Serbia had the LRAD systems on hand, after buying them in 2022, most likely from Genasys, but possibly from HyperSpike.

https://genasys.com/lrad-products/

It's a legal gray area in Serbia where the use against civilians isn't explicitly forbidden, so they're playing fast and loose and moving fast to crush opposition. It's better than troops just gunning people down, but for a modern, supposedly civilized country it's horrible to see.

The people in power are the type of people that use their power in these ways. The US shouldn't be supplying them. We're not the world police, we don't need to enforce global norms, and we shouldn't be selling hyperoffensive mass crowd control technology. They should be limited to Temu LRAD, or their LRAD at home; we shouldn't be providing them S-Tier dystopian authoritarian kits for DIY oppression.

The people that profited off of this are a special kind of evil. We shouldn't be outfitting dictators, gangsters, or warlords.

But, greed is good. The dollar is king. This is what happens when incentives and principles don't align.

The opposition protesting here is 1/5 of the population of the country . Its basically all people.

You are aware that these LRAD systems have been used against US citizens, aren't you?

Police also regularly use tear gas against US citizens. These are weapons that would violate the Geneva convention, but we're okay with them to disperse a crowd.

Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) (a follow-on to the 1925 "Geneva Convention") allows for the use of riot control agents (like tear gas) for law enforcement purposes.

https://www.opcw.org/our-work/what-chemical-weapon

I think that's inline with what the point the GP was trying to make. Tear gas would otherwise fall into the definition of a weapon that would violate the Geneva Convention if not for the specific earmark that its okay for law enforcement to use it.

Its a bit of a logical loop based only on definitions. Its not against the convention because the law includes the exception, but the exception otherwise goes against the principles of the convention.

> As explained in the military manual of the Netherlands, the prohibition of the use of riot control agents as a method of warfare is inspired by the fact that use of tear gas, for example, in armed conflict “runs the danger of provoking the use of other more dangerous chemicals”. A party which is being attacked by riot control agents may think it is being attacked by deadly chemical weapons and resort to the use of chemical weapons. It is this danger of escalation that States sought to avert by agreeing to prohibit the use of riot control agents as a method of warfare in armed conflict. This motivation is equally valid in international and non-international armed conflicts.

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule75

>This motivation is equally valid in international and non-international armed conflicts.

Okay but clearly protesters aren't going to escalate to mustard gas just because police used tear gas?

I think the argument here is that its okay to use against a crowd because the risk of escalation is very low.

> A party which is being attacked by riot control agents may think it is being attacked by deadly chemical weapons and resort to the use of chemical weapons. It is this danger of escalation that States sought to avert by agreeing to prohibit the use of riot control agents as a method of warfare in armed conflict.

The implication of the statement “These are weapons that would violate the Geneva convention, but we're okay with them to disperse a crowd.” is that riot agents are considered too barbaric to be deployed even in war, which is not the reason these agents are prohibited in wartime use. Instead, there was a worry that it would be too difficult to differentiate riot agents from chemical weapons (e.g. chlorine or mustard gas), which could lead the party attacked with riot agents to retaliate with chemical weapons.

finally someone bringing some reason and evidence to this stupid discussion. thank you

Suppressing protests in US isn't usually law enforcement, its purpose is to violate the law and suppress speech.

The link you were just given offers clarity on that point; the definition does not hinge on the meaning of the word "riot".

In the case of the Bonus Army, it was Herbert Hoover's intent to deny a means of existence with bullets to deny existence of vets and their families even sooner. History really wants to rhyme again soon, which is unfortunate.

The Geneva Convention bans all chemical weapons. Part of the rationale for a total ban is to avoid escalating to more dangerous chemical agents. Helpful r/AskHistorians thread:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gwtj89/the_c...

> Part of the rationale for a total ban is to avoid escalating to more dangerous chemical agents

Chemical weapons are tactically useless for modern militaries [1]. You’re pretty much always better off pounding with high explosives.

And there isn’t a known path to escalation potential. If there were, everyone would be developing it.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

Chemical weapons are tactically useless to the American combat doctrine, as described in that article. As we have seen, the Russian doctrine (and Ukraine's doctrine) relies on much more brute force to push a meter at a time and much more indiscriminate damage. It's hard to imagine chemical weapons being useless.

He makes the mistake of looking at how the US military fights and thinking that is the only way to fight a war. Incidentally, if you looked at how the Roman army used short swords and concluded that "long swords are useless for fighting a war," I bet he would have something to say about it.

> He makes the mistake of looking at how the US military fights and thinking that is the only way to fight a war

Keep reading.

"And, so, where do we still see chemical weapons used? In static-system vs. static-system warfare. Thus, in Syria – where the Syrian Civil War has been waged as a series of starve-or-surrender urban sieges, a hallmark of static vs. static fighting – you see significant use of chemical weapons, especially as a terror tactic against besieged civilians. The limited manpower and capabilities of regime forces have caused the war to deteriorate into a series of sieges, sometimes stretching out years (fighting in Aleppo lasted for four years, for instance; the final siege itself ran from February 2014 to its conclusion in December 2016). Anti-regime forces are often poorly equipped (often completely unable, for instance, to engage regime air-assets) and the civilian populace was completely unprotected against chemical munitions, making them far more vulnerable targets.

