DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March | Hacker News Reader

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

muckrock.com

263 pointsanigbrowl202 comments

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.

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.

Sunk cost fallacy isn't even what's driving that sort of thing. It isn't even that they spent the money and want to keep justifying it. There are parties with a vested financial interested in the continued use of such things.

Yeah, those scanners where you hold your hands up were a big boondoggle.

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.

El Al security is not a good model at all.

I'm still yet to figure out what they achieved by seizing my backpack (that had all of my personal documentation) and damaging my brand new MBP 2016 and Pixel tablet (by very clearly dropping them a dozen times) had to do with security. Especially when they lied about putting it on the plane and I arrived at Ben Gurion with literally nothing other than a passport in one pocket and a dead phone in the other.

El Al's actions say the opposite about what you say about Israelis: El Al clearly believes that they are better at what they do than the IDF or Ben Gurion airport security, so they take it upon themselves (as private citizens) to pick up the slack. For what it's worth, the woman who interviewed me at Ben Gurion didn't have a lot of nice things to say about El Al either.

Why has El Al security seized your backpack? I can see why they'd want to search a backpack, but can't for the life of me understand why they'd seize it. I know airlines can sometimes check-in your carry-on items when they run out of cabin space. Is this what happened to you?

Seized my 23" LG travel monitor for 3 weeks, claiming it was a potential bomb.

Fortunately I was in Israel for 4 months, so a minor inconvenience in the scheme of things, but still, seemed a bit over the top...until I stepped out of the airport and saw teenagers wielding machine guns (serving in military), the Israelis aren't messing around ;-)

If you're Israeli I'd imagine the security measures aren't nearly as stringent.

Because they just wanted to screw with me. They specifically didn't let me take on a paper file which had my invitation letter, citizenship copy and various other things that would have made my life easier at Ben Gurion.

They promised they'd put it on the plane and they didn't. I got it two or three days later as El Al doesn't fly during Shabbat.

People with a little power and no supervision are likely to abuse it for their own ego. I doubt it's anything more than that.

Being singled out for invasive searching and questioning whenever you fly for no reason other than your ethnicity goes a little beyond "not being offended."

It's not simply (ed: only) based on ethnicity.

When people talk about banning "profiling" that's what they mean.

A credit score could be made more accurate if you included race and ethnicity, but current models are more accurate than one built simply on race and ethnicity. (This may simply be measuring the recial bias of society, but more data is almost always useful.)

Sure, it may offend people to include race, it's not required. EX: People without children are a higher risk than those with children. On it's own not a big deal, and you can't trust any one thing, but screening even 1 in 3 people is still vastly cheaper than everyone.

In the end we can be just as effective without including race if we simply spend more money to profile more people. Making more people suffer for little gain vs. standing up for your principles is less clear cut than people want to admit. Still, both options are viable.

It's definitely not. My dad had one of those 'extensive questioning' sessions the first time (and only the first time) he flew to Israel because (we think) he is former non-US military. He's also whiter than snow, basically the definition of Caucasian.

You're right that there are many ways to profile, but race and religion have been historically pervasive profiling techniques.

It does seem more fair to simply put everyone through the same process. If you're annoyed at why you (an innocent) have to be subjected to such stringent and time consuming security, that's how innocents who fit "the profile" might feel as well.

If those doing the profiling are interested in being successful, and race and religion prove to be ineffective indicators of threat, then such profiling should stop (or bombs will keep getting through at an inordinate rate). Otherwise, race and religion are simply observations about passengers which have value in directing attention.

Correlation != Causation

If we examine the background of anyone who has ever committed terrorism, every major race and religion would be covered. And so much of crime comes from social context, so at what point could you ever say: it's safe to assume that anyone with X ethnic background is not a threat. You can take any race and put them in a hostile, violent context and see them either continue the violence or die.

Or, if you say the majority of terrorists are men, so let's stop profiling women, I'm sure you would find more women committing terrorism. Then are women the greater threat or is it simply that we've made it harder for men to be terrorists?

I don't see a way to profile without affecting the statistics.

I agree with the gist of everything you've written here. And I think you're slightly missing the point.

> "so much of crime comes from social context"

Agreed. This is why I advocate taking that context into account. Not profiling would mean treating every single individual the exact same way, removing all social context from consideration.

> at what point could you ever say: it's safe to assume that anyone with X ethnic background is not a threat

This is not the point of profiling. The point is to build probability distributions, and hone them.

> I don't see a way to profile without affecting the statistics.

This is literally the point! You want to profile on such an exacting superset of factors (behavior, history, autonomous responses, forensics...) that you cause the incidence rate of terrorism to go down, across the board.

A brittle policy like "only screen middle eastern men" will of course get gamed, but that is terrible profiling. It builds a one-dimensional "profile"--you want a profile that is harder to fool, and based on actual behavioral cues.

