That device is more useful for firefighters than for cops. Firefighters need to find people inside burning buildings. Looking for trapped people is one of the more dangerous jobs in firefighting. The fact that it's being sold more to cops than firefighters indicates that cops are getting too much money for tactical gear.
The device is a fairly basic Doppler radar, although the sensitivity is impressive. Someone might want to look up the FCC approval data for it to get the full technical specs.
> Someone might want to look up the FCC approval data for it to get the full technical specs
Someone using a new account named throwawayranger did that and posted the results, but the comment was promptly killed because it was a new account posting via TOR.
For those without "showdead" enabled, here is the content of the dead post:
It's a low power device (35mw), but it's in a radiolocation band, so they had to get a wavier from the FCC. That's an interesting read, because it lists the uses. They're getting surprisingly good range for only 35mw radar power.
The patent is for a different device - that's for a better version of those wands used in security screening. The approach is similar, but the power is much lower.
To give an idea of just how whacked the priorities of the Police are, with the recent announcement from the Attorney General of the US that the Federal government would no longer cooperate with civil seizures of property unless a crime has committed our locals (Atlanta and Dekalb county) are now pushing the state to expand civil seizure laws.
This is for seizure of property without proof of a crime. They want it expanded because the money goes to them. If ever a law needed to be passed it is to revert the whole idea of civil seizure and the idea that any monies obtained by the police go to them, if at all money seized by police through tickets or any other means should go anywhere but them
US civil seizure laws make me incredibly thankful that I live elsewhere. Not just because these laws exist, but because they demonstrate how meaningless the US constitution really is in practice.
Reading the article, I thought this might be a UWB (Ultrawideband) device. But going through the tech specs, I'm not sure. It just might be, but it doesn't say in the specs.
"...of a stepped-frequency continuous wave (SFCW) radar transceiver...The RANGE-R cycles through a sequence of 120 frequencies in 2 MHz increments from 3.18 GHz to 3.42 GHz. At each of the frequencies, it transmits a maximum 32mW power level with no modulation."
UWB would work with 500 Mhz or more spectrum, here it's only 240 Mhz, but why not.
And UWB would be a pulse-based system.
I thought that there were already UWB Radars deployed with firefighters. Can't find any right now.
would the huge increase in heat in such burning buildings hinder the usability of a Doppler radar? I would guess so, as different temperature should mean different speed of sound.
As disturbing as the police use is, I am more disturbed by the possibility (inevitability?) of devices like these, and similar audio devices, becoming so cheap and readily available that even basic privacy from strangers while in your home becomes a thing of the past.
It seems to me that before too long anyone could pick up audio and video devices for a couple hundred bucks that would allow them to see you in your own house and hear your every word.
Bouncing lasers off window panes to detect audio is a worrisome development. The counter-measure is to install dual pane windows equipped with acoustic transducers that vibrate the panes with white noise. For the device mentioned in the article, when the technology becomes available to consumers and/or is open-sourced, anyone will be able to count the occupants of any location near to them. The question again becomes one of counter-measures.
Development? The technique has been well known for a long time, I remember hearing about it in the late 90s. It isn't widely used because it isn't practical. Also, your countermeasure doesn't work if there is another reflective surface inside the room.
> Development? The technique has been well known for a long time
The difference is that these things used to be the domain of major government agencies rather than a hobbyist with a few hundred dollars and a poor sense of privacy.
The bottom line with both of these technologies is that their usecases are simply too narrow to inspire causal use.
The radar-gadget is useful if you're about to storm a house full of armed adversaries - in most other cases, you can just peek through the window or knock on the door and get much the same information.
The laser-bouncer is great for eavesdropping on people who take some effort to hide their communication - if they don't, hiding a wireless microphone or a high-capacity dictaphone is orders of magnitude simpler and cheaper.
The other countermeasure is windows angled downward so that the laser would have to be on the premises to get a direct bounce. Not viable for most homes, though.