But a major factor here is actually weakness, in the Syrian regime forces. Assad simply didn’t have a lot of modern air-to-ground munitions; chemical munitions weren’t being compared for cost- and mission-effectiveness against such modern weapons, but against barrels loaded with explosives, nails and scrap – weapons which would have been primitive by the standards of the 1940s, much less now. And – let’s be honest here – his ground forces lack manpower, but also perform quite poorly. Remember: the question for the effectiveness of chemical weapons is value-over-replacement – while the vulnerability of anti-regime forces increased the value, we also must note that Assad’s heavily weakened, static system forces also substantially reduced the value of the replacement. In a fight between what are, in the last analysis, two weak forces, the calculation on the effectiveness of chemical weapons changes."

Why would e.g. sarin be useful for indiscriminate damage when A) you could drop a conventional or thermobaric bomb instead, and B) you can circumvent sarin by wearing a $200 suit from AliExpress? I'm not seeing how it's meant to fit into Russian military doctrine other than in niche circumstances.

Russian tactics have been largely ineffective and characterized by horrendous losses despite immense advantages in manpower and material

Russian tactics have worked so far in Ukraine, as gruesome as that is.

That very much depends on what you mean by "worked". And it's not like Western militaries are lacking the physical means to engage in heavier and more damaging attacks; they just have viable alternatives that they prefer.

1) Putin has conquered more population than he lost (even just counting fighting age men)

2) Putin has conquered more money/value/resources than he lost due to the conflict (by a factor of 10, maybe 100)

3) Even Ukraine's European allies seem to agree that Putin will get a ceasefire and sanctions relief where he gets to keep what he conquered

It's true that Russia did not achieve it's war goals (destruction or total control of Ukraine, and let's just not talk about the outright embarrassing "in 3 days" part), but they got quite a bit. Perhaps even more important, they got more than enough to make the conflict, at least potentially, a net positive for Putin.

>Chemical weapons are tactically useless for modern militaries

The defense of Azovstal steelworks and Gaza tunnels seems to show otherwise.

It is an obvious fallacy to conflate the usage of tear gas canisters with the usage of mustard gas in WWI. They differ drastically in amount/concentration, area of effect, and long term health risks, thus should be treated differently in considering their usage.

Tear gas clearly sits on a spectrum of non-lethal arms with various other options that are more or less harmful. While it's entirely fair to criticize its use on a case by case basis, insofar as disorderly public gatherings can have varying levels of violence/destruction, it would stand to reason that some instances warrant the use of tear gas.

Generally if you do it to your own people the world is fine with.. just about anything.

Serbia is currently using it on its own people, and yet we here we are reading about it and discussing, with no small amount of outrage.

How do you feel about the defensive use of pepper spray?

Ya, and what about high-velocity lead spray?

> These are weapons that would violate the Geneva convention, but we're okay with them to disperse a crowd.

Isn't that a category ban that came out of a couple specific members of that category that were used and had particularly nasty effects? And then countries' domestic law enforcement rules tend to be defined in different terms.

It is. People think that the "Frangible bullets and teargas banned by the Genevan Conventions" means that they're seen as too cruel to use in war. Unfortunately the "wisdom of crowds" that we've created on social media has decided that it does.

The reality is that we're talking about the views of people in 1925, as informed by a previous group of people in the late 1800's. They were far more concerned with avoiding the use of gas as a weapon than in dealing with the LD50 of the various gasses.

Likewise with frangible/hollow-point ammunition, it isn't even banned by the Geneva Conventions, it was banned under the now-defunct Hague Convention. For better or worse they thought that these "tumbling" or "expanding" bullets were designed to inflict intentionally greater suffering. Who knows maybe the versions that existed in the late 1800's did too, the ones today aren't used because they're worthless against even modest body armor.

But again, people just see text on a picture in a meme and take it to heart.

Except they are used today. Russian 5.45 is famously highly prone to tumbling due to its design with bubble of air in the front of the bullet (even more so than rifle rounds in general). If we look at American 5.56mm, the original M193 was prone to fragmenting, which the original study reports on what would eventually become M16 noted as the reason why it's capable of creating more devastating wounds then the then-standard M80 ball. And modern M855A1 fragments even more reliably (at lower velocities) while still punching through armor.

Pretty much any OTM round is effectively expanding and/or fragmenting (depending on velocity) as well...

So for all practical purposes this convention hasn't been followed for literally decades now. The pretense is that we claim that all these bullet designs just happen to do what they do. Although IIRC the US military authorized use of 9mm JHP in some circumstances, as well, so I think even that veneer is mostly gone by now.

> Who knows maybe the versions that existed in the late 1800's did too

The ones now and back then aren't any different. They do inflict greater suffering when the injury isn't immediately lethal. They essentially maim the target.

There's a legitimate case to be made for home defense because they won't penetrate common building materials nearly as far. It makes them much safer to anyone in the surrounding area.

There are also cases where the additional stopping power is invaluable, for example against a pack of dogs.

You can argue that any GSW that isn't immediately lethal inflicts suffering, I'm not sure how an expanding head changes that. In a handgun round mushrooming is absolutely about terminal ballistics rather than protection against over-penetration, but it is true that expanding .223 and frangible rounds are focused on over-penetration

But again the biggest reason you don't see expanding rounds in war is (especially modern) armor defeats them far more easily than standard .223.

are they against the Geneva convention because of the direct effects, or because in a war you’d then proceed to kill everyone while they’re coughing?

It's because of the direct effects; chlorine gas for instance will almost instantly blind anyone exposed to it, and tear gas can also be fatal. My great-grandfather was gassed in the First World War and only narrowly survived. Chemical weapons were technically already banned by this point, but it was WW1 that prompted the modern Geneva Protocol (not the Geneva Conventions; these are slight different). Unfortunately, none of the Geneva treaties cover their use outside of wartime.