> If those doing the profiling are interested in being successful, and race and religion prove to be ineffective indicators of threat, then such profiling should stop

I mean maybe if the profiling is being done by robots, but in reality I have my doubts.

I think humans can do this as well, they just need the right incentive structure (i.e. tied to actual results). CYA security theatre is not it.

I think the bias is too deeply ingrained to disappear without strong, sustained institutional pressure to avoid it.

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?

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).

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.

It sounds like this interrogation strategy could be designed to make the interviewee think that the interlocutor is onto something, even if they aren't.

If you're a regular guy, you're likely to react by becoming bored and tired. If you're doing sinister stuff, there is a chance that you might start to stress out from the interaction. I believe similar techniques are used when screening people for government security clearances using a polygraph. They seem to push people hard and accuse them of lying. I can only assume it's with the intent of causing legitimately guilty people to "crack".

I am not trying to justify the practice, just speculating about the purported rationale. Not a very fun experience as an innocent person.

You're trying to justify it in the sense that they're some sort of smart people with a plan. They're just civilians, they're not spies. No malice or cunning elements to it - just idiocy.

The takeaway I got is that they just don't want people to visit Israel and made it as difficult as possible for me (which involved taking away my personal documentation, such as my invitation letter and copies of my citizenship, to give me a tough time when I got to Ben Gurion).

"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.

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.

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.

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.

The "interrogation" felt more like they didn't want me to visit Israel again. Genuinely, that was the only take away I had.

They tried to intimidate me with their faux "all seeing eye" - asking about whether or not I trained judo (in reference to the jiu-jitsu Gi I had in my luggage) but aside from that, the questions about the shekels in my wallet and also taking issue with the rubber waistband on my pants, they didn't really ask about anything else. The shekels thing and the issue they took with it was just absurd.

It was really just civilian employees on a power trip trying to mess with me... because they can.

> physiological responses (sweating, increased heartrate, nervousness), consistency under questioning, etc.

Is this what Canadian border guards are supposed to be doing? I hate dealing with them, and therefore minimize my border crossings. I just want to pour money into the Canadian economy as a tourist from time to time, and actual Canadian cops (RCMP) are much less aggressive than their US counterparts, but the border crossing is almost always unnecessarily miserable.

Who decides the profiles?

With the incident in Cuba I would think we would be a bit more reluctant to use such devices on civilians.

Why?

Because the hypothesis is that people in Cuba have brain damage due to devices like these.

> brain damage

Surely that's a feature, not a bug, when the police have to deal with civil rights protesters. Recall the dogs, batons, and water cannons of the south.

They used water cannons on people in Standing Rock in some seriously cold temperatures just last year.

And dogs on protestors in Ferguson in the hours after the police shooting of Michael Brown.

Isn't mental instability positively correlated with antisocial, disruptive behavior? I'd imagine that they want well behaved protesters.

It’ll take some high dollar lawsuits getting paid out before any regulation around these will happen.

Ah, one of the remaining only ways "doing the right thing" ever gets done in the States these days.

Why can countries like South Korea, Taiwan or Japan provide public services like roads, internet infrastructure, police and healthcare at an incredibly small fraction of the cost that is lightyeaes ahead in quality and competency (for the 99%)?

Path dependence? US went a bit too far in the "individual liberty" direction, and it now can't get out of the mess. In principle, things could be fixed, but good luck getting enough lawyer mass on this.

Surely allowing police to use excessive force to control protestors is the exact opposite of "individual liberty".

>individual liberty causes high prices and low quality. this could be fixed with more lawyers

please elaborate

Free market causes low quality.

What I meant in my comment was something else though - that strong individual liberty/independence causes difficulties in coordinating people on large-scale infrastructural projects. I.e. by the time you get through all the lawsuits and payouts, your new rail line takes 10x time to build and costs 20x the money a less liberal country would need to spend.

These countries all have at least 10x the population density of the US. I'm not sure about healthcare, but the rest of your list gets cheaper as population density increases.

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.

My main point is not that providing quality public services is easy but that excuses like "we don't have enough population density" are a red herring. The real hurdles are entirely political.

Some back of the envelope calculations:

Length of US/Canada border: 8,890km [1] Population of Canada: 36,708,083 [2]

Assuming ALL of Canada's population lives within 100km of this border a rough estimate of this area might be 889,000km^2 giving a population density of 41 people per square kilometre. This conservative estimate is in the same ballpark as the US population density of 33 people per square kilometre [3] with the caveat that this population is spread across a long, thin 9000 km ribbon increasing the cost of roads and any other infrastructure versus the US's more favourable shape. And let's not forget that Canada's GDP per capita is $46,437 while America's is $57,467 [4]. This is a factor of 1.24 in favour of the United States.