New homes (at least where I live) all have TechShield (or similar) radiant barrier installed for energy efficiency. It's basically siding or insulation covered with a thin layer of foil. It's effective enough as a Faraday cage that some of my friends with new homes can't get a cell signal in their home. I wonder if this will be enough to thwart the casual eavesdropper.
It's basically easy and cheap (once customer base grows from spooks & diplomats to general public) but it will seriously hamper your 4G, and wifi too if you want intra-building insulation.
By reading the article I would have thought it would be possible to walk down the street while pointing at a house and the device would show if/where someone is hiding but after reading this FAQ I don't think this device is working so well as people expect.
Maybe in houses with wooden walls but not in buildings with thick brick or concrete steal enhanced walls. They even recommend to press the device against the wall/floor to get the best results. This means that the device can be used to see if somebody is behind a specific wall but not just somewhere in the house a couple of rooms away.
In the warmer parts of the country, you are not looking at a lot of metal/brick. In California for example, you are looking at a lot of plywood and insulation mostly.
What if you could get a discount on e.g. your insurance payments for a similar device, permanently mounted on the outside of your residence, and readable on location by law enforcement or other responders (like rescue)? Would you be OK with other people taking the deal?
Seems like the type of thing Big Brother would do to make it more palatable. Personally, no, I would never do sacrifice my privacy for whatever amount they'd give you. But I guess that choice is up to each individual, really.
During a typical 2nd Amendment[1] debate ("flame war", really) a common argument was raised about how various "big, modern weapons" required a different set of rules. Regardless of how one felt about people having "small" (i.e. traditional arms with which society has experience), surely it must be obvious that "big" (new, unknown) things like nerve gases or atomic bombs are so dangerous they must be kept from civilian hands.
Technology eavesdropping in new ways is a similar "forbidden knowledge". While it may not be a weapon itself, when it becomes simple and cheap enough that containing the forbidden knowledge becomes impossible[2] we face the potential disruption of some of the very foundations of society.
The question isn't if the average person will gain access to cheap and powerful eavesdropping technology, or weapons as powerful as atomic bombs, or even worse technologies that we haven't discovered yet. The question is if society will be ready for when those technologies grow and become a cheap commodity.
The general purpose computer already did this, and other electronic devices like the one mentioned in this article are experiencing this transition right now. Biotech seems to be ramping up and I suspect we will see the biotech equivalent to the "cheap personal computer" in the near-ish future. The point is we, as a species, really need to learn how to deal with these technologies now, or a future "mass shooting" might instead be an "engineered plague" or "20 kiloton bomb".
How do we deal with these threats? I don't know. But I do know trying to keep technologies bottled up as "forbidden knowledge" is at best only a delaying tactic. I suspect that "fixing most social problems" (racism, extreme poverty, etc) is probably a prerequisite. I personally like Roddenberry's idea of fixing most of the basic physical needs with technology; it won't fix everything, but it would probably be a good start. Unfortunately, it is easy to succumb to a defeatist or nihilistic attitude when faced with these problems. Even Feynman thought[3] the success of the Manhattan Project necessarily implied that civilization "would all be destroyed very soon anyway".
For me, I try to remember that we can't predict change[4], and worrying about things we cannot change is a waste of time and energy. Big problems grow out of small problems, so I focus on those small things that I can change. There is a real risk that technology will happen faster than our ability to assimilate those technologies, but we should try anyway, because the alternative is to give into natural selection as yet another species that didn't adapt to its environment fast enough.[5]
[1] This post is not about the 2nd. Please, there is no need to re-open that highly-charged debate.
[2] "information wants to be free", or at least hard impossible to contain.
[4] See James Burke's ("Connections") non-teleological view of progress
[5] aka the speciation of humanity. I highly recommend Bruce Sterling's exploration of this type of "end result" for humanity in his novel Schismatrix[6]. (this is where my username ("pdkl95") comes from...)
That would depend on the purpose of the dike... and who/what was downstream.
That said, see my profile for a description of "PDKL 95". There is a good chance I'd grab the jackhammer if it would somehow lead to a useful re-framing of the consensual hallucination.
