General > General Technical Chat
What do you think about mixed use weapon tech?
<< < (3/4) > >>
james_s:

--- Quote from: aduinstat on October 15, 2022, 04:08:05 pm ---Well, the police could deescalate. Just having the tools available makes you want to use them.

--- End quote ---

Yeah try that with a riot and let me know how that goes.

IMHO if you don't want to be on the receiving end of a water canon or teargas grenade, learn how to behave in public. In all of my years I have never once been tempted to riot, it has been extremely easy to avoid, so I've never really understood the problem. If you want to protest something, you better be willing to police your own because it only takes one bad apple to spoil the whole barrel. If things start to get out of hand, then anyone who remains on the scene is guilty by association.
AVGresponding:

--- Quote from: james_s on October 16, 2022, 12:28:52 am ---
--- Quote from: aduinstat on October 15, 2022, 04:08:05 pm ---Well, the police could deescalate. Just having the tools available makes you want to use them.

--- End quote ---

Yeah try that with a riot and let me know how that goes.

IMHO if you don't want to be on the receiving end of a water canon or teargas grenade, learn how to behave in public. In all of my years I have never once been tempted to riot, it has been extremely easy to avoid, so I've never really understood the problem. If you want to protest something, you better be willing to police your own because it only takes one bad apple to spoil the whole barrel. If things start to get out of hand, then anyone who remains on the scene is guilty by association.

--- End quote ---

Things are not so simple or black and white as you would like to believe. Ian Tomlinson was going about his lawful business in the area where he lived, where protests (somewhat short of a riot) were happening, when he was struck by a police officer, and collapsed and died some minutes later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Ian_Tomlinson
Stray Electron:
   I completely agree with James-S.  Being beaten by the police isn't something that I live in fear of. However I have been robbed by thugs, more than once. So I've vote to keep the police and to keep them involved and on the streets with no "deescalation".

   With Google and the internet it's not hard to find cases where someone has been injured or killed by excessive force used by the police (see George Floyd and/or Rodney King) but those RARE cases do not justify abolishing the police departments (code word: "defunding") or forcing them to abandon the streets to the rioters (code word: "deescalate").  Like it or not, innocent people are killed very day, all over the world. But rarely by the police.  Look at the hundreds of murders in London, Paris and the US by Islamic extremists in recent years or the hundreds of murders of totally innocent in Ireland and England by the IRA bombings; just to name a few. Those are much greater frequency than the extremely few numbers of completely innocent people that are killed by the police.

   NOW, show me how any of those has anything to do with dual use technology!  In all three cases, including the one that YOU named, the victims were beaten with clubs or in G.F's case manually strangled.  No technology of any sort was involved, dual use or otherwise.  If you can't then get out of this thread and take your police hating politics somewhere else.
AVGresponding:

--- Quote from: Stray Electron on October 16, 2022, 02:26:25 pm ---   I completely agree with James-S.  Being beaten by the police isn't something that I live in fear of. However I have been robbed by thugs, more than once. So I've vote to keep the police and to keep them involved and on the streets with no "deescalation".

   With Google and the internet it's not hard to find cases where someone has been injured or killed by excessive force used by the police (see George Floyd and/or Rodney King) but those RARE cases do not justify abolishing the police departments (code word: "defunding") or forcing them to abandon the streets to the rioters (code word: "deescalate").  Like it or not, innocent people are killed very day, all over the world. But rarely by the police.  Look at the hundreds of murders in London, Paris and the US by Islamic extremists in recent years or the hundreds of murders of totally innocent in Ireland and England by the IRA bombings; just to name a few. Those are much greater frequency than the extremely few numbers of completely innocent people that are killed by the police.

   NOW, show me how any of those has anything to do with dual use technology!  In all three cases, including the one that YOU named, the victims were beaten with clubs or in G.F's case manually strangled.  No technology of any sort was involved, dual use or otherwise.  If you can't then get out of this thread and take your police hating politics somewhere else.

--- End quote ---

Can't speak for anyone else, but at no point have I advocated the abolition or defunding of the police, and to suggest that I have is either a mistake due to not reading my post correctly, or a disingenuous attempt to brand me as some sort of anarchist.

My point in linking the Ian Tomlinson case was not directly about dual use technology, it was a refutation of the frankly idiotic claim that anyone on the scene of a riot that isn't a police officer is guilty by association.


As regards the technology available to police forces, aduinstat has already pointed out that if they have a tool available, they are likely to use it, even when it might be inappropriate. UK police have been criticised, and censured by the courts, on multiple occasions recently, for unlawfully holding DNA samples beyond allowable limits, and there is great concern, justifiably so in my opinion, regarding the use of facial recognition systems.
hans:
Imagine this..

MIlitary defense have invested a lot in building robust and reliable radar systems. The research that has gone into that is not only the building of electronics, but also design of antennas and field measurements on various objects or antenna reflections (e.g. structural vs electrical scattering properties).

Backscatter is used in RFID, which can be used anywhere from strict access regulation (e.g. to police or military stations), or for an electronic door lock in a public/large building.

Going 1 step further, we want to look into using backscatter radio for building wireless sensor networks. Since creating reflections is such a cheap way of broadcasting data, it severely cuts down on battery consumption and thus operational costs.

RFID, much like radar, requires an excitation source (a sine wave) to create reflections from. However, that requires infrastructure which could be a hassle. So recycling existing RF signals is being investigated with ambient backscatter radio, which has been successful for various signal sources (TV, FM, WiFi, Bluetooth stations).

Now imagine a world where we can have sensor devices everywhere, and nobody needs to go around replacing batteries to keep them on, and these sensors can piggyback their communications of existing signal powers. Imagine a government information agency or the military that can develop a device which continuously transmits mic data from a room, using existing RF infrastructure, permanently integrated into e.g. furniture or building structures to keep them hidden.

Wouldn't that be an awesome spy/intel device for military/gov? Is that sci-fi enough? Probably. But this story has gone full circle, and I imagine virtually any tech can do that. Now personally I work on the IoT part of it.. but looking back and forward you can always identify military applications. Even then any tech that has a great value in military can also benefit civilians: always-on sensors are an example, but also imagine better radar systems for airports and air space control. Or future warehouses if we replace all Amazon employees with drones to fly and navigate them indoors (which if reports are correct, are running out of people since high turnover rate).

The problem is probably that when people are going to mount real weapons on those drones, and navigate them radars or GPS, that now drone, radar and GPS technology have all been militarized and are bad. I don't think that's the case. A water cannon can be used to split riot groups, extinguish a building on fire, or be used for events to give the crowd a blast (literally).
Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page
There was an error while thanking
Thanking...

Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod