
DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March - anigbrowl
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/nov/20/dc-lrad/
======
Sephr
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.

~~~
djsumdog
I support them not being allowed ever. But just like the totally ineffective
body scanners at airports, too much money has been sunk in for officers not to
use them.

No one actually cares about the sunk cost fallacy.

~~~
secret_island
Quite right. Israel's El Al simply profiles everyone that flies and by doing
so they obviate the need to use stupid, expensive equipment that does nothing
other than bottleneck airports and cause frustration. The Israelis are the
best in the world at what they do regarding air security. The West has
considered using the same techniques and they likely should. I'm not opposed
to profiling if the person fits the profile. Better profiling than dead
innocents. People do not have the right to not be offended. I get the heavy
hand for some reason every time I fly and I'm literally the grey man, but I
understand and go along with it. I'm also squeeky clean from a legal
standpoint.

~~~
alexeldeib
I agree broadly that the Israeli model seems the one to follow. My
understanding differs, however, in that it's not strictly profiling in the
sense that carries heavy negative connotations in the US. I haven't traveled
to Israel so can't comment, but I understand that in "profiling" the focus is
on more objective metrics than an American might think when they hear the word
-- e.g., physiological responses (sweating, increased heartrate, nervousness),
consistency under questioning, etc.

If that's not the case, would you mind providing some details about your own
experience, since you mentioned being pulled aside repeatedly?

~~~
stevenjohns
None of those are the metrics they use. Despite being an Australian citizen
with a very clean record, as well as having a very Western name, I was red
flagged before I even arrived because of my country of birth.

With El Al, you're interrogated before you board the plane. When you go to
check in, there is a "pre check-in" where you show staff your passport and
they check your name off against a paper list. That paper list would already
indicate whether or not you're going to be interrogated and at what level.

My coworker flying with me was also red flagged, and he was explicitly told it
was because of my country of birth and that he was flying with me.

He had much less of a rough time than me, though, where I was being
interrogated over where I got the 100 shekels they found in my wallet
(apparently exchanging a nominal amount of Aussie dollars for shekels at
Sydney airport "just in case" astounded El Al security, and it was much more
likely that there was something much more sinister going on).

~~~
alexeldeib
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.

~~~
azernik
"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.

~~~
stevenjohns
Not really. It was a standard run-of-the-mill search. The shekels are the only
thing they were genuinely interested in. They couldn't comprehend why I had
gotten it.

It was bizarre.

~~~
azernik
Weeeeeeeeeeeird.

But then, I'm Jewish Israeli, so I don't have a lot of first-person experience
with the full interrogation experience, just second-hand accounts from both
sides of the table.

------
fencepost
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 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." A less
powerful system that can send voice communications sounds an awful lot like a
PA system to me. Given the described use "to assist in instructing the crowd
flows on continuing to flow away from the entrances of the stations" that also
sounds like a PA system.

This sounds like a lot of sensationalism on something pretty mundane.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
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, loss of balance, and potentially permanent
hearing loss."

Now, their particular model might not have that last capability or it might
have options to avoid it, I don't know.

But I don't know if I trust police to use it after less violent methods have
been tried, including simple conflict resolution and non-combative crowd
control. This is the same reason I dislike police departments to have military
weapons - most states aren't training their police in basic interpersonal
communication with mentally ill citizens - How can we trust the training on
this?

Doesn't matter to me what version of the weapon they have or how they are
using it - to me, anyway. I'm more worried about the potential harm,
regulations on use, and the training the cops receive so they can be trusted
with such a thing.

~~~
fencepost
> 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.

~~~
anigbrowl
I disagree. You're arguing that it's OK to deploy, it depends on how its used.
But that normalizes the use of LRADs, APCs and so on, and by the time they're
used in a repressive fashion it's too late to do anything about it.

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

~~~
djsumdog
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 cases of organizers houses being raided as well.

The big mistake people are making is thinking Orwell's 1984 type world started
with Trump or even W. Bush. Unlike the world of Orwell, we're not under
totalitarianism. We're closer to Huxsley's Brave New World, but many aspects
of 1984 do exist in our society. Our media has been very untrustworthy, long
before Trump coined the term "fake news" (before him, we just called it
"news").

Yet whenever people call out Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green
screen, or when videos emerge of the CNN Kosovo videos from the mid 90s being
filmed in front of a blue screen with reporters making fun of their audience
between takes, the networks just hand-wave it away. They have the influence to
bury it and make people forget, or not care.

We've been living in parts of the 1984 world long before Kennedy, long before
I was born and long before my parents were born.

~~~
heartbreak
> Trump coined the term "fake news"

Trump did not, in fact, coin the term “fake news”.

~~~
fourthark
Didn't it mean satire, like the Daily Show and the Onion, before?