Given all this, why is the US incapable of providing the kind of single-payer healthcare that Canada does to its population?

[1] https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-402-x/2012000/chap/geo/geo-...

[2] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/f...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

It isn't but I thought we were talking about infrastructure (there are clearly political factors at work there too of course).

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.

Fine, we are talking about the trhee main urban centers of the US here - not the whole country. Now that this strawman is out of the way- are we allowed to continue?

I don't think that's a strawman. Roads and internet have to reach everyone in the country, not just major urban areas. The money for these projects comes from people in major urban areas too.

You make a good point about policing. Density wouldn't explain why policing in Tokyo is better and cheaper than in New York.

No. You don’t get to wire up NYC at the expense of all taxpayers.

NYC pays far more in both state and federal taxes than it receives in services. NY State pays far more in federal taxes than it receives in services. Rural parts of the US receive far more in services than they pay in taxes.

The rest of the country isn't paying for a thing in NYC - it's the other way around. Just leave us more of our own tax money and we could do all sorts of things that aren't currently considered possible.

> Just leave us more of our own tax money and we could do all sorts of things that aren't currently considered possible.

At (roughly) what number of people does that argument stop working? 5M? 500K? 50K? 5?

I'm not clear on what it is you're asking.

In the case of healthcare it's because the US is alone in the degree to which its system is privatized.

I agree that this is a major factor for the US, but as a point of clarification, empirically (based on other countries) there seems to be a degree of privatization that increases efficiency.

The US government is like old legacy software. It's not as good as modern software but it's too difficult and expensive to replace.

Even that won't cause any real regulation. If anything the legal battles will just drag on for years before they're eventually settled out of court for almost nothing.

This requires direct mechanical coupling to the head. The air to skin interface is an impedance mismatch which causes very little of the energy to be transmitted to the brain. This is likely not a real concern.

The air pockets in your head will resonate quite effectively. The impedance mismatch in the air pockets can result in powerful vibrations. Your head isn't filled with 100% liquids and solids.

I am interested in investigating this further. Could you link me to any scientific articles that have explained how all this works?

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?

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/

They max out at 2.5kHz. All they can do is loud speech and infrasound.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's a very good question. In Poland police was also said to have used this device during an oppositions protest. However, it turned out it was used as a speaker. It wasn't used as a crowd control device because it isn't included in our Law about Police as a legal mean of enforcement. To make things more interesting it shouldn't have been bought at all (because it's usage is illegal), but it was bought anyway by our previous government that is our current opposition protesting today.

You can watch this video as an example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMyY3_dmrM

That video shows it being used as a crowd dispersal tool at a much more confrontational protest (G20, in 2009) along with a bunch of police in body armor. Do you have any video showing the same kind of thing at the "pink pussy hat" Women's March in DC in 2017?

I understand that a LRAD can be used as a weapon, but was it or is the headline and article over the top?

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 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.

> Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen

source?

> CNN Kosovo videos from the mid 90s being filmed in front of a blue screen

source?

EDIT: the second one appears to have been debunked (was the Gulf War, not Kosovo years later). wasn't able to find any evidence of the first one.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22170/did-cnn-f...

https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-cnns-fake-news-broadcasts-...

>>whenever people call out Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen

Huh? A quick Google Search shows only sources from absurd places like InfoWars. Have any conclusive evidence that can't be easily explained by motion compression algorithms?

Can't speak to djsumdog's allegations. While they're probably true, it's also possible that people are thinking of a key part of "Wag the Dog" w/ Dustin Hoffman et al.

Anyway, maybe the following links will help:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2003/03/16/hollywood-designer-c...

and

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/29/hollywood-an...

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_In...

I'm sure we all know that America's media has had a long history of telling the "right" story for the "right" reasons. I don't feel like digging around for cites, but it's pretty well known that the point of "embedding" journalists w/troops for the (formal) continuation of the 'Gulf War' was to make the journalists feel more sympathetic to the mission (troops) and thus tell the folks at home the appropriate story.

There's also a long history of the CIA recruiting journalists, editors, owners, etc... Real example from recent history: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/corres...

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/08/mark-mazzetti-s...

And there we have the real Fake News. The term originated as a label for crackpot/tinfoil-hat/state-actor misinformation ops. It was picked up by Trump who presumably misunderstood the meaning, and used by him to describe MSM he didn't like. Sort of Fake News squared...

I don't think he misunderstood the meaning at all. I think he just realized he could turn the label into an attack on legitimate news sources that were printing unflattering stories about him while devaluing the use of the term against actual false reporting that benefited him in one fell swoop.

I'd find his strategy brilliant if it weren't for the fact it is an all-out assault on the very concept of truth and it's likely doing irreparable damage to the very institutions this nation is founded upon.

