

Police Using Paintballs to Tag Iranian Protestors  - robg
http://keepingthechange.blogspot.com/2009/07/paint-ball-police-targeting-irans.html

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kirse
_According to this person, the security forces use these paint balls to single
out protestors, who they believe should be arrested. Sharp shooters are
positioned in nearby locations (where they cannot be seen by the
demonstrators) and launch paint balls at selected targets,_

If anyone else has played Paintball here, sharp-shooting to that sort of
needed level of accuracy is pretty much impossible. Just looking at that
picture makes me laugh at how a sharp-shooter would "snipe" a select person in
that crowd. It's possible to jack up the FPS on a gun to shoot hot (and shoot
further), but even then it's not really possible to guarantee a hit, given how
a paintball is aerodynamically pitiful compared to an actual bullet.

Anyone else who has played paintball here can confirm that paint can easily
fly several feet off its intended trajectory in as short as 40 yards. In a
crowd, just 6 inches would be enough to mark the wrong person.

So if they're trying to target a unique person in a crowd who is supposedly
going to be arrested? Highly unlikely. I could definitely seem them shooting
hot to disperse crowds though, paintballs sting quite nicely without a good
layer of clothing.

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GiraffeNecktie
It's probably almost as effective to hit random people and make them think
that they're are being singled out as a ringleader. Bad things happen to
political detainees in Iranian jails
([http://thesop.org/journalism/2008/02/05/cries-within-
iranian...](http://thesop.org/journalism/2008/02/05/cries-within-iranian-
prison-still-haunt-canadian-filmmaker)) It would certainly scare the crap out
of me to be tagged.

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fgimenez
My boss used to live in communist poland, and this was a very common tactic.
Instead of shooting paintballs, they squirted people with liquid that would
only show up under a black light. Police would later hold checkpoints with
black lights to scan potential protesters.

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catch23
So protesters should all smear themselves with a similar paintball colored
ink. If everyone has the ink on them, police would need a new way to separate
the fakes.

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edmccaffrey
The very act of doing that would make them a protester who is more subversive
than average, and worthy of taking. And with such an inaccurate weapon, they
aren't actually looking for specific targets; they're trying to intimidate.

Getting random people even benefits the leaders. If the population knows that
bad things happen to political prisoners, and that the mildest of protesters
are being marked as leaders, then some will lose their nerve.

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joshu
This is not a good UI for tagging.

