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Advanced Anti Electronic Weapons 99

Posted by CmdrTaco from the as-long-as-it-happens-to-the-other-guy dept.
brennanw writes "ABCNews COM has a transcript from a new story about Russian and US research into high-frequency energy weapons. Not really Star Wars or Star Trek stuff, closer to directed Electromagnetic pulses that can fry computers, automobiles... Interesting stuff, esp. if you're paranoid (like me). " It seems like that guy really likes his job. Kind of a freaky read.
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Advanced Anti Electronic Weapons More

Advanced Anti Electronic Weapons

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  • One of the Survival Research Labs guys is involved.

    The Experimental Interaction Unit [eiu.org]

    BTW nukes can give you 50,000 volts per meter. So a five inch bus run (12.7 cm) could give you a cool 6000-plus volts. That oughta fry most chips.

  • Poke around glubco.com and you'll find a microwave weapon. Heck, you could probably get a microwave weapon by defeating the safety switch that keeps your microwave from running with the door open.

  • wow.. (Score:1)

    by drwiii ( 434 )
    So Microsoft has found a way to crash computers without even being near them.. No surprise.

    Seriously though, this looks like some pretty neat technology.

    "It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. Then it's just fun you can't see."

  • It seems to me that I read another story like this, except the military was looking at using ultra-low frequency soundwaves to cause the enemy to lose control of their bodily functions.

    I can picture it now: all COs will have to make sure that everyone in their company has gone to the bathroom before they go out on patrol...

    ----

  • Looking into lasers is bad for your eyes. You think? Maybe this is why even consumer devices like CD drives have warning labels on them... (With your one remaining eye, do not look back into the laser...)

    And electromagnetic pulses are bad for electronics. Umm... didn't we all learn this one in "Surviving a Nuclear War 101"? (Hide under a desk or table until the shockwave has passed. Have plenty of canned food on hand. Make sure you have a manual can opener, your electric one will not work because of EMP. Do not use elevators during nuclear attacks; use the stairs instead. Do not attempt to converse with dead bodies, it only causes psychological problems...)

    And what's the KBG, anyway? Is that the new politically correct spelling of "KGB"? (Dyslexics, untie! You have nothing to lose but your chinas...)

    Honestly, the mainstream media these days...
  • http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/ [niu.edu]

    Criticism of electronic warfare, especially as portrayed by the media.

  • I don't image it would take a very big EM-bomb to cause problems. All it takes is a small briefcase in the luggage compartment and *boom*!


    Please explain this: if a terrorist can get a heavy package, filled with electronics, metal, and batteries past airport security...WHY (instead of using a conventional bomb) would he/she use an untested and unproven EMP bomb?

    That's scary.


    What I find even scarier is the gullibility of the American public to fall for such crap like this (I believe an article in the Crypt noted that the video cameras in the *car* were unaffacted by the "ray gun". To be fair, I didn't see the segment, so I don't know).


    Cheap too. Cheap weapons never help me sleep at nights. And I'm only slightly paranoid.


    Instead of BS HREF gun crap like this, worry about biological warfare (IMO, an even bigger threat and proven technology too).

  • Posted by Matt Bartley:

    I've heard they are quite common in Japan at places like restaurants and movie theaters.
  • Posted by kanIbIz:

    w8 until they come out with a new ver of the terrosist handbook that tells all the little kiddies how to build this stuff. little different then the slingshot i used;]
  • The Krasniarsk [sp?] RADAR installation, IIRC.

    Don Negro
  • When will these be available to consumers?

    I'm getting real tired of the neighbor's car stereo pumping after midnight. >:)
  • True, but knives are much quieter.

  • Yep (Score:1)

    by alany ( 1398 )
    HERF and EMP weapons are nothing new.

    I don't think too many of the 'HERF gun' guys really have any idea what they are talking about though. The power supply unit for a CW microwave HERF device would be so big and heavy you wouldn't back pack it.

    Kinda reminds me of the idea of carrying a rail gun, sure you might just be able to lift it, but the recoil would liquify your skeleton.