> Trump coined the term "fake news"

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

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

> 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...

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.

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.

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

I don't know if the original fake news was important to the election. I do think though that it's a very important issue in general. How do we prevent entirely fabricated click bait from going viral?

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 events around the election. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news#Definition), even if they are not intended to be used as an authority, are more trustworthy. Alternative one can look at the baloney detection kit by Carl Sagan and simply define any baloney that get published in news format to be fake news.

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 that you can trust any news source (of course both WaPo and WSJ flub stories and have to make retractions from time to time, journalists are humans).

I don't doubt that they stays to the facts, but I also don't trust them to tell the truth.

Let me take an example story that was printed in most news papers after the election. Two facts: The number of new articles written during the election about the Clinton email scandal was twice as many as the Trump tape scandal, but news papers also wrote more than twice as much about the Trump tape scandal than the Clinton email scandal. Both are factual true, but any conclusion made on them is akin to falsehoods because they leave out the necessary context. What is missing is time, as in that news paper wrote about the Clinton email scandal the whole 6 months that the study looked at, while the Trump audio tape scandal was earthed only one month before the election date. As such looking at articles per day while each scandal was new, the trump scandal created significant more articles than any other month, while the long duration of the email scandal created a much higher total number of articles than those of the single month that the audio tapes were discussed.

But it is not news to say that an event stretched over 6 months can create more articles than a single month, or that the last month of an election generates a lot of news articles. It is something a Wikipedia article might mention to balance a paragraph, but it do not generate clicks from a political targeted audience. Lying by omission is technically not an outright falsehood, and they aren't required to make retractions to fix it, so both sides instead paints them selves as victims of the media and media is happy to write articles about it that tailors to their matching demographic. Money is gained and all that is lost is trust.

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...

Fake news is a term invented by the Nazis during the 30s to describe media they disagreed with.

In German, Lügenpresse (lying press, literally) has the same origin and use (including the same resurgence through use by the alt-right)

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.

A term can't be "invented" if it was in another language. Coining a term literally only has relevance in the language it's coined. The concept of an untrustworthy press is much older besides.

It wasn't exactly in a different language — the Nazis did also produce propaganda in english (which literally used the term fake news), and during 2016, both translations of the term came into use by supporters of the Trump campaign, from which it grew.

Maybe, but the point is right - "fake news" isn't a new thing, it's just a new name for "only slightly more bullshit than what's on national newspapers and television".

The origin of the term "fake news" was rewritten by the people who did actually coin the term right around when every totalitarian state in the world (quite predictably) adopted it to justify their crackdowns on speech. (It was obvious they would because it meshed so nicely with the existing narratives they used to justify this to their citizens.) The claim that Trump didn't coin the term is now an alternative fact; the only permissible non-Trump origin is the supposed tie to "Lugenpresse" that's also since appeared.

> "Yet whenever people call out Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen..."

When was Anderson Cooper caught in front of a green screen?

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.

Scary as hell

Little known fact: 1984 is based on WW2 and immediate post-war Britain. Orwell was a propaganda correspondent for the BBC; his wife worked for the Censorship Department. 1984 was based on his experiences then, and the disillusionment of the Cold War immediately following WW2. He had initially intended to title it 1948.

Actually, this is not that little-known: it's in the Wikipedia page for George Orwell and easily accessible on the net, and the text itself says it's set in Great Britain after the major powers have divided up the world and entered a state of perpetual war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Second_World_War...

http://www.ministry-of-information.com/the-origins-of-orwell...

People get thrown by the title, though, thinking that it's a prediction of a future dystopia while Orwell was actually writing about the world he lived in then.

Orwell is an interesting figure; while a solid left-winger all his life, his experience in the Spanish Civil War left him with an entirely justified fear and hatred of Stalinism. 1984 and Animal Farm are about this, both allegories for the crimes of Stalin. 1984 was a fairly straightforward extrapolation of trends he could see back then. All the little details of the dystopia can be traced back to actual events under Stalin or Mao.

Hmm...hard to believe this is not commonly known when the book is taught in schools, even in the US. I suppose the students need to be awake and paying attention..

Someone calling something a "little known fact" doesn't necessarily make it any of those things.

> 1984 is based on WW2 and immediate post-war Britain

and Stalin's USSR.

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

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.

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?

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.)

> 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.

It sounds like that depends on the police and protesters being at least nominally willing to cooperate, however grudgingly. That's not always the case. If the police and the local government think that the protesters have no right to be there at all and the only thing preventing open violence is the fear of bad publicity, it's a lot more of a powder keg.

If the protest is about police violence, for example. Have a friendly advance chat with the police about where, when, and how many, and you'll likely show up to find your venue packed with concrete barricades and cops in riot gear to "preserve public safety". You need to get a critical mass of protesters in place with cameras on them before the cops can get fully organized, or they'll shut you down before you can begin.