AIUI they are mainly banned because they could lead to escalations in chemical weapons usage. If your enemy uses tear gas vs cs gas, it could be hard to tell right away and you might feel pressure to use all the tools you have available (including lethal chemical weapons) vs. Play by the rules.

Of course if you are fighting a real war, there is probably going to be chem weapons used. It happened in Syria. It is happening in Ukraine. It will keep happening. Geneva convention is wishful thinking.

> Geneva convention is wishful thinking.

It is a convention. It is useful for applying pressure. It certainly seems to reduce their use.

You could as well say that laws against murder or theft or whatever are wishful thinking.

Murder is generally punished. Unless you spew pollutants with known biological harm leading to numerous cancerous deaths and cover it up and pay off enough politicians. Then it is generally rewarded or at least tolerated.

something to consider is that in the Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm) the military used a bunker buster on a Sarin gas storage facility and shot the sarin high into the atmosphere, where it then floated far downwind and landed on US troops. Ofc, reporting on it doesn't really consider Iraqi civilians and is only weepy about US soldiers.

https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/newsroom/articles/year-2022/s...

Both? Indiscriminate chemical weapons is the issue, not the intent. Otherwise wouldn't all weapons be illegal?

Some weapons are intrinsically forbidden because of their effects on individuals: soft-point bullets for instance. These are as discriminate as you want them to be, but are nonetheless prohibited in conflicts. Thus it's not just indiscriminate weapons that are banned by international agreement!

What would ICC think of it, I wonder.

The ICC is fine with it. France is a particularly big fan of firing tear gas canisters at protestors. It's not just the US.

My American Citizen score card:

LRAD + Tear gas 2009

Tear gas 2017

Tear gas 2021

Still got the exhausted canister from 2009 as a souvenir. Carry a bottle of water, the tear gas rinses out quickly.

Yes - we've got a long way to go with regards to these technologies.

When?

Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device#Uni...

Was an especially commonly discussed topic in 2020 during the George Floyd related protests. Some notable video resources on how to defend against these devices and what one can expect: [0] and [1]. To save you time, if i remember correctly, the most effective is one of those plastic riot shields held in reverse to direct the sound back at the sender (notably pretty difficult when you don't want to just hit other protesters, or don't know where the sound is coming from and/or are getting hit by reflections).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXKTBQBugIA

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sqIvak-4Ek

Apparently used multiple times during Black Lives Matter protests: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/06/04/204368...

NYPD -- https://gothamist.com/news/city-settles-lawsuit-protesters-w...

> It's better than troops just gunning people down

Except you're far more likely to use it.

This is why cops don't shoot to "injure" instead of kill (also, it's hard enough for them to hit center of mass in a tense situation; there's no way they hit a leg.) It's lethal force. Which means that for its use to be legal, that person has to die because they are an imminent lethal threat to others. If injury is sufficient to resolve a situation, they weren't an imminent lethal threat.

Tasers started out as a way to temporarily incapacitate someone so you didn't have to shoot them. Now they're being used as compliance and corporal punishment devices.

Lots of videos out there of cops ordering people to do something while shocking them with something that makes their entire body lock up and is extremely painful.

They know the person can't do what they want them to. "Stop resisting!" while tasering someone is the cop version of "stop hitting yourself!"

the only acceptable condition to use it maybe if there are riot or violence breakout in that area not for peaceful protest

If you were at a protest that was starting to get a bit rowdy and somebody used one of these on you, what would you do? I'd either come back prepared for actual violence, or switch from protest to sabotage.

It just screams "escalation" to me.

> If you were at a protest that was starting to get a bit rowdy and somebody used one of these on you, what would you do?

Leave. The moment it turns into a riot you’re doing damage to your cause. (If you’re in a protest and see hooligans, restrain them.)

You might enjoy reading Rules for Radicals if you haven't already. If your riot can provoke a worse response from the authority, it can help your cause. The reaction is the action.

It may be that this protest in Serbia got a bit rowdy and riotous (see "diversity of tactics") and now the headline is about the government's use of a disproportionate weapon against protestors, not about a riot.

> You might enjoy reading Rules for Radicals if you haven't already. If your riot can provoke a worse response from the authority

One motif of Allinsky's message is the importance of organisation. Triggering tear gas against your peaceful protest is one thing. Losing control of it such that stores start getting looted is not.

> It may be that this protest in Serbia got a bit rowdy and riotous (see "diversity of tactics") and now the headline is about the government's use of a disproportionate weapon against protestors

This is the first-order effect. They got a tweet. (Not a headline.) I'm sceptical they'll get a second because this isn't a clear case of a nonlethal weapon being used against a peaceful crowd, it's something more muddled, and as a result there are zero comments in this thread discussing what the protesters are protesting.

Rules for Radicals is one of my favorite books and I don't think this an accurate summary of what Alinsky says, at all. It's a short book, you can get it for free online, people should just read it.

This tracks so much with what you’ve said before.

That's good advice, but I mean what do you do when you get home? Now that your right to assemble has been effectively revoked, what's your next step?

> what do you do when you get home? Now that your right to assemble has been effectively revoked

Your right to assembly remains. You just made a risk-adjustment decision about not participating in a riot. The correct thing to do is go home, regroup and join the protest leadership to help plan another protest where the hooliganism is kept in check.

Come back the next day?

The reason why these are legal is precisely because they are so ineffective.

Who defines what counts as a riot?

The people who have the state-sanctioned monopoly on violence are the ones who get to decide when a protest becomes a riot or unlawful assembly.

I’m not saying they’re always wrong but when only one group gets to pull the card that allows them to shut down protest it creates perverse incentives.

> Who defines what counts as a riot?