    EMP generators are practical though, I have a bit of text (hersay basically) on my homepage that talks a little about them. As a matter of fact I recently registered herf.org to put up a site to dispell some of the EM weapon rumours. (it isn't up yet)

    I have a 3" round by 10" long device that can kill digital watches and other small unshielded electronics from about 1 metre. It was built from an old photo flash unit reworked to store about 20 Joules. It has an anoying effect of magnetising the shadow mask in VDUs too.
  • This stuff has been around for years. Search for EMP weapons, HERF (high energy radio frequency) weapons. The theory behind this is easy: charge up a bunch of capacitors and discharge their load into coil. The implementation is (supposedly) complex, although I think that someone with 100k$ for equipment and R&D can do that.

    Also, do a search for TEMPEST. It is an army standard to protect their equipment from such attacks (basically a Faraday cage, with specs of how much EMI will be detectable from inside). It used to be very secret until about 5 years ago, but now you can buy TEMPEST-certified computer cases on the street. Someone (uncle Ira?) was selling them at last two DefCons for like 500$:). Be warned, these are HEAVY :)

    By rumours, many military buildings are TEMPEST-proof, walls/windows are covered with electroconductive solution.

  • The college that I went to was about 10 miles from a Stategic Air Command base (they even invited junior & senior engineering students for tours of the planes and simulators...I got to sit in a B-1B). A friend of mine used to be in the AF and knew some of the technicians at the base. On of them got a speeding ticket on the way to work (speed trap near the base entrance). Later, while working on one of the planes, he discovered that he could see the cop that gave him the ticket. So he decided to test the piece of electronic warfare units he was fixing to fry every piece of electronics in that police cruiser. =)

    My friend also said they would often use the radar units that were in the shop to warm up coffee and lunch.

  • Yep (Score:1)

    by cirby ( 2599 )
    The thing about HERF guns and the like is that you don't *need* a continuous output. For example, a 10-amp circuit at 120 volts is 1200 watts (less than most hair dryers). Charge a capacitor with it for a second or so, and discharge quickly. For a couple of milliseconds, you get power levels in the megawatt/second range.

    Scale that gadget of your up with a bigger power supply, and see what happens.

  • Hell, they (The US and Russion Governments...) have had this evil stuff for years now.

    EMP bombs (Glide bomb with lots of high energy density capacitors and lots of coil wire- a small explosive charge causes the high-discharge rate capacitors to dump into the coil when the bomb reaches it's designated target; it'll nuke any radio gear nearby and possibly take out other solid state devices as well), microwave guns designed to suppress the operation of electronics on aircraft (By either causing induced currents in the circuitry that cause a lack of syncronization within computer devices (they lose sync, quit talking with each other) or at higher power levels, burn out the electronics), etc.

    Go out and surf the WWW for pages with discussions of HERF (High-Energy RF) guns, HARRP (An Ionosphere "heater" that the DOD operates up in Alaska), and EM other warfare toys. It's all out there and it's all very real.
  • Microwave ovens put out around 1 to 2 kilowatts. Size a narrow beam antenna on the waveguide and you can direct the beam and heat a cup of coffee across the street, start a fire, or . . . Not to mention magnetrons in commercial products have a lower vacuum and are electricaly noisy. Communication links will go down...

    Now power one of these in a suitcase with high energy density lithium batteries and you have the weapon he's talking about.
  • sweet. i wonder what the effective ranges are for weapons like this.
  • If "the government" is willing to make this sort of thing public, what are they holding back? The recently declassified spy satellite photos are another good example of this sort of thing.

    Lets induce current in some poor fool's synapses. "Oooooweee! Lookit'im twitch". To say nothing of what "they" could do to some statesman with a pacemaker.

    "Gee, we don't know why Ambassador Yaka-Yaka had a heart attack. Thats really too bad. Our sincerest condolences. Honest."
  • This stuff will get designed anyways, one way or another. The sooner we get a grip on these devices, the sooner we can learn to thwart them.
  • We may be seeing some more interesting headgear in the military future, as well as body-armor, to protect the soldier AND the information/communication electronics contained within.

    The day of the foot-soldier will return, as a one-man tank, a-la Heinleins's Starship Troopers (NOT the movie).