I would be so interested to see some research about information spread during active containment efforts. Obviously many institutions have developed highly effective measures of containment. They all involve coercing involved people into silence (NDAs, threats of criminal prosecution etc.) combined with, at least attempted, strict controls of where the data goes.
I feel like information just sort of succumbs to entropy and it will always "try" to leak out of containment like some fleeting gas.
Is that due to human nature? Or due to the nature of information itself? Would other intelligent beings with a different psychology/ social structure also spread information like a wildfire?
Obvious problem with that research: any information that was successfully contained are tautologically things we would not know about.
I completely agree with the entropy/leaking-gas analogy, and it may suggest an explanation for why information "leaks" so easily: compared to matter, the energy of information is extremely small. The energy cost of copying or moving is trivial, and easier movement implies faster diffusion.
> I suspect that "fixing most social problems" (racism, extreme poverty, etc) is probably a prerequisite.
Disagree completely. This smells of a "busywork" solution - we know something needs to be done, but we don't know what, so we try to do something for the greater good, hoping that we can redeem ourselves and somehow be protected (or at the very least more protected) from the threat.
Incidents such as mass shootings, which you highlighted, don't tend to have roots in racism or poverty situations, but rather psychopathy; a dramatic disconnect from the wholesome core of our human nature which develops in the soul of a deeply troubled individual.
This is a problem that our society with its culture is not equipped to handle. I do tend to think that there have been societies in the past, which did have the ability to contain such problems - I don't see a murderous psychopath arising within the company of Buddha and his travelling ashram of monks.
21st century Western civilization is taking a radically different path, investing itself fully in technological progress at the expense of everything else, and will reap the fruit of this choice, good and bad.
The problem with that line of thinking is that you're really arguing that an entire technology is 'uninvented' because it could be used for evil. Suggesting that we ought to give up doppler radar entirely, with all its benefits like detecting victims in natural disasters, finding people trapped in fires, detecting criminal suspects, etc because it might be used by the next evil dictator is ridiculous. It's a completely unmeasured response. Besides being impossible to uninvent things, it just means we lose out on potentially useful technology now for an intangible benefit that might never come to pass.
The fact that the next evil dictator could have access to tools like this is reason to be vigilant not to let an evil dictator come to power and to be sensible about how we use these tools today to stop them being used in ways we think are unreasonable. It is not a reason to suggest we shouldn't have the tools.
That's absolutely not what parent was arguing, though. Also, that "line of thinking" not necessarily leads there. Accepting the technology is but one step. But we still need to raise moral and ethic questions about it. All parent was really saying is, that the nazis wouldn't have thought twice about using said technology to kill even more people.
It absolutely is what the parent is arguing. It's impossible to say "Evil people would use this technology for evil!" without implying something should be done to stop them, otherwise you're tacitly condoning evil. The thing that should be done is stopping the evil people from doing things, regardless of what they use, rather than questioning morally ambivalent technology just in case evil people use it.
Once a technology has been invented, uninventing it because it might be used to harm people doesn't work. Especially if the people wanting to do the harm are in a position of power (like the nazis were).
Wondering about the countless wonderful or horrific uses new technologies might have is simply part of critical thinking.
I don't think anyone did that calculation but if we were to add up all the good technology brings us with all the bad it brings us, I'm not sure we'd end up in the positive.
So I think it's pretty natural when you hear about some new technology to ask yourself "great, how's that thing going to be used against us?"
Asking yourself what you could do to stop it is a completely different matter. And we all know here that security through obscurity is a pretty poor defense.
What if it's passive? Wifi from the routers of homes emit the RF energy and all the police do is use a detector I could see that as legal since it's energy being emitted just as if it were light shining out a window and you were a silhouette.
>The system, devised by Karl Woodbridge and Kevin Chetty, requires two antennae and a signal processing unit (i.e. computer), and is no larger than a suitcase. Unlike normal radar, which emits radio waves and then measures any reflected signals, this new system operates in complete stealth.