Practically, the media and the public at large. I forgot the source, but you can pretty much directly see the negative effect of e.g. bridge blocking on public sympathy for a cause.

Ukrainians didn't leave, and they ended up taking their country back. Twice.

So, the moment a single cop lobs a tear gas can at a peaceful protest, is the moment when the protest starts doing damage to its cause?

That would explain why they seem to be so eager to employ violence against peaceful protestors.

> the moment a single cop lobs a tear gas can at a peaceful protest, is the moment when the protest starts doing damage to its cause?

No. The trigger was "a protest that was starting to get a bit rowdy." Not a peaceful protest that gets gassed. The latter is extremely effective at generating public sympathy.

This thinking is dangerous and wrong.

You cannot fight against violence without violence. Violence is most effective when it's implied/threatened, before it is materialized.

The goal of protests are:

1) To serve as a show of force (they are literally called demonstrations in some languages because you demonstrate your ability to organize and act - large numbers of people are capable of large amounts of violence).

2) To paint your side as the victim by provoking an overreaction.

Westerners often think that 2 is sufficient because they live in democracies where a large part of the government is also unwilling to use violence and become the aggressor. But against a dictator who is willing to use as much violence against the people as is available to him, 2 alone is worthless.

Goal 2 only serves to maximize the number of people willing to rise up but the real goal is to break the enemy's will to fight. Either to make the dictator lose his nerve and flee or to kill him because corpses don't have a will.

The point is it's a delicate balancing act to paint yourself as victim/weak to get more support and angry/strong to make the dictator back down. Westerners focus on the first part because it works against their governments but against greater oppression, you will not get anywhere without actual will to fight and kill.

And that is possibly the aim. When the protests turn into violence or sabotage, the state uses that to justify its own violent repression.

so you saying if there are violence or sabotage, you let these people do it??? how can that be better

They're suggesting that the point of an authority using this weapon on a mass of people may be to cause those people to become violent so that the authority can use the subsequent fear to justify further abuses.

Which I think is likely, but also a bad decision. Generally speaking, the job of a legitimate government is to make violent protest unnecessary. So depending on the situation, the best action may indeed be to back down and rethink how things got there in the first place, rather than continuing to provoke more violence. Continuing to escalate is not a sustainable strategy for anyone that intends to maintain power for long, as the numbers are not generally on their side.

Yeah but the problem is with mass movement people like this, there are good chance people that can take advantage of these protest (looting,rob etc)

the point of these weapon is not "defeat" but mostly to crowd control right because you cant rule out if there is no crime even in peaceful protest, both things can be true at the same time

also if such weapon is not permanently injure or harm people, I can see why this weapon is in need like pepper spray

yes, it is an escalation.

Governance is maintaining public support for the government having a monopoly on violent escalation.

If the government does not have this power, then any person has an individual veto over the rest of the country.

Laws are used to describe how and when individuals can protest.

As it turns out, part of maintaining that "public support" is not taking advantage of it. The very idea of a stable monopoly on violent escalation is obviously meant to deter violence. When it instead makes violence more likely (because the monopolist is suddenly planning to abuse its monopoly) that's quite a big change and people can be expected to react accordingly.

That is correct. It really depends on the temperature of public sentiment .

Many protests get a charitable assumption in the US as a legacy of civil rights and the Vietnam anti-war movements. However, I think a lot of that good will is eroding.

Each country has different perceptions, and ultimately, each protest is different (e.g. who shot first, is it abuse, ect)

Are chemical irritants preferable, then? Or just LEOs in riot gear with rubber batons? There's no amount of pushback or repercussion that a rioter will feel is fair or humane, and the mindset of "I'll turn violent and/or destructive if my participation in civil unrest is punished" is a perfect justification for these systems to exist.

>Are chemical irritants preferable

Absolutely. You can heal from those. LRADs are maiming weapons designed to cause permanent damage. Under any reasonable legal system their use would be considered a war crime.

LRADs are not designed to cause permanent damage. They are explicitly designed under the intention of being a way to disperse a crowd without long term harm.

There hasn’t been much research on long term health impacts, but it’s not a tool to maim people.

https://phr.org/our-work/resources/health-impacts-of-crowd-c...

160 dB way over hearing safe. Most rifle rounds are in >140 dB territory, and that is quite sufficient to give you permanent hearing damage.

They are designed to produce sound pressure levels that cause permanent hearing damage from short exposure, which makes them maiming weapons. There is no safe way to use an LRAD. Anybody who uses an LRAD is evil. Stop making excuses for despicable behavior. Deliberately causing hearing damage is no better than smashing people's fingers with hammers.

maybe the government should consider protestor demands and reform in many cases

> There's no amount of pushback or repercussion that a rioter will feel is fair or humane

I mean you're talking about using violence against people to stop or prevent property damage. Most options are off the table in the moment, in the same way you can't execute someone if you catch them vandalizing your car. Smashing their fingers with a hammer wouldn't probably kill them but you can't do that either.

After-the-fact repercussions like criminal charges or civil liabilities, well, it doesn't matter how they feel about it? That's not how court works.

This reads like you suppose the only thing to do is let rioters vent their outrage against whatever objects happen to be in their way at the time, and hope that there exists some legal comeuppance after the fact.

Why can't some reasonable degree of force be used to prevent property damage? What moral dilemma exists that makes protecting property deserve a comparison to executing someone?

> Why can't some reasonable degree of force be used

No one said that. It was suggested that physically injuring someone in direct retaliation for property damage wasn't appropriate. Add to that the fact that riot control measures are hardly targeted.

