liberties which extends into violence and puts innocent lives and property
at risk that ultimately leads to such hindrance," he says. "I would trust
the judgment of trained law-enforcement professionals trying to maintain
public order and public safety over that of a younger, immature, less
circumspect agitator." In other words, the kids aren't all right.
Captain Heal used to think the same way before he started boning up on
sociology, especially the work of Clark McPhail, author of The Myth of the
Madding Crowd. Now Heal fears that a "dream" weapon like the phaser might
ultimately lead to greater bloodshed. With an eye to '60s-era civil rights
protests and today's Palestinian struggle, Heal asks, "Are we sealing off
the safety valve? Riots tend to bring issues to the forefront that would
have become the cause of a full-blooded revolution. If there's no riot, the
safety release is not there."
The idea of giving protesters leeway was hard for Heal to swallow. "For me
to shift my paradigm after 25 years in law enforcement was almost a nervous
breakdown," he reflects.
Protesters aiming to give politicians a nervous breakdown are turning
increasingly to new technologies, beyond the hacktivism of defacing Web
sites and e-bombing a corporation's inbox. The Institute for Applied
Autonomy makes robots to stage protests where a human might be in danger or
too restricted. The collective also has an anthropomorphic pamphleteer
called "Little Brother" that hits passersby with protest literature. It's
intentionally designed with a disarming cuteness that George Lucas or
Steven Spielberg could love. All that's missing is a "We Shall Overcome"
MP3 file. At the last Davos, Switzerland, economic meeting, protesters
projected their sentiments in laser light across a mountain face by typing
messages into www.hellomrpresident.com
Remote-controlled flyers like the saucer-shaped Draganflyer made in Canada
have been eyed as vehicles for toting banners, projecting images, and
carrying wireless cameras. That would make it a good platform for what
activists call "digital witnessing," sending images via satellite to
webcasters for worldwide viewing, bypassing corporate media. The human and
environmental rights group AmazonWatch says the tools it has given native
peoples for digital witnessing may already be restraining companies and
governments in the region, but can do little against secretive vigilantes.
The Ruckus Society is opening a Tech Toolbox Action Camp in October to
train activists in new technologies and to pool together experts. But
program director Han Shan warns against developing a fetish for electronic
toys. Basic things like text messaging, micro-radio broadcasting, and
e-mail to Palm Pilots have already made street organizing far more
effective, he observes.
Still, one can take technology so far that protests become a bloodless
ritual, a meaningless Kabuki. Imagine the Washington Mall filled with angry
citizens shoulder-to-shoulder, fists raised high with righteous anger-all
holograms projected by people safely in their living rooms. Think that's
absurd? The folks at www.whitehouseprotests.com will, for a fee, carry your
banner and chant your slogan in the capital, and send you a photo of the
day's events.
"Robots and flying machines are fanciful and interesting, but there's
simply no replacement for human bodies on the street to show our power in
numbers and for being radically nonviolent. The purest way of people
communicating their outrage is putting themselves in harm's way," Shan
says. You have to be willing to "throw [your] body like a monkey wrench
into the machine to say, 'No more!' "
Tell us what you think. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/
Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop
Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink
Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
