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DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

muckrock.com

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Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#191

Post by dwyerm »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #159
Sephr wrote: post #17

High power directed ultrasound can potentially cause brain damage from induced mechanical strain in brain tissue. I feel like parametric ultrasonic speakers should be more stringently regulated before every single police department starts using them as if they were regular loudspeakers. I support requiring something akin to an amateur radio license to operate high powered parametric ultrasonic speakers.

LRADs don't generate ultrasound. The worst they can do is create the brown note.

I'm pretty sure that they do. They're parametric speakers, like the 'Soundlazer[1]', that use a very loud ultrasonic carrier and make audible sound from the interference between the beams of ultrasonics.

Even when an parametric speaker is playing 'silence', it is probably blasting 120dB of ultrasound. Soundlazer's faq on Kickstarted mentioned this explicitly: "...you will be hit with 120.5Db of sound pressure that you can't hear! It starts hurting your ears after 10 minutes."

http://www.soundlazer.com/

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#192

Post by fencepost »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #186
fencepost wrote: post #105

Before I'm willing to condemn this I'd want to know a lot more about how it was actually used. Was it used as a weapon or simply as an available bullhorn or announcement/PA system? I don't recall any press at the time about serious crowd control problems or the "weapon" use of LRADs, and a quick bit of searching now also doesn't show anything like that. Even the article notes "military grade versions that can send vo…

The very next section if the article describes what the police version can do: "There are various models of LRAD, with military grade versions that can send voice communications up to 5.5 miles away, and slightly less powerful versions like the LRAD 500X or 300X which are what police departments generally use. All can produce a sound somewhat akin to a high-powered car alarm that can cause intense headaches, nausea,…

> The very next section if the article describes what the police version can do

I understand what it can do. What I care about is what it did do. You might just as well complain about police use of military-style armored vehicles. Did you know they can mount guns on those or even run people over?

The way in which things are used matters. In this case, a tool (effectively a high-tech speaker system) that has both offensive and non-offensive uses was used in what appears to be a non-offensive way as an announcement system, but because the same equipment can be used offensively someone's trying to do what I'll call "crap-stirring" here.

"Crap-stirring" like this reflects badly on both the people doing it (e.g. Muckrock) and the people who fall for it.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#193

Post by fencepost »

Sephr wrote: post #17

High power directed ultrasound can potentially cause brain damage from induced mechanical strain in brain tissue. I feel like parametric ultrasonic speakers should be more stringently regulated before every single police department starts using them as if they were regular loudspeakers. I support requiring something akin to an amateur radio license to operate high powered parametric ultrasonic speakers.

It sounds like you have a lot more technical knowledge about these than most people. Can you expand on this?

I see people in this thread doing what Muckrock likely desired and getting all worked up because the police used an LRAD, but I also see that it was used as an announcement system not as a loosely-targeted weapon. Does its use for announcements carry dangers that aren't clear to those of us without technical knowledge of it?

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#194

Post by hiram112 »

aalleavitch wrote: post #182
belorn wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Researchers at Harvard made a study on which news paper focused on which candidate and was used by followers by each side ( https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/33759251/2017-08... ). The washingtonpost had, like many others, a very clear bias in both which candidate they promoted and their intended reader demographic. I don't trust anyone marked clearly blue or red to make a trustworthy description about even…

The Washington Post has existed for 140 years and has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes. It's the newspaper that broke Watergate. You can acknowledge a news source for its editorial bias and still trust it not to print outright falsehoods on a regular basis. The Wall Street Journal is editorially right-leaning but that doesn't mean I think it prints lies, I will trust it regarding statements of objective fact up to the point th…

The Washington Post, IMO, has taken a serious dive in the past few years. Unlike the NYTimes and WSJ, WAPO has simply become another click-bait, hit-piece site like Salon or Buzzfeed. It's shameless.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#195

Post by hiram112 »

kuschku wrote: post #119
thomasz wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no alt right in Germany. We are dealing with a surge in far right activism, but those people are just that: Right wing extremists. It’s not a new phenomenon, it never went away completely.