There are many non-violent options available. Sometimes rioters will escalate violently against the officers carrying those out. It's far less likely anyone objects to proportionate and necessary use of force in such cases.

I don't find it acceptable for any reason whatsoever.

It's a weapon meant to deny the use of an area by threatening non-selective permanent physical damage. There are very few legitimate civil use cases for something like that.

Something like protecting the capitol from being stormed by a mob?

You could outfit the front steps with crewed machine guns, but apparently they only do that if they expect people protesting in favor of liberal values.

I thought they made these sound cannons so they didn’t have to mow down their own populace?

I also feel like that’d have a counterproductive effect.

Only if you want to justify the mob's presence there.

I might have tried just closing and locking the doors first.

Yes because Trump's lot are too stupid to break down windows and doors

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/01/06/jim-himes...

You really believe the security of those windows in the Capitol comes down to the glass? That you're even willing to accept this proposition says something.

Anyways, to my point, clearly observable in that picture are security shutters, on the sides of the window, left open and unlocked. I might have closed and locked those.

It's the most important time in human history to protest/fight unchecked power because it's likely the last era of humanity that we are going to be able to.

We are getting to the point where the technology that fuels oppression, including extremely pervasive surveillance, privatized intelligence services with no oversight, scalable AI agents that do as they are told, and crowd "maiming" or other forceful dispersal techniques are growing past the ability to resist them.

Wars historically happened under conditions where people died but the planet was largely left in tact, but we now have 3 countries with the ability to erase entire cities or make the world functionally uninhabitable by humans, which absolutely changes the calculus of war. If you do not have nukes your sovereignty is questionable.

Likewise if the tools to put down crowds, find saboteurs, and weed out dissent is perfected, meaningful dissent can only be expressed through withdrawal and there is no final check on abuses of power where any, instead of some, of the "checkers" of power are left in tact. Anti-dissent technology has the potential for a nuclear moment that fundamentally changes the calculus of protest and I think AI is very much potentially that.

> it's likely the last era of humanity that we are going to be able to

Athenians were saying this in respect of writing.

>it's likely the last era of humanity

No. Just no. No matter what what the thing is. It just isn't.

That's not a reason to NOT protest/fight unchecked power. It just isn't the reason to do it.

That is a pretty disingenuous quotation, you cut it mid sentence destroying the context:

> It's the most important time in human history to protest/fight unchecked power because it's likely the last era of humanity that we are going to be able to.

I cut the context because the context doesn't matter.

Anyone making the claim that this likely the last era of humanity that anything is just wrong. The future (even just the future of humanity) is longer and weirder and wilder and more filled with unknowns than anyone alive now can imagine.

This is not the last era of humanity that anything.

We should still be protesting/fighting unchecked power.

Was expressing this fear to my wife and kids the other day. Ubiquitous cameras everywhere (like in the UK for many years) and other surveillance technology has always been a concern but had scaling limits -- but when you combine it now with the cheap ease of machine learning technologies we have a serious problem.

And then consider drones, mobile devices. And then mass disinformation and/or disruption via LLMs.

As a long time advocate of old school mass action, and a believe in active protest movements as part of a healthy democracy, I have a strong feeling of unease. I've had it since about 9/11, but it's now really bad.

e.g. if you know, with certainty, that heading out to a protest could lead to your instant termination from your job because a drone passed over and took a photo and identified all 100,000 people in the crowd instantly.. would you still go?

Or if having been identified, some malevolent actor could just turn around and mass produce fake content from you and others in the crowd, to discredit you?

Shivers.

Close friend who was on the spot described it as car or plane running towards you, you don't only hear it, you also feel vibrations in the body creating panic and fear.

All demonstrations of LRAD I heard on youtube were with high pitched sound, not a "whoosh" as witnesses experienced last night in Belgrade. Can these devices play any kind of sound?

What is described by victims, and what can be heard on some recordings from last nights, sounds more like Vortex Cannon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJpChS-_RJg

Even without knowing the background of those protests: It is heartbreaking to see a crowd of peaceful people (seemingly during a moment of silence) being attacked by their own country and fleeing in panic and pain.

Here's some background: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2g8v32q30o

Another video, from a different angle:

https://www.reddit.com/r/serbia/comments/1jchks6/novi_snimci...

Please take into account that this occurred during the fifteen-minute silence observed by the protesters in memory of the fifteen victims of the accident, which the protesters blame on the government corruption and which was the very reason for the start of the protests.

I've seen some theories that it was actually an ADS (basically a low-power microwave beam, immensely painful but tuned to be just under the threshold to actually cause visible burns), since there haven't been any reported cases of permanent deafness yet.

The student organizers in the crowd did an incredible job clearing people out of there before the police could escalate further and cause more mob-crowding panic deaths.

>cases of permanent deafness

Ah so these sonic weapons are indeed seriously harmful. I was wondering if hearing loss was a result.

It really isn't smart to do this kind of thing.

Once an organization actually attacks you, it's very easy to decide that any legitimacy they view themselves as having is irrelevant and to come back next Monday with mortars and machine guns.

Reminds me of the escalation seen in the Ukrainian Maidan, went from some heavy handed policing to non-lethal rounds (eg: teargas / beanbags) to BBs to snipers and live firing on crowds.

Yes, although that was exceptionally irrational, to the point where I don't really feel I understand the events.

It would be rational if you would think killing a few (or a lot of) protesters will intimidate the rest of the country into submission. It didn't, but it could have.

Timothy Snyder put his history of Ukraine class on YouTube. The lesson on the Maidan was done by a guest speaker. The presentation is mostly dry and the person isn't the best speaker, but the content was quality and very worth watching, especially if you have any beliefs in "color revolutions" or American imperialism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_CLI3xY58&list=PLh9mgdi4rN...

