Weapons of Mass Compliance

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http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/33/features-ehrenreich.php

 

JULY 4 - 10, 2003

Weapons of Mass Compliance

Now at a tech lab near you, agony-inducing tools that will control your

disorderly tendencies and blast those riotous urges

by Ben Ehrenreich

 

Firing indiscriminately on unarmed crowds of civilians, long a staple method of

restoring order, is today almost universally frowned upon. Maybe we have the

Internet or the low price of video cameras to thank for this, one of the few

identifiable advances in humanity over recent decades. But the New World Order

has its discontents. Police and military alike face new challenges not only from

the usual terrorist suspects, but from all manner of uppity civilians the world

over, from at-times unruly displays of democratic zeal at protests in Seattle,

New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Philadelphia, Quebec City, Prague, Genoa and

a grab bag of other Western cities, to occasional bits of ugliness in the

dingier corners of the globe when the ungrateful subjects of American military

“humanitarian” missions rudely snap at the hands that feed them. The primary

challenge for a more media-savvy police state: to make people calm and compliant

without actually making them dead.

 

Engineers, hard at work for years now on this problem, have come up with some

creative solutions, fun gadgets that give the banalities of police work a little

Flash Gordon–cum–Robocop sheen. Spurred in part by some embarrassing scenes in

Somalia, the Department of Defense in 1997 established the Joint Non-Lethal

Weapons Directorate (JNLWD), with an annual budget of about $25 million, to

research toys that might hurt a lot but would — ostensibly at least — stop short

of killing you. The high-tech defense industry, much of it just a couple of

hours’ drive down Interstate 5 from Los Angeles, has responded with predictable

enthusiasm and ingenuity, and will likely get a boost of legitimacy from a

National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report released earlier this year, urging

greater federal funding for non-lethal weapons research and evaluation.

 

Most of this research goes on far away from the public eye, through a network of

universities (Penn State, for instance, runs an Institute for Non-Lethal Defense

Technologies), military labs and tech-world entrepreneurial ventures that

parallels and at times gruesomely parodies the rest of the technology sector.

One weapon, though, the gracelessly named VMADS, created a small media flurry

when the Pentagon formally unveiled it in March. Short for Vehicle-Mounted

Active Denial System (presumably because it actively denies people the

possibility of not being in pain), it’s sort of like a microwave oven gone

seriously bad. Bolted to a Humvee, it can disperse stubborn crowds by beaming

millimeter-waves of radio-frequency energy, thus “stimulating the pain receptors

but not inducing permanent damage.” Cross your fingers. The Pentagon has spent

$40 million on the VMADS’s development, but according to the NAS report, next to

nothing is known about the actual short- or long-term effects of

zapping people with the thing.

 

Equally sci-fi scary is a weapon being developed by HSV Technologies in San

Diego; it’s a high-powered ultraviolet laser that ionizes channels of air, along

which an electric current can then be passed, effectively creating invisible

live wires wherever it’s aimed. A blast at the ray gun’s lowest setting, its

inventor told the Defense News newsletter, “would cause a person’s [skeletal]

muscles to contract, effectively freezing him in place.”

 

Jaycor, an all-purpose crowd-control technology firm, also based in San Diego,

manufactures a somewhat sloppier variation on the same theme: a demonically

overgrown water gun that, according to the company’s Web site, “can deliver

electric shocks to individuals at ranges up to 25 feet without conductive

wires.” (Also on the Web site: photos of riot-geared cops advancing on cringing

protesters and boasts that Jaycor’s “PepperBall™ launchers and projectiles were

used by the Seattle Police Department to control the World Trade Organization

protest riots in 1999.”) Jaycor’s “liquid stun gun,” or “wireless stun gun,” can

be used, the Web site says, “in conjunction with a vehicle-mounted water cannon”

to clear crowds fast; it shoots “an electrified conductive fluid . . .

delivering debilitating but not lethal shocks.”

 

Jaycor is also marketing something called the Sticky Shocker, a nastily barbed

projectile “designed to partially penetrate thick clothing or leather” (and

presumably bare skin), which, fired from a grenade launcher, proceeds to “impart

a short burst of high-voltage pulses,” incapacitating whomever it’s stuck to.

The JNLWD’s Human Effects Advisory Panel, which goes by the astonishingly

well-chosen acronym HEAP, studied the two physical effects of the Sticky

Shocker, “blunt impact and electrical insult.” Both, the HEAP determined, can

cause death. The Jaycor Web site nonetheless proudly declares that “Sticky

Shocker® is as safe as other non-lethal weapons in present use,” which is very

likely true.

 

Other high-tech firms have been banking on sound as the agony-inducing agent of

choice. Properly manipulated, ultrasonic signals, according to the NAS, can

cause “pain, [the] presence of irritating/aggravating noise, or the production

of uncomfortable internal organ conditions.” Hence, in addition to its line of

sub-woofers and consumer audio products, the American Technology Corp., also

based in San Diego, has come up with something called the Directed Stick

Radiator, a battery-operated magic wand of sorts “that uses a high intensity

acoustic pressure wave to disorient and disable targeted individuals up to 100

yards away.” Likewise, Scientific Applications & Research Associates of Cypress

has developed a “sonic firehose” designed for use against disorderly crowds,

which it can knock to the ground and otherwise annoy with a “supersonic vortex

of air.” The problem, the NAS laments, is that “although repeated attempts have

been made to develop high-intensity sound generators capable

of eliciting desired results,” they still can make people irreversibly deaf.

 

There is more, much more. There are remote-controlled “marsupial robots,” built

in San Diego for the Navy, which can fire 10 to 12 non-lethal rounds per second.

There are “sticky foams” that can be sprayed on crowds to disgust and confuse

them and make it very hard for them to move around. Like fun foam without the

fun, colored dyes, skin irritants and foul-smelling chemicals can be added to

make the experience still more unpleasant. “When sticky, black, odorous foam is

discharged onto a target,” one manufacturer declares, “the response should be

compliance and/or quick exit.” In likely contravention of

anti-chemical-and-biological-weapons treaties (the Pentagon has a rather loose

interpretation of these things), the military is working to develop microbes

that eat asphalt and metal and turn petroleum to useless goo, and to perfect

airborne delivery systems of so-called “calmatives” — aerosol versions of

Valium, Prozac and powerful opiates like Fentanyl — just in case all the blunt

trauma, microwave menace, and acoustic and electrical insult should fail to

keep the populace sufficiently tranquil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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