The AfD is literally the alt-right. Same ideology (which is distinct from the NPD), same marketing, same reasons for resurgence, and even similar sources of funding.

Who are these mysterious funders of the alt-right, in either Germany or the US?

Unlike the left, which does seem to have a few favorite donors concentrated high up amongst the elites, it doesn't appear that the alt-right has many friends in high places these days.

Unless you're trying to insinuate groups like the Koch Brothers and similar, but I've always been under the impression that most of the typical right wing donors were not in favor of things important to the alt-right, including lowered immigration, reversal of trade agreements, white nationalism, etc.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#196

Post by aalleavitch »

hiram112 wrote: post #194
aalleavitch wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Washington Post has existed for 140 years and has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes. It's the newspaper that broke Watergate. You can acknowledge a news source for its editorial bias and still trust it not to print outright falsehoods on a regular basis. The Wall Street Journal is editorially right-leaning but that doesn't mean I think it prints lies, I will trust it regarding statements of objective fact up to the point th…

The Washington Post, IMO, has taken a serious dive in the past few years. Unlike the NYTimes and WSJ, WAPO has simply become another click-bait, hit-piece site like Salon or Buzzfeed. It's shameless.

I disagree, it has very much been on the ball regarding its investigative reporting this year. The editorials have been the same constant stream of hysterics you see everywhere else, but they've broken some fantastic articles regarding disinformation campaigns with hard fact-based reporting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kreml...

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#197

Post by alexeldeib »

azernik wrote: post #98
alexeldeib wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the detail, and for your own experience. The interrogation interests me. It sounds you don't feel it was useful? I had heard about this kind of interrogation over mundane stories, and understood it as a way of "testing" individuals' stories (especially under duress). But that would depend on it being repeated/prodded thoroughly, which it seems isn't the case.

"Repeated/prodded thoroughly" matches all of the descriptions of the long-form interrogations by Israeli airline and airport security. If they got to the 100 shekels in his wallet, then that means they probably asked him about a lot of other things first, and searched his wallet, and probably tried to put together a timeline of exactly when he went where to try to find cracks in the story.

This is the theory that I'd heard behind the strategy. Having not experienced it myself, I'm curious how it plays out in practice. It seems they have a high true positive rate and low false negative (i.e., properly suspecting people who should be suspected), but perhaps also a somewhat high false positive rate? This still would be favorable in my eyes to the security in America.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#198

Post by debaserab2 »

djsumdog wrote: post #35
sidcool wrote: post #18

America's becoming the scary police state we all despise. And with good tech.

becoming? It's been this way for a very long time. Very few major media outlets cover the Democrat/Republican National Conventions, but you can watch videos online of the protests from past years going back quite a bit. Rage Against the Machine use to do protests at both the DNC and RNC which I thought was hilarious. It's very common for protesters to be smoke bombed, herded, arrested and detained. There are several…

Do you mind defending your argument with some actual sources?

There's too many bullshitters on this forum (and pretty much everywhere on the web) that like to drop conspiracy theories into legitimate conversations and then never stick around to defend them or provide any credibility.

It's an incredibly useless and frustrating distraction when people do this.

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#199

Post by jacob9706 »

emodendroket wrote: post #171
AlexandrB wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the US has 10x the population density of Canada. Yet we manage it somehow (except for internet). I love how the US is simultaneously the most powerful economy in the world and completely hapless at putting any of that to use for the good of its citizens.

To be fair, the vast majority of Canadians live near Canada's southern border.

To be fair, it's cold up north...

Re: DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

#200

Post by emodendroket »

jacob9706 wrote: post #199
emodendroket wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the vast majority of Canadians live near Canada's southern border.

To be fair, it's cold up north...

For sure. It's not a mystery why people would rather live in Toronto than Yellowknife. But it does mean that low population density is in some sense mostly on paper.
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