~~~
heartbreak
> Once upon a time (like, three [thirteen] months ago), "fake news" had a
> precise meaning. It referred to total fabrications — made-up stories about
> Donald Trump suffering a heart attack or earning the pope's endorsement —
> and the phrase burst into the political lexicon as Facebook and Google vowed
> to clean up some of the garbage that had polluted the Internet during the
> presidential election.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2017/02/09/fa...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2017/02/09/fake-news-has-now-lost-all-meaning/)

~~~
ajmurmann
I'm shocked that yours is the only comment on here that actually remembers
what happened. The actual "fake news" that was entirely fabricated as click
bate was discussed for a few weeks even on This American Life if I recall
correctly. There was even an interview with a guy from Georgia (the country)
who made a mint making up stories that appealed to Trump supporters and now
nobody remembers how that important concept was hijacked by the demagogue.

~~~
jochung
Fake news was an own goal by the left wing press. After selling a fable to
their readers about a Clinton landslide, they tried to deflect by blaming the
election outcome on fabricated stories. But there was never any evidence these
stories had more reach and influence than what mainstream outlets were
peddling. Same way there is no evidence Russian Facebook ads and social media
postings eclipsed the millions e.g. the Clinton campaign spent to Correct The
Record. Similarly, laments about r/the_donald were categorically ignoring how
the default news and politics reddits had become unofficial Clinton cheering
squads with moderators complicit.

Most ironically, lefties lamented the ignorance of right wing voters in
accepting stories that confirmed their bias and preconceptions, while they
themselves eagerly accepted the fake news narrative.

Fake news was not an important concept. Media manipulation however was, and
the two got conflated for very obvious reasons.

~~~
aalleavitch
You really don't know, do you?

> Following the 2016 election, a specific concern has been the effect of false
> stories—“fake news,” as it has been dubbed—circulated on social media.
> Recent evidence shows that: 1) 62 percent of US adults get news on social
> media (Gottfried and Shearer 2016); 2) the most popular fake news stories
> were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news
> stories (Silverman 2016); 3) many people who see fake news stories report
> that they believe them (Silverman and Singer-Vine 2016); and 4) the most
> discussed fake news stories tended to favor Donald Trump over Hillary
> Clinton (Silverman 2016). Putting these facts together, a number of
> commentators have suggested that Donald Trump would not have been elected
> president were it not for the influence of fake news (for examples, see
> Parkinson 2016; Read 2016; Dewey 2016).

[https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf)

------
tobyhinloopen
I like how you couldn't use this in a war against your enemy, but you can on
your own citizens.

------
stevemk14ebr
I'd like to know the protocol for the deployment of these sound cannons. If
they first try to apply officers on the ground to direct crowds, and then
deploy sonic cannons afterwards when the aforementioned fails, then i
personally feel that's justifiable. However i'm not sure I agree with the use
of such tech as a first line option, it screams dystopian to me personally.

~~~
jstanley
If police are unable to control the crowd, at what point is that simply
because the crowd is so large that the police _should_ be unable to control
them?

If the DDR had this sort of technology, would the Berlin wall still be
standing? And, if so, would that be a good thing?

~~~
handelaar
As someone who used to organise large demonstrations in London for CND [a UK
anti-nuclear org] a long time ago -- there is _no_ point that the crowd is
_ever_ so large that a combination of the organasition itself with the police
where the crowd "should" be unable to control it. In fact when you're putting
together a demo in London you meet the Met police and meeting that requirement
is one of the things you discuss with them.

On Feb 15 2003 a demo against the impending second war in Iraq was so
ridiculously larger than anyone (police and organisers included - it was at
least a million people) expected that I personally [long story] caused
Waterloo Bridge to be closed at about 2pm. The senior police on the day were
so understaffed relative to the crowd size that not only did _I_ close a major
traffic artery but we volunteers with some previous experience also got called
out by the Metropolitan Police on TV for thanks.

Still was a _very_ strange feeling to, after years earlier spending many
similar days being condescended at by untrained idiot coppers, suddenly being
drafted by their bosses into making major crowd-control strategic decisions
when the situation had become incredibly dangerous mostly because those same
police had utterly misgauged the turnout( _).

(_ On that day having left the org in question some years previously I didn't
believe it was going to be that big either. And had turned down their request
to help. Then I was in a bank in town a few days before surrounded by ordinary
regular nonpolitical people and _everybody_ in the queue joined in a
discussion about which tube station they needed to be at for Saturday. Both I
and the org were wrong about how big it was going to be by a factor of between
2 and 5.)

~~~
handelaar
(tl-dr: There's no such thing as a crowd that "should" be uncontrollable. Only
a demo that was poorly planned by the people who are supposed to ensure that
it's safe for everyone who attends.)

~~~
anigbrowl
Are demos supposed to always be 'safe'? That seems like pre-emptively
neutralizing mass political expression that might actually be motivated by a
desire for a change of government. You're basically saying that demonstrations
should be gestural, not actually change anything. With that attitude no wonder
Blair and Bush pressed ahead with the Iraq war, as there was no danger of
having to face any political consequences.

------
strictnein
This is an example of why I stopped donating to MuckRock. What they're trying
to imply here is not what happened, nor is it supported by the document
they're citing.