(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.)

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.

Interesting. The Met vs. crowds seems to have a varied history; I ended up next to the famous May Day 2001 protest where people were "kettled" in Oxford Circus for 8 hours, entirely by accident.

I was between jobs and had gone to the shops on Oxford Street, noting a commotion and went to have a look. I then noticed that police lines were forming loosely around me, and decided that I needed to be behind them quickly. Very much the right decision. A little later I was looking at a completely deserted Regent Street (unthinkable given how busy it is normally), chatting to the only other bystander. He was a rightwinger's caricature of a "liberal elite"; an English lecturer at a polytechnic dressed in a red corduroy suit. We discussed Marxism. It seemed appropriate under the circumstances.

This sounds like an awesome story. Please do share if you already haven't somewhere!

Did you close off the bridge because the bridge wouldn't be able to support the weight of so many people marching? Or for some other reason?

The DDR "let" people cross the wall. If they had not wanted to allow the people to cross, they would not have let them cross. I mean, it's not like they didn't have storm rifles or were unwilling to fire upon civilians. That is to say, they had more powerful weapons and were willing to use them. They made a choice to let people cross.

So it was only after the spokesperson for the Berlin Communist Party announced they would allow free crossing of the wall that people began crossing (en-masse).

It’s likely that a government in that situation would prefer to use these less lethal weapons. Mowing down the crowd en masse with something like firearms would magnify problems at home and abroad, whereas turning them back with something like a sonic cannon would cause less complications.

Let's suppose Kim, Jung-un has a problem with people crossing over into SK. Do you think he'll use less than lethal weapons, or do you think he'll go for the assault rifles?

Parent Post implied that had the DDR had these sonic weapons the Berlin Wall would not have fallen... as if The DDR would not have had the willingness to put a stop to it if they wanted to. What happened is they announced publicly that they had a change of heart and would let people cross. And so people did.

If you're leading a country as a stong[man] and you want to retain control, it is imperative you use strong tactics --anything less is seen as a weakness by (good or bad) adversaries, and rightly so.

I think that the reason the DDR did that was because of their power was already slipping. If they massacred a lot of citizens, they would probably have a revolution on their hands… They practically already did.

It’s a difficult comparison to North Korea because the regime is not in that situation. The situation is more nuanced than that. I elaborated on possible motivations for using nonlethal force earlier... In the case of North Korea, they also might prefer to not kill citizens who they use for labor.

I wasn’t intending to discuss specific events or political situations, though. I meant to merely touch on the political dynamics of non-lethal crowd control.

I find it fascinating that in North-Korea, even though they where starving, the system itself did not deteriorate. To be honest, the moment my life is slowly ending, due to missing calories- the politics of survival should kick in and vote for freedom (aka food) with theire feet.

North Korea would have collapsed long ago were it not for external influence. The country is like that alcoholic uncle that we keep enabling. Every time he throws a tantrum we give in to his demands because we don't want him to hurt his kids or burn the house down or attack the neighbours.

Quite the opposite, actually - the announcement was by accident, and the police at the border weren't informed. They caved to the sheer mass of people, unintentionally organized by the party.

It is not clear that if a similar number of people had been organized in another way, the wall would not have fallen.

The DDR was going down, once Hungary opened its borders. There was no wall between East bloc countries, and as many East Germans were leaving as could find cars and gas to get out with.

When the crowd is large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice than anybody else. This is a democracy.

> When the crowd is large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice than anybody else. This is a democracy.

This is a strong indictment of political science education in this country.

First of all, you need to understand that the policy preferences of the voting constituency in any given national election are not strongly correlated to policy results. This is shown convincingly in Benjamin Ginsberg's book, "Do Elections Matter?" I strongly recommend this book - after reading it, you will never again try to explain away an act of government with the same tired logic of, "we get the government we vote for."

It is a difficult-to-deny fact that, in the USA, the government frequently and quietly advances policies which do not appear to be derived from any kind electoral mandate, nor are favored by a substantial portion of the electorate.

But there's a much stronger argument here, and it's about this completely incorrect assertion of yours:

> This is a democracy.

While it's true that, in the modern international parlance, the USA is a democratic state, it is not a democracy in the way that you have used that word here - and our founding documents (and the federalist papers) go out of their way to distinguish our form of government from a democracy as such.

The difference is this: Even if 100% of the voting public votes for a measure that abolishes the freedom to assemble, the government has no authority and no legal standing to trample any individual's rights. This is the essence of a republic: the powers of the government are limited and enumerated and do not change by dint of a given election.