I wouldn't consider the passive/active distinction the definition for 'invasive.' I'd consider thermal imaging from the outside of the home w/out a warrant 'invasive', but a thermal camera is just picking up the heat radiated by your body.
The article links to the relevant Supreme Court decision. They, in "Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), held that the use of a thermal imaging, or FLIR, device from a public vantage point to monitor the radiation of heat from a person's home was a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and thus required a warrant." -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
The article goes on to say the Supreme Court "specifically noted that the rule would apply to radar-based systems that were then being developed."
There's already precedent about this involving radiated IR, which ruled that police may not use such tools without a warrant, as it violates what people normally consider to be private information.
It's possible that different rulings will come in the future, but you have people defending drug dealers to thank for essentially ruling that this requires a warrant at present.
Active versus passive is less of an issue here than a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'. Regardless of whether you're transmitting energy into a premises, you're still 'looking inside'.
It's worth noting that a normal human without engineering training is aware of silhouettes or even if the window is open - if they do things in plain view, there is onus on them. It takes specialised knowledge to even know this hi-tech stuff is possible for the most part, so you can't really equate passive collection of undetectable-by-human radiation to things like windows and silhouettes, when it comes to the average person.
I have a really hard time believing that this will pass constitutional muster if this ever the use of this device ever gets challenged or gets into the court system. One's home is generally sacrosanct -- there are some exceptions, but those are few and far between.
Law enforcement used a thermal imaging camera to detect hotspots consistent with marijuana growth inside Kyllo's house. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that this was a 4th amendment violation.
I would argue the opposite. The dissenting opinion's rationale doesn't hold up in this case
> Heat waves, like aromas that are generated in a kitchen, or in a laboratory or opium den, enter the public domain if and when they leave a building.
In the case of thermal imaging, you measure light waves that is already leaving the building. In the case of radar, you are actively sending in light waves to bounce off the inside and return to you.
That's certainly true using that reasoning (which, incidentally, I think is ridiculous). Of course, they could come up with a workaround. Like perhaps it's not a violation of property rights for invisible and virtually harmless waves to enter private property, and if they happen to bounce off something and come back to the source for collection and analysis, so be it.
> That's certainly true using that reasoning (which, incidentally, I think is ridiculous).
While Kyllo was obviously decided correctly, I don't think the reasoning of the dissent is ridiculous. Arguably, it's better scientifically.
Premise: It's not an unreasonable search if police stand on the public street outside a house and hear someone shout: "I killed Jake!"
Argument: Use of thermal imaging is indistinguishable from standing on the street hoping to hear a shout. Sound waves and infrared light waves are both generated inside the building, escape into public space, and are captured by passive receiving devices (ears, IR cameras). It's arbitrary to treat sound and infrared light differently.
The above may be a good example against hyper-technical reasoning in court cases (but see: everyone's support of the argument advanced by Aereo), but it's not a scientifically unsound argument.
I would argue that if the police require any equipment in addition to the normal range of human senses to detect evidence, the use of such equipment should be considered a search. Whether the feet physically move onto the property or not, the equipment is breaching a privacy barrier.
If you confess to murder in your own home on an ultrasonic carrier wave, and the police happen to be outside on the sidewalk pointing an ultrasonic microphone at your house, no reasonable person could deny that was a search of your home.
A visible-light camera with an audible-range microphone that coincidentally covered your home in the course of otherwise lawful activity, on the other hand, would be more in the nature of accidental eyewitness than intentional search.
When people take steps to create a private space for themselves, they judge by their own senses whether their precautions are sufficient. If I stand outside my own house and cannot see, hear, smell, or otherwise sense any activity within, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. I typically do not use a wi-fi packet sniffer, or a FLIR camera, or a laser microphone to ensure that my activities are safe from interception from random passers-by, because they do not carry such equipment.
> If you confess to murder in your own home on an ultrasonic carrier wave, and the police happen to be outside on the sidewalk pointing an ultrasonic microphone at your house, no reasonable person could deny that was a search of your home.
What if I broadcast my guilt on un-encrypted FM radio?