~~~
mikeokner
Your comment made me go back and actually read the FOIA document, and indeed
it does read as though the police used an LRAD (presumably at low power) in a
manner similar to a loudspeaker to convey information, not in a forceful,
damaging manner.

------
matt_the_bass
There are legitimate (IMHO) uses for these. For example, a crowd panics and
people start getting trampled. An LRAD can be used to communicate directions
quickly at long range to help stop the panic.

The report sounds like the police were doing what they should be doing. Have
the organizers of that March complained about police actions or disputed the
report? If not, then I would tend to believe the report. If correct, then the
use (or lack thereof) of the LRAD seems reasonable.

I'm apposed to abuse of power. Not power in and of itself. I think there have
been significant abuses by police lately and in years past. But I also believe
that these abuses do not represent all police.

~~~
mrob
These are weapons designed to maim. And they are particularly insidious
because permanent hearing damage and tinnitus are invisible. You can ruin
hundreds of lives at once with no messy blood spills. Damaging hearing is a
great way to punish "undesirable" people while pretending you're not evil. I
can't think of any argument for their use that doesn't also permit use of
biological and chemical weapons. It's 100% unethical.

~~~
rdtsc
Agreed. If given the choice I can see someone opting to have their arm broken
than getting permanent hearing loss. Yet one seems more violent because it
requires physical contact while other is invisible.

------
droopyEyelids
I wonder what kind of hearing protection the police use while this is active.
I feel like it'd be a hazardous job to operate this frequently.

Also, is it illegal for a civilian to own and use one?

~~~
rdtsc
If it is just a speaker I doubt it is illegal to own but operating it such
that it causes hearing loss could probably be considered assault.

------
venning
Potentially, DC Police may own these devices due to DC being home to a large
deaf population. I believe DC has the highest deaf population, as a percentage
of the whole, among all major US cities.

DC Police began installing "Rumbler" systems in police cars ten years ago,
partly to help the deaf population identify when police cars were present. [1]

I could imagine a situation where someone on the city/police council saw the
LRAD devices as potentially useful in the event of a largely-deaf protest, as
happened in 2006.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/10...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/10/28/AR2007102801465.html)

------
ThrowawayNEF
Is it just me or when did this become normal? I learned in Engineering class
quite some time ago that it's theoretically possible to use the resonance
frequency of the human body as a weapon. Back then this was something that
everybody considered unethical.

How have we ended up with things like tear gas and LRAD, that would be
outlawed in military conflict but seem perfectly fine for "crowd control"
purposes?

~~~
jjoonathan
What's the Q of a human? My guess would have been "pretty low." Is that not
the case?

~~~
sterlind
[12.2Hz for males, 12.8Hz for females,
evidently.]([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/9306739/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/9306739/))

Using two LRADs emitting ultrasound to cause a difference tone, and some sort
of laser range finder to observe oscillation and adjust a phase locked loop,
it should be possible to resonate the bodies of people in a crowd at will.

as heinous as it'd be to implement this, I kinda want to try it. but that's
how we've gotten into this pickle, in the first place.

~~~
jjoonathan
Q is the quality factor, not the resonant frequency. It's the ratio of stored
to dissipated energy, in other words the amount of "amplification" you can
achieve by stimulating at the resonant frequency as opposed to the non-
resonant frequency. It's never infinite unless you have a system whose
oscillations dissipate no energy. In "squishy" systems Q tends to be rather
low, and the effects of resonance rather muted. I would expect humans to have
a low Q.

------
omegaworks
Hacker News, can we come up with clever ways to undermine this growing trend
toward authoritarianism? How effective are ear plugs as a countermeasure?
Parabolic mirrors?

How can we divest from organizations employing these anti-populist, anti-
democratic measures?

~~~
zo1
I've often suggested a form of "humble-bundle"-like funding model for
government functions. An application of a bit of free-market capitalism to an
otherwise involuntary system. So if you wished to punish or scale-back or
defund the police because they were preventing protesting using means that are
too-violent for your liking, then you can simply reduce the funding that you
allocate to policing in the next cycle. You vote with your tax money.

Sure, this raises issues in that it disproportionately lets people that pay
more tax have a larger say in issues. But I'm sure you could allocate tax-
funding in terms of vote-dollars. So (TOTAL_TAX_COLLECTED / POPULATION_COUNT =
YOUR_ALLOCATABLE_FUNDING). Also, we would probably have to have a solid
discussion regarding the granularity of the system. Heck, employ some sort of
hierarchical ideas, too. This is, after all, 2017 so why not use more
algorithmic/tech-based solutions to an institution that is still stuck in
archaic times.

Oddly, I suggest this as a Libertarian/anarcho-capitalist. Because I think it
could potentially strike a good balance between the state's arguable necessary
functions, the involuntary nature of taxation and the problems with democratic
representation.

~~~
specialist
A positive step would be publish all expenditures, appropriations, contracts,
etc. By default. Bypassing the sunlighting/FOIA charade.