The police presence and tactics at any large assembly in the country since about 1970 has unambiguously been an affront to this right, and the refusal of the courts to recognize this represents one of the most visible abdications of legal reason in modern constitutional law (not the most, but one of the most).

If the government wants to bring sonic cannons and rubber bullets and kettling to protests, it needs to first go through the legal process of amending the constitution to remove the freedom to assemble from the 1st amendment.

Polls and votes and candidates are entirely orthogonal to this matter.

I really agree with this. Specifically, American politics, although technically democratic, is not representational. The US elections are first past the post, where as Australia's is order of preference with instant runoff (you literally cannot throw your vote away) and New Zealand's is MMP (where 50% of Parliament gets equal representation based on party preference and the other 50% get the majority vote).

Also, American preferences don't reflect policy. I did a video on a paper/publication that goes over this:

http://fightthefuture.org/videos/does-voting-make-a-differen...

Maine recently voted for ranked voting, and there are groups like Represent.us that are working to enact anti-corruption legislation at the local and state levels; knowing that anything at the Federal level simply won't pass today. We need new officials elected at the lower echelons under anti-corruption rules and for those rules to then propagate up. It's a very uphill battle considering the amount of power and money to prevent it from happening.

> where as Australia's is order of preference with instant runoff (you literally cannot throw your vote away)

This is a tangent, but IRV is horribly broken: it throws your vote away for you, by ignoring all your preferences other than the top choice until it decides that your top choice no longer matters. If you vote A > B > C, IRC ignores that you prefer B over C until it eliminates A. That can cause C to win. That is not a theoretical concern; it's something that you would expect to happen when third parties become more popular.

It is also a powerful force for forcing cooperation between political parties, which trade preference deals.

This is a powerful force for centrism, an important feature of stable democracies - compare australia’s Relatively centrist governmnents and political parties (despite what the stagnation we see at present) VS the vast and expanding gulf between us parties

So is a better rank-based system. I can't think of a single reason to prefer IRV over better rank-based voting systems, and plenty of reasons not to.

I absolutely agree that our voting systems are part of the problem; first-past-the-post is broken.

You don't get to create a mob and send it wherever you want. If you want to change the police, you can either vote or start a civil war.

With the way districts are Gerrymandered, the electoral college and the amount of money required to even come to the fight: This is an oligarchy.

More people DID vote for Hillary. Fat lot of good it's doing us.

Even if she won, she was still the Secretary of State that gave us more predator drones, more bombing and served under a president that spent every day at work (the first president in history).

I feel like people don't realize the corruption is pretty equal between both candidates/parties, they just toss a few pandering policies here and there to get people angry, or spin things differently.

I think it doesn't matter which side you see it from, democracy in the US is completely broken. In most states your vote doesn't matter. Both parties ended up with candidates that were disliked by more people than liked. Trump keeps bringing up Hillary because she probably is the only candidate who makes him even remotely look good to anyone meanwhile even most Democrats didn't want her. Both parties had to fight off what in essence were third party candidates because it's more viable to hijack one of the big two than running as a third party. And that's completely ignoring that once in office completely unpopular measures get pushed through my either site. It's completely broken!

Sorry, that should have read "every day at war"

> and served under a president that spent every day at work (the first president in history).

...That's a negative? Also I didn't think that Obama spent every day at work, at least not from what the news reported.

Some dudes I work with went nuts over Obama being a tax burden when he stopped in Hawaii and it was reported he was stoked to have a plate lunch. To be fair though, they kept talking about Hawaii like they didn't realize it's a state.

> I feel like people don't realize the corruption is pretty equal between both candidates/parties

So what? Even if one accepts the unimaginative premise that all politicians are equally corrupt, there are very clear differences in the policies they enact, so it is a rational decision to make discerning choices between them; the implied suggestion that it's all a wash is very obviously incorrect.

If you look at the primary abuses of the plutocracy in the States (ie War Complex, Wall Street & Central Bankkng, psrticulsr kinds of constitutional abuses) there is little difference. For example, Goldman Sachs wins with unelected powerful positions after every election(1). Obama was anti war and said he would protect whistle blowers, but prosecuted more whistle blowers than any president in history, and dropped over 25,000 bombs, primarily targeting Muslims. He also didn't stand up to the healthcare lobbies, or use any seriois political capital to end unconstitutional Guantanamo. So you can't tell me any rhetoric coming from our last presidents has much of anything to do with what really matters in the world. All the huffing and puffing is just targeted at people's emotions to keep them occupied with political battles other than going after the plutocracy.

> You can't tell me any rhetoric coming from our last presidents has much of anything to do with what really matters in the world

Without delving into the subjective can of worms that underpins "what really matters in the world", none of what you said refutes the fact that it is still rational to make choices since those choices have consequences that matter to citizens. There are other things going on in the world besides whatever it is you believe "really matters", but you're free to abstain from the political process until the time comes when nations stop fighting wars.