Again, I think Kyllo was rightly decided. But I don't think the dissent's argument was "ridiculous." I think there's some logic to asking: why the heck should the 4th amendment treat sonic and EM emissions differently depending on their wavelength?
Because the wavelength determines whether you need to make an explicit effort to retrieve the information.
The search is not a matter of retrieving what is possible to retrieve, but is instead about intentionally breaching a privacy barrier.
As long as you have taken a single safeguard to protect yourself from casual observation, anyone circumventing that safeguard with the intention of observing you is performing a search.
Thus, if you want to make an FM broadcast, it would be prudent to do so on a frequency that is not expected to be routinely monitored. Anything that could be directly intercepted by commonly-available radio receivers, such as car radios, walkie-talkies, police scanners, or similar would not create a reasonable expectation of privacy. Anything that might cause interference in an electronic device is likewise non-private, as anyone who transmits should be aware that amateur and professional radio operators may investigate interference.
In those cases, sending your FM transmission from inside a Faraday cage, through a shielded cable, to the inside of another cage, would be sufficient precaution against casual observation that anyone hearing your signal must have been searching for it. I contend that even if the shielding is imperfect, the signal leaks, and the cops are able to monitor and record your transmissions, they are still peeking behind the fig leaf, so to speak. The instant that they become aware that the transmissions were intended to be private, all subsequent monitoring is a search.
Were it otherwise, a person not acting in his official capacity could breach the privacy barrier, and then later monitor under the presumption that no such barrier existed. A cop might take off his badge and shove a pin through the shielding on the cable into the center conductor, then put the badge back on and tune in the radio signal as though it were meant to be a broadcast.
The dissenting argument is ridiculous because the "searchiness" of an observation does not depend on some law of physics. It depends on whether you are exposing something that I wish to be private, regardless of the means by which you do it.
I would argue that if the police require any equipment in addition to the normal range of human senses to detect evidence, the use of such equipment should be considered a search.
What if the equipment is extremely common? Anyone can stand outside your home and see your WiFi networks. Should the cops need a warrant to say "from the street, I turned on my iPhone and saw a wireless network?"
What if 75% of smart phones had FLIR and people regularly used them?
NB: I'm not necessarily convinced of this. It might turn out the best way is to start at "normal range of human senses" and explicitly add to that, say by legislation.
There will always be grey areas, but I think the recording/observing equipment would need to be both common and not deployed for the purpose of gathering evidence. If some evidence was somehow in the SSID of a Wifi network, and a police officer happened to see it on a laptop, I wouldn't call that a search (although I also probably wouldn't really call it credible enough evidence to justify any further action). If some conversations were broadcast over FM radio, and a police officer happened to hear it while driving by the source, I wouldn't call that a search.
It is most certainly not a violation of property rights; radio waves are a notable exemption to normal property rights. Not to mention the fact that their are many other radio waves that already enter your private property.
They still would need to argue that it is not a 4th amendment violation.
The 4th amendment pretty clearly exists in an assumed system of private property. Searches and seizures both imply action that would normally be a violation of property rights. The quote you cited is also talking about property rights.
First thing I thought. This is exactly the same. Unless someone starts commercialising mass sales of radars, this is basically inadmissible in court.
For those who don't know, the basis for ruling thermal imaging an unreasonable search is that most people don't have high-resolution thermal imaging devices (so you can't assume you're being watched that way)
It's funny ("funny") how much police work operates like how I wrote papers in high school.
Write it from one (possibly unapproved, but convenient) source, find citations for various passages in several books after it's done, mostly by using the index to find exactly what's needed to avoid needing to read more than a couple paragraphs of each book, until the "minimum sources" number is hit.
Kyllo was about thermal imaging but the opinion is quite clear. There's a much, much stronger case for thermal imaging equipment than there is for a device which probes via radio waves.
FLIR is a special camera that detects infra-red light. IR is electromagnetic radiation that is emitted from objects with heat.