It was now a revolt against произвол, an idea of arbitrariness tinged with tyranny, helplessness in the face of power, the feeling that the powers that be can do whatever they want to you, and you are helpless, that you are being treated as a plaything, as a thing and not as a human being, as an object and not as a subject, and the Maidan became a revolt against произвол, it became an insistence on being treated as a person and not as a thing, as a subject not as an object, and they began to call themselves on the Maidan the revolution of dignity.

It seems that Yanukovych (Ukraine's corrupt Russian puppet leader) was counted on the fact that if you shock people this way (brutally beating up protestors), not enough to kill people, but enough to terrify them, the parents will freak out and they will pull their kids off the streets... (after many people's children were beaten) Suddenly you have parents joining their children on the streets, and that is the moment that creates the revolution...

But nobody thinks that way. If they can kill your friends, they can round you up afterwards and kill you.

Once it gets to that point, there's no reason not to immediately organize a military response.

Almost every single authoritarian thinks that way. That’s how they stay in power. Please google Volksaufstand (1953), Hungarian Uprising (1956), Prague Spring (1968), Tiananmen (1989), Vilnius Massacre (1991)…

>But nobody thinks that way.

And yet history shows many (dozens?) of instance where that's exactly what most people thought.

Hold on to that thought we're going to need it this summer.

Unfortunately, it worked in Belarus.

I knew those protests were going to fail as soon as I heard on the news that police were throwing down their weapons and joining the protesters.

The way to defeat a dictator is not by painting yourself as a defenseless victim. (That is only useful as the first step to gain support.) The way is to show him you have a greater potential for violence than him and if he doesn't flee, he will be punished (usually killed, sometimes tortured first).

They had huge numbers and if at least some police were on their side they were on the right track to escalating the threat of violence. At some point the dictator would have either broken or the violence would have materialized. But that requires the good people to keep their weapons and use them.

Estimates are that something like 300,000+ people were out actively protesting just in Belgrade... in a country of 6.6 million people.

Yes, but polarization is a possibility. You can't know you're the majority, so until violence is used against you, you don't necessarily have a reason to turn the thing into a civil war.

Something like 1.6 million people across Serbia were protesting across the country, last I heard. They're the majority.

That seems reasonable, but my comment was intended as a continuation of my general 'if an organization attacks you...'.

No, I'm actually not really talking about Serbia at all, but about the general situation, i.e. about violence and how one should react to it.

Basically, I'm saying that if one is attacked, the one can do as one likes, but if one is not attacked, then one can leave things to democracy; and it is difficult to know whether ones position, in the absence of an election, has popular support.

you are stating this with confidence but it doesn't sound at all convincing - where are you getting this from?

aggressive crowd control measures have been used very often and they almost never result in an armed rebellion. that's just nonsense. There are many MANY levels of escalation left for both sides - as well as the real expectation of behind the scenes diplomacy and within-the-system politics.

like really, are you just fantasizing about a balkan civil war because it's exciting? or are you trying to get more people to think that civil disagreement may as well be considered warfare? just what are you on about, mate?

> any legitimacy they view themselves as having

I'm pretty sure that's not actually how power or legitimacy work anyway.

Once they're shooting at you, or going after you in some other way, that legitimacy etc. is irrelevant, simply because they're going after you.

The solution is then always an organized military response. This applies whether it's your government or somebody else's.

> The solution is then always an organized military response.

In actual history, not always, and not that often.

Case in point, for example, the Peterloo Massacre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre

   took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England, on Monday 16 August 1819. Eighteen people died and 400–700 were injured when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.

the response to that, from the general public, was general outrage, mocking of government, but no "organized military response".

The immediate effect of Peterloo was a crackdown on reform. The government instructed the police and courts to go after the journalists, presses and publication of the Manchester Observer.

  For a few months following Peterloo it seemed to the authorities that the country was heading towards an armed rebellion. Encouraging them in that belief were two abortive uprisings, [..], and the discovery and foiling of [..] conspiracy to blow up the cabinet that winter.

  By the end of the year, the government had introduced legislation, later known as the Six Acts, to suppress radical meetings and publications, and by the end of 1820 every significant working-class radical reformer was in jail; civil liberties had declined to an even lower level than they were before Peterloo.

The urge for reform increased, resolve stiffened, and eventually (after some time) change came about.

  Events such as [ ..these.. ] all serve to indicate the breadth, diversity and widespread geographical scale of the demand for economic and political reform at the time.

  Peterloo had no effect on the speed of reform, but in due course all but one of the reformers' demands, annual parliaments, were met. Following the Great Reform Act 1832 [ ... ]

These LRADs have always been planned to be used against mass protests, from day one.

Planned? Perhaps. Destined? Certainly.

The imperial boomerang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

This strikes at the core of the idea of solidarity.

If you see injustice but do nothing, you invite the same injustice on yourself.

Injustice at it's core is an arbitrary execution of power, so suffering injustice anywhere is to let power stay unchecked which communicates that there are no consequences for abuses of power, which only invites more abuses of power.

If there aren't consequences for power being used against others, there won't be consequences for power being used against you.

The Basque Country has been a huge sandbox against the later leftist groups in the rest of Spain.

LRADs have been used against protesters in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, France, and Germany.

I assume it was used to disperse riots, in Serbia it was used as people were standing peacefully, observing 15 minutes of silence.

A lot of the uses in Western countries weren't even to disperse anyone, they were used as giant speakers to broadcast messages, e.g. during Covid in Germany.