Just to make it abundantly clear, by "what matters" I'm referring to the topics I addressed in my post such as (1) who gets killed? (2) who does the killing? (3) who ends up with the money? (4) who has constitutional rights?

I have been thinking about how to work around the gerrymandering/gigantic 'war chests' that the incumbents have and the following idea comes to mind: run against these incumbents locally in the party primaries to help drain their truckloads of 'campaign contributions' and help give the election candidate a fighting chance to upset this stinking pile of evil.

And if people were asked about immigration policy instead of told, we both wouldn’t have had a candidate as vulgar as Trump getting the GOP nomination, and we wouldn’t have had the demographic shift that probably resulted in more Democratic votes than Hillary won the popular vote by.

Oligarchic forces aren’t just tipping the scales in one direction.

The crowd was large enough to show up at the polls and get more votes for the candidate of their choice. Hillary got 2,868,691 more votes.

This isn't democracy.

There is more than one definition of democracy. We have never practiced that form of it and never will. Representative democracy is still a form of democracy, no matter how much people want to pine after the popular vote totals.

And that wasn't even a candidate with a positive approval rating...

During the election? Yeah. Before the election? No.

https://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/hillary-clinto...

Before the election she was a Senator, a Secretary of State, a First Lady and about 20 times the Most Admired Woman in America. Her unpopularity was manufactured. It says more about the electorate than the woman.

That chart shows her popularity dropping starting around 2010 and her unfavorability going up big time in 2015. All before the election.

Now why would that be? Must have been something. Not sure what it was. Maybe you can remind me. It was repeated over and over and over, endlessly. You'd think I'd be able to remember it. I'll think of it eventually.

I honestly don't know. Was it the emails? Was it Benghazi? It's also totally irrelevant. During the primaries we had a single candidate with positive approval ratings. After the primaries we had to disliked candidates whose primary strength was that they weren't their opponent. Then the candidate with the higher popular vote lost. It's completely fucked!

Just to clarify, you feel it’s “justifiable” to inflict permanent hearing loss indiscriminately on a crowd after some officers have deemed the crowd unruly?

Since the article says nobody was arrested it seems unlikely that the cannon was only used as a last resort on unruly crowds.

From the report and article, it doesn't sound like the LRAD was used as the first line option.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You're making the same mistake that everyone in this thread is afraid the cops are also making.

A sound cannon is not a loudspeaker, it's a weapon. If you want a loudspeaker, get a loudspeaker.

This thing is designed to inflict actual, serious, permanent damage to people mechanically, from a large standoff distance.

It's used to paralize combatants approaching a convoy. It shouldn't be used against crowds at home.

If you look at LRAD's product guide [1], they primarily describe their devices as being for "communication", not as a weapon. Now, they apparently can also output "deterrent tones", which are potentially dangerous - and I wouldn't be surprised if the product guide 'sugarcoats' things by focusing on non-offensive use cases. But it seems like a leap to claim that it's incapable of being used safely as a loudspeaker (which seems to have been the police's intent in the DC march).

[1] https://www.lradx.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/LRAD-Produc...

That device is indeed for "communication" in the same way that a warning shot is a method of communication. This is not hyperbole, this is quite literally what the device was designed for, per the US military itself:

"AHD is a non-lethal, counterpersonnel, long-range hailing and warning device capable of producing highly directional sound beams, allowing users to project warning tones and intelligible voice commands beyond small arms engagement range. This capability helps Soldiers more effectively determine the intent of a person, crowd, vessel, or vehicle at a safe distance, potentially deterring them prior to escalating to lethal force." (http://www.pica.army.mil/pmccs/combatmunitions/nonlethalsys/...)

and

"Acoustic Hailing Devices are designed to deny access into/out of an area to individuals, move individuals through an area, and suppress individuals." (http://jnlwp.defense.gov/Current-Non-Lethal-Weapons/Acoustic...)

("AHD" = "acoustic hailing device", the generic term for LRADs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_hailing_device#Origin )

If you limit power you limit the potential harm of its abuse.

I think the bigger issue is legality of protest and the police's role in governance.

> I also believe that these abuses do not represent all police.

The institution of police was created to undermine labor movements. It may behoove you to re-examine your assumption that they're there to keep you safe.

Umm... not so much. Police forces pre-date the industral revolution by over 2000 years, dating back to ancient China, Greece, and Rome. Their common duty has always been enforcement if of natural law (prevention of theft and violence or investigation and capture of such criminals).

Source: Wikipedia.

My local sheriff and his crew actually do protect and serve the public. As do 99% of Police in the USA.

Not to get too into the weeds here but I've found that the sheriff is generally more responsive to the public and less abusive than police forces as the sheriff is a constitutional officer who must stand election, and therefore cannot wantonly abuse the public without consequence as police departments tend to do.