RADAR emits a more "traditional" radio wave, and then detects objects when the radio wave reflects back. Unlike FLIR (which is passive), I would consider RADAR to be active.
I would think (rather naively so) that the case against using RADAR without a warrant would be stronger, given that the government would have to actively affect your house. To play devil's advocate, the pot grower was emitting a signal in the FLIR case...
Anyone more educated than I able to cast light (haha) on this?
One nice thing about the Supreme Court is that every ruling comes with at least one (or two if the ruling is not unanimous) experts explaining the situation. And if any of the remaining Justices disagree, or feel that something was left out, of those two opinions, they can add their own.
In this case, the dissent wrote:
Unlike an x-ray scan, or other possible "through-the-wall" techniques, the detection of infrared radiation emanating from the home did not accomplish "an unauthorized physical penetration into the premises,"
and:
While the Court "take[s] the long view" and decides this case based largely on the potential of yet-to-be-developed technology that might allow "through-the-wall surveillance," ante, at 38-40; see ante, at 36, n. 3, this case involves nothing more than off-the-wall surveillance by law enforcement officers to gather information exposed to the general public from the outside of petitioner's home. All that the infrared camera did in this case was passively measure heat emitted.
Indeed. The ruling is quite clear that penetrating radio waves into the residence is presumed to be unacceptable. Even the dissent in Kyllo (FLIR) agrees on this point in regard to x-ray.
Your house is constantly saturated with radio waves from TV stations, radio stations, wifi etc.
What if I were to design a device that passively received reflections of these signals rather then generating it's own to achieve the same function as the device in this post.
So I now have the same result, but I am "merely" receiving reflections, rather then making my own.
There is no difference in the function, this is rules lawyering at its best.
I am willing to let police observe emissions on visible wavelengths ONLY because that is a slippery slope to not being allowed to look into windows.
Anything you need a device to view is not ok to view without a warrant, no matter the technique.
If you look at Gizmo's quotes, I think it's pretty clear they considered these kinds of technology tricks in deciding Kyllo, and 'taking the long view' that high tech collection of passively emitted information requires a warrant. I think the general approach is it's the result that matters, not the specific approach, e.g. 'expectation of privacy'.
So does using these new devices mean they will be using the flash bangs less? They should be able to see who all is inside and realize a child or person that is not the suspect?
This is actually a good point. Under current law they aren't going to be able to use one to gather evidence without a warrant, but if they already have a warrant it might make raids safer. Assuming the tech is any good, that is.
Exactly. As long as they can get usage under control by making them warrant only, sounds like a good way to start demilitarising the police. Hard to justify going all SWAT if you can see a house contains only two unarmed people in bed.
The Range-r simply tells users how far away movement is occurring in a building.
Useful for a no nock entry, but not much more.
The bigger issue is the number of tactical police raids on private homes, plus some of the other technologies in development and currently available.
Stingray, which is currently in use, acts as a portable cell tower. All cell phone calls in the vicinity of a stingray unit get routed through the mobile cell tower, warrant or not.
> and similar audio devices, becoming so cheap and readily available that even basic privacy from strangers while in your home becomes a thing of the past.
Even at current price ($6000), the thing is cheap, taking into account what it can do.
As for privacy, forget about that, at least privacy by default. that's so dead. Start thinking about counter measures.
Does the US use "sarking" [1] (metal foil insulation) in house construction?
Most Australian houses are wrapped in a layer of metal foil insulation. Presumably that would offer some attenuation to radar, though the windows must still allow radiation though, as mobile phones typically work inside. Perhaps a house with metal foil based window tinting would offer a reasonably complete Faraday cage?
People use a lot of different construction materials and techniques across the country, but I don't think this "sarking" is common for residences.
People don't want to live inside Faraday cages though, for the reason you already mentioned: their mobile phones wouldn't work. Not to mention broadcast television, AM/FM radio, garage door openers, etc.
I'm already living in a Faraday cage - we had to have AT&T send us a microcell because we had zero reception in our apartment. Plus, if my phone could place calls over wifi, I wouldn't mind if other signals couldn't get in - I don't even think we have a TV antenna, or anything that would pick up an AM/FM radio signal.