It's crazy to compare that to what seems to have happened in Serbia. It's like saying "Carter has used a hammer, too" when commenting on a murder, and leaving out that Carter used the hammer to build houses with Habitat for Humanity.

"whataboutism" is pernicious, widespread, and devastating to civil society.

Precedent if I like it, whataboutisn otherwise.

I don't necessarily dispute that claim, but do you have evidence to support it ?

It's extensively covered on the wikipedia page alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_acoustic_device#Uni...

Also if you just google "LRAD use in [country]" there are source for any country you're actually wondering about...

If you actually read the page that you've linked, you'll see that many European countries were just using it to deliver COVID notifications

Along with offensive uses in Greece, Japan, the US, and New Zealand along with some uses on sea going vessels against pirates. It's not just notification uses and even just as a notification messages there are reports of hearing damage when turned too high.

that's not necessarely the weapon LRAD, Long Range Acoustic Devices may also be used for communication. I would be really alerted if this kind of weapon would be used in Germany.

> In the first half of 2020, Bad Homburg's fire brigade and city police used an LRAD 100X system more than 60 times to deliver COVID-19 information.

LRAD 100X: https://danimex.com/products?ProductID=PROD1666

The page also lists offensive/anti-protest usages in New Zealand & USA plus a number of other places as well. For Australia the usage is somewhat ambiguous but even used just as an "announcement" it can be turned up strong enough to be painful.

Very important to know, though could you share a source where we can read about it?

  The LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) was used for the first time in the USA in Pittsburgh during the time of G20 summit on September 24-25th, 2009

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

  The city of Pittsburgh has agreed to pay more than $200,000 to settle two cases stemming from the actions of the city during the September 2009 G-20 Summit, including $72,000 to Karen Piper, a bystander who suffered permanent hearing loss after Pittsburgh police deployed a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) on a neighborhood street.

* https://www.aclupa.org/en/press-releases/city-pittsburgh-set...

What’s an LRAD? Explaining the ‘sonic weapons’ police use for crowd control and communication (2022) - https://theconversation.com/whats-an-lrad-explaining-the-son...

I wonder how the engineers and scientists who contributed to that less-lethal weapon feel about it.

Probably enjoyed working on cool sci-fi shit. Invisible weapons are pretty cool -- though I think conceptually the heat ray class (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System?useskin=v...) is cooler than the LRAD class. How they're used or should be used? An unimportant question in the face of coolness. Then there's just basic pride in good engineering or craftsmanship that can help spark joy in whatever one is working on, from weapons to some hairy enterprise legacy ball of mud you're slowly making improvements to. A silly quote I've always liked, from Nathaniel Borenstein: "It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a "DestroyBaghdad" procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a "DestroyCity" procedure, to which "Baghdad" could be given as a parameter."

"However, it is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb."[1]

1: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer

Reminds me of a meme about how as an aerospace graduate, after a year and a thousand rejections, you just need to “live, laugh, Lockheed Martin”

I've worked on lethal weapons. I feel great!

@2OEH8eoCRo0

> I've worked on lethal weapons. I feel great!

Assuming that "I feel great" was with respect to having worked on lethal weapons, can you elaborate a bit? Do you consider your work to be supporting good cause(s) and feel it was well motivated for you to work on them, or do you just have no moral grievances working on lethal weapons (for whatever psychological reason)?

(Just to be clear, I think weapons in general can be used for good, as well as for bad.)

From your perspective, can you guess how you'd feel building a less-lethal weapons system like is the subject of this post, given what you think the typical uses of it would be?

"Well I am not breaking any laws so this won't be used against me. And I need money anyway"

This has to be about people who pushes the button. Not about the people who invents the technology. Otherwise you might want to stop all the kitchen knifes production, cause people occasionally use those to kill each other.

Okay, but if the tool is a weapon and is designed specifically to inflict harm on humans, then I think that analogy completely breaks down.

No there is a very clear difference of responsibility between creating an instrument that can be turned towards harm and one that is designed to cause it. Someone designed, engineered, and built these tools knowing this is what they were to be used for.

It should be about the entity who brings something like this to a market and profits off it. In this case a corporation.

Is there any counter measure for this?

Hardcore hearing protection?

Noise cancelling headphones?

Handheld sound insulation "shield"?

Use some thick metal plate as a shield and let it reflect the sound back towards the source, most likely. Or something foamy, like mattresses or the like, to just attenuate it. But I don't think any of that would protect you if you're facing 160 dB (though it would indeed be useful if you're farther from the source); the appropriate tactic then is indeed to disperse uniformly over a larger area and make it infeasible for your adversary to launch a concentrated attack. (After all, this is how actual present-day military tactics copes with the existence of much older "area denial" weapons, such as machine guns, tanks etc.) Your protests should then become more "hit and run" in style, relying on highly visible gimmicks rather than mere physical presence to demonstrate continued support.

That's the exact same circumstances that lead to the development of guerilla warfare. I don't know how you'd go around creating a "highly visible gimmick" that has any lasting impact though.

The point is to simply demonstrate mass support by any means available. You can do it by gathering as a large crowd, but when that becomes a vulnerability your tactics must evolve somehow.

Dunno, ask Tesla owners how they're feeling about driving their vehicle and parking it, lately. On that note, ask Musk how he feels about the trending direction of his stock value. The highly visible gimmick of swastikas spraypainted on cars, torched charging stations & Cybertrucks, etc. seems to have an effect. Probably a lasting one, though that remains to be seen of course.

Once there's violence targeting you, the solution is to bring real weapons and resolve it using ordinary military tactics, that is, you kill the operator.