Slave rebellions weren't labor movements?

Are you suggesting ancient police were created to stop slave rebellions and not created to prevent the far more common everyday crime?

Source?

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?

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

I doubt it, it's basically just a large beamforming loudspeaker. I'd consider deploying them if I had a property I wanted to secure against wildlife or criminal elements. Granted, in cases where you operate it in a way which caused illegal harm to a person's hearing, you may be subject to negligence litigation. It would be wise to operate it at the lowest level which generates the desired effect, I suspect the police are more haphazard with their deployment because (fair or not) they are subject to less strict standards of behaviour in practice.

Added: LRAD corp. markets the device mostly for law enforcement/public safety, military, and emergency notification, however they also market it for private users in wildlife control, and there doesn't seem to be anything said about legal concerns (though it's possible that there's an existing process controlling use of devices for similar purposes such as propane cannons). Obviously any law concerning the propagation of loud noises in general would apply with LRADs all the same. A civilian user would not likely have an opportunity to use an LRAD outdoors in a populated area.

If the police are operating it so often that this is a serious concern it raises bigger questions.

It's not illegal (in the US in most jurisdictions, not a lawyer so check before you buy) to own one. In fact, they are sold to private entities all the time, mostly event venues. You can even buy one right now on eBay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/LRAD-1000X-Long-Range-Acoustic-Devi...

Using it, however, would likely run afoul with local noise ordinances.

I wondered the same. One of my "trigger" issues is children without hearing protection at concerts, festivals, etc. Most people are completely unaware how much irreparable damage loudness may cause.

I witnessed our local women's march. Lots of kids. (And the most chill protest march I've ever seen.) If these speakers were used directly on children, they'd certainly have damaged hearing.

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.

Most places have noise ordinances that, like many laws, don't apply to law enforcement.

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...

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?

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

[12.2Hz for males, 12.8Hz for females, evidently.](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.

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.

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?

We need a better voting system than we do now. I strongly believe we'll see much better representation when we can vote outside the two party system without throwing away a vote.

That presumes people wouldn't vote in favor of authoritarian practices.

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.

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

There is a mechanism design to make it easier to fund public goods voluntarily: dominant assurance contracts.

I'm pretty sure that motorcycle helmets with active noise control would help a lot. Also maybe padded bodysuits. But there'd be downsides for protest groups to show up wearing such gear, no?

I think protesting is a largely useless endeavor. It's nothing but a "show of force" in meat-space, that allows the possibility of violent encounters between individuals that have opposing world-views/opinions. Rather, allow people to vote directly on issues that they are passionate about. This leads into direct democracy and is arguably a whole lot more ethical than what we have now.

Agreed. Time and place matters.

My (minor) successes on policy work happened when my whole tribe showed up to testify at hearings, repeated.

To see how this works, attend any public hearing regarding puppies, kittens, kennels, etc. Whereas most hearings have no audience, attendees, the kittens pack the chambers. And the advocates will get their way.

(I've done the street level protests. It feels nice, validating to be around others who agree with you. But mostly it just makes you a target.)

> How can we divest

learn to grow your food

the key is the u.s. is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy (only in certain elections).

the strategy is to support representatives whose opinions you trust and speak persuasively to people to bring them on your side. To do this effectively, you must listen to them and understand their concerns.

there is no quick-fix. you must perform this work at a slow and steady pace your entire life, never feeling confident others can handle it (that their angry facebook memes will stop a demagogue).

When you're given a choice of two candidates and neither of them represent your interests, and this happens time after time, I think it's fair to question the efficacy of the tack you're proposing.

In this situation, another person has to put themselves forward as a candidate. The failure of the society is when nobody else does.

Then you run into the systemic failures of the current political and electoral systems in the US (and some other countries with electoral systems dating back to a similar period) - that voting for a third-party candidate is to throw away your vote for the most acceptable of the two "provided" candidates, and practically guarantee that the least acceptable wins due to the divide in votes.

There are, of course, a variety of electoral systems that allow and encourage third-party candidates to have a chance, but it's very, very hard to change an electoral system that got everyone in the political system where they are, to one which provides them new competition. See parallels with regulatory capture.

As much as I agree that people need to be persistent, steady and patient in their political participation. This doesn't work so long as you're importing foreign-voters en-masse that are largely voting for a specific party, or voting for politicians as a way to reward them for allowing such importation to occur.

Or, have some sort of middle ground between the large gap of representative and direct democracy. Sort of what Switzerland is doing whereby any movement can force the government, by virtue of having enough votes, into having a nation-wide referendum. And it has to be binding for the politicians, to the spirit and letter of the referendum results. Unlike what we're seeing in the UK now.

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