Me too, maybe. We have a stucco exterior that was applied over a wire mesh. While the mesh isn't necessarily electrically contiguous (SIGINT/stealth wasn't part of residential construction specs in the 1940s), we have very poor cell reception inside and pretty good reception if we walk ten feet so we're outside the exterior walls.
The response of materials to EM radiation and its attenuation is highly frequency-dependent (at the very high frequencies, this is why we see things having different colours), so it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing; a material could be transparent to most frequencies but appear opaque to the ones radar use - essentially, the filter absorbs all the energy at particular wavelengths.
I've thought about living in one, I only use radio in the car and TV comes in through cables. On the plus side my wifi would be protected from wardriving (or an outside access) as it would never leave the house.
Cell service would definitely be a problem though.
While this is admittedly off-topic to this thread, I too have given this some thought. I'm coming around to the opinion that losing cell service wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
I prefer to live in a rural area, and a landline would definitely be cheaper. Ditching the smartphone in favor of a feature phone, which could remain off, battery disconnected, and in it's own little faraday cage in the car -- because being prepared for an emergency is a thing we should all do -- well, it all seems very appealing. Nothing in my pocket, no wifi sniffer gathering the hardware address off my phone, no location tracking services, etc.
Best of all, the people in my life would adjust to me not being available 24x7x365. I think that would be highly beneficial when compared to the constant stream of interruptions that seem like an invasion of privacy all on their own.
"The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving."
For the speculative future sake of humanity, if you ever work on the GUI for one of those things, make sure it has an elevation indicator.
More than 1m below the detector, show a downward-pointing triangle. More than 1m above it, show an upward-pointing triangle. Within 1m, show a square. Change the relative size of the icon according to the size of the moving object. Add telltale lines extending from the center of the icon in a contrast color to show direction of motion and speed.
I realize that the shortcomings of the device UI were critical to the dramatic tension, but whenever I see that scene in Aliens, I can't help but sympathetically think about the poor military-industrial-complex gadget developer who wasn't even allowed to think about the user experience, because the requirements were determined by someone who would likely never use it, and cast in concrete long before anyone was hired to implement them.
And the thing that really kills me is that the person who created those requirements probably based them on a device seen in a sci-fi movie. This is why it is so important for film directors to employ technical consultants whenever they include gadgets and computer monitors. Anything seen on the big screen will have an ongoing and possibly unintended future influence on design.
That's nothing, wait till they get hold of an ADR scanner, it can chemically identify everything it scans and can do it through miles of rock. In interview, Colin Stove is quoted as referring to it jokingly as a "quadcorder", on the basis that it is much better than a tricorder - http://adrokgroup.com/technology/how-it-works
It's radar. So it is emitting radio waves, with a tiny tiny percent of them bouncing back to the detector. So it can be detected and/or jammed.
Assuming these devices work on a very narrow frequency range, it shouldn't be too hard to passively hear them coming. If detectors appear, these devices would become a serious liability for anyone looking to "storm" a residence.
The posted pdf to the manual shows a little bit of the device.
But here's another larger and more advanced device (linked in the article). It is doing the same but with an more elaborated output visualization.
It only tells you if there are people inside, either moving or breathing, and how far away they are. There's only text output, no actual images.
---------
From the manual: "RANGE-R is designed for simple one-handed operation. Holding RANGE-R to a wall, door or other building structure, the operator simultaneously presses buttons on the sensor’s two sides to begin the analysis. Within three seconds, the system returns a range-to-target result as well as the status of the target, which is indicated as either a mover (Mov) or a breather (Br). The result is displayed to the user in terms of distance in feet to the target on the unit’s LCD. RANGE-R is also capable of detecting and displaying the range of multiple targets. In such cases, the display will alternate through the different ranges of the targets."
The device is a fairly basic Doppler radar, although the sensitivity is impressive. Someone might want to look up the FCC approval data for it to get the full technical specs.