That sounds bold and exciting, but it's clearly false and terrible advice.

Violence, like warfare, is politics by other means. Every expert knows that law of warfare - the first law of warfare, in a sense - that it ends when and only when there is political agreement. Even in warfare, violence just buys time and changes your political position.

In countries with rule-of-law, you can use the political / legal system to stop the violence and hold accountable the perpetrators. In countries without, the only solution is political.

It's also well-established that non-violence and other tactics can be quite effective. While if you attack back and injure others, your credibility and legality is gone - nobody will listen to you or pay much attention to 'they started it' (which the other side will dispute anyway).

Once there's violence targeting you, the politics is over and a different kind of problem solving begins.

If someone has attacked you and there has been no apology or attempt to solve the situation, he must be eliminated. Once he's done it, he may well try again, in which case you might die. Better then to get rid of him.

> the only solution is political.

This an idealized version of revolution and assumes elections are available and respected... There's rarely no violence during the fall of authoritarian regimes, even the most famous version of non-violent protest succeeding in India included a lot of fighting by Indian nationalists that pushed Britain to withdraw.

Read some Fanon, then come back and review your comment.

>And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrest, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. What about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs [Soviet state institutions] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

If…if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! … We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago

"Attack is the best form of defence" is a well-grounded doctrine, but it's not mutually exclusive with protecting yourself. Armies use armoured vehicles even though armour-piercing shells exist, for example.

It's also not always necessary; actively using force against the authorities would essentially be the start of a civil war, and personally I don't think starting a civil war is more likely to result in change than peaceful protest. For instance, Serbia is to some extent reliant on the EU, and has expressed an interest in joining. That should force the current government to reconsider and crack down on corruption much better than an attempted coup would.

Full disclosure: I have never been to Serbia and this is just my personal feeling. But for expressly peaceful protests to seamlessly turn into a full-blown revolution, and a successful one at that, seems incredibly unlikely to me.

Yes, but these kinds of systems are not actually very good as military weapons. They are easily countered by simply shooting the operators.

Are they? They seem easy enough to operate remotely, or by a guy in a tank or a bulletproof Popemobile or whatever.

Defensive measure are also enjoyable as they give an increased tactical field - as to put it, they increase the luck area.

Yes, but presumably dealing with just a couple of systems like this has to be a quick matter. These things are probably off right now, so it's just a matter of finding them, shooting the people guarding them and either destroying or taking them.

No, he's probably just around the corner, having just set up the speakers and put on his hearing protection.

Yes, these weapons are much shorter ranged than an AK-47 in trained hands. They are not really for fighting wars.

The report I read said it relied on bone conduction, so hearing protection wouldn't do a whole lot. Only things that can attenuate low frequency sounds before it gets to the ear. So muff style headphones might work, or mass

It's not so much that LRAD relies on bone conduction to inflict pain (and sensorineural hearing loss!), but that the sound levels are so high that even if you block the air conduction route with earplugs, the bone conduction route (approximately 30 dB of attenuation compared with air) still might deliver enough sound to the inner ear to cause pain and hearing loss.

This kind of thing is a problem on aircraft carriers, where people working on the flight deck are so close to loud jets that no amount of conventional hearing protection will adequately conserve hearing. Creare has been working for the last decade and a half on special helmets for the US Navy to overcome this issue, resulting in the HGU-99/P Hearing Protection Helmet.

Can you have a device which upon detecting the frequency emits some kind of counter vibration that cancels out th attack?

This is how active noise cancellation works in headphones. You stick little microphones on the outside of the headphones, then play back what’s picked up through the headphones themselves but with a very slight delay so all the peaks and troughs match up. The problem is that you need to put out sounds at least as loud, and that’s a pretty bad thing to get even slightly wrong if the energy levels are that high.

You do it with the waves inverted otherwise the delay would have to be dynamic and frequency dependent.

Not sure how all NC earpones work, but I'd say you still need the delay to properly process the sound and mix it with whatever is playing (unless you rawdog the input flipped and amplified directly in analog).

Normally sounds don't change in frequency that often so that's good enough (tm). I can hear myself typing now (short burst of sound), but the washing machine nearby, which is louder without earphones, is completely gone.

It's not theoretically impossible but it is completely impractical to engineer such a thing - destructive interference has to be precisely matched to cancel out a sound, and if it's not you just get "beats" as the phases overlap.

And that match depends on matching frequency and distance - or having a very fast tuning system, and then you've got to do all this in a device that's not just another LRAD (at which point you're back to "the best defense is a good offense").

Ear muffs aren’t going to do much against 160dB

For all we know, certain types of deafness may be immune.

Probably also worth watching a related video from the same channel: "Defeating Microwave Weapons! - Part 1" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg_aUOSLuRo

FPV drone blowing up the LRAD. Total cost below $1000.

At that point, you should realize that a round of 7.62 is under $1 and equally effective.

An LRAD is a big speaker array so you'd need a lot of shots to take out enough of the array or a lucky shot and angle to hit some control box.

The protesters described the noise it was like something huge was flying past over them, looking at the reaction it must’ve been terrifying

in case anyone’s curious about the context of the protest, I wrote a brief summary for an outside perspective about a month ago https://markoanastasov.com/signals/serbia-student-revolution...

Excellent write up. Thank-you. Not anything in the available press, or media, has explained it so well.

From the videos and the description, it looks like it basically makes you think there’s a vehicle approaching and everyone runs away to not get run over.

But would this actually work repeatedly or could you actively override the panic effect if you become aware that it’s just an illusion?

As I understand, you can override the panic, but lose your hearing.