    Kewl! Where do I sign?
  • A lot of people designing weapons are really interested in their technical corner, you see the same with gun people and even those who make or work with mines. I think they somehow 'forget' what their product does to people. Other than that, they are just nerds in another area.

    Maybe we should try and show them that there is plenty of 'nerdable stuff' outside weaponry...
  • http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/other/kooks.htm

    The Crypt newsletter devotes itself to debunking
    common military techno-myths.

    It turns out that the story about Russians
    stealing money from a bank by deactivating
    the security system with one of these guns
    was a JOKE on this website several years ago.

    Now it found its way into the BS stories of
    these info-terrorism experts, and is being
    reported as fact.

    The web site mentions the 20/20 episode
    specifically at the end of the page.

  • There are two categories of EMP generators. (1) Explosive, and (2) Re-usable.

    (1) Explosive generators: early research was done on these in the 1950s in Russia. In 1992, I saw a videotape of the test of a unit about 10 tons in weight which had a peak output of 10 TW for a good part of a millisecond. Works by using explosives to rapidly compress a magnetic field, doing work which can be obtained by induction.

    (2) Re-usable generators: there are many designs, but the Marx bank stands out. This is a stack of capacitors with a controlling diode matrix which can be charged individually and discharged in parallel. Look up Marx banks if you want to build your own.
  • and Smack said:
    "They're allowed to screw up -- they included a disclaimer..."

    Heh, I tried this in school with my papers. It didn't work.

    --

  • ABC was allowed into China Lake (a sensitive DoD facility) to do this story. You can therefore conclude that the DoD wanted this story out. Why?

    To get money out of congress to build lots of nasty EMP toys, that's why. You can take all the nonsense about how other countries are far ahead of the US in this area with a huge grain of salt; after all, US defense spending is far larger than the defense spending of every other country in the world, combined. And throughout the last few decades, phony stories about "gaps" (missile gap, etc) have been put out so that the US taxpayers will pay even more for cool ways to kill people.

  • Excuse ME? After 9 yrs in the service of what I consider to be a great country, I think I speak from experience when I say.. Get Bent.


    The Military states quite clearly in the rights of a soldier that adequete medical treatment is a right for every memeber of every branch of the service.


    I don't know what Mongol Horde infused book you just pulled your head out of, but in the Armed Forces of the USA we don't shoot or ignore our wounded. It's our little way of insuring that the freedoms you take for granted are gauranteed by fresh waves of recruits. All of whom are promised and reasonably expect good medical care for injuries in the line of duty.


    Give me a call when/if you ever pull a tour w/ any branch of the service, and we'll discuss why your comments raise the hackles of every man or woman who's served in our various forces.

    ~Grell

    There are a lot of things that people will be able to put on my gravestone, but "Worked and Played Well with Tyrants" will not be one of them. -- C.D. Tavares


  • huh? (Score:1)

    by troyboy ( 9890 )
    Who says that people who oppose violence would necessarily fault gun manufacturers for violence that they did not commit?


    To digress slightly, how do you know that the gun manufacturers were NOT negligent in the New York case? I can't imagine how, but apparently a jury thought so... it mught help to see the *evidence*.

  • I think this is kind of old news to quite a lot of people.

    I remember reading about EMP generators that could disable the electrical system of an automobile. I believe that it's now small enough that some police departments have them for use in disabling cars in car chases.
  • I know I'm not the first to mention Nikola Telsa, but he was doing this kinda stuff LONG ago.. Read up on the web (I lost the links damn it!) on Telsa's Colorado Springs experiment in 1901(?)... Not to mention creating an earthquake in NYC a little while later.. His major goal in life was to transmit power without wires.. Most of the stuff I read about in the ABC article seems to me to be very related.

  • GoldenEye is old tech - it's been known ever since Hiroshima that detonating a nuclear device in the upper ionosphere results in a huge electro-magnetic pulse. The lack of atmosphere results in the energy which would normally be expended as a fireball, being released as electro-magnetic energy. And, because it's released all at once, it's a pulse. Hence "EMP".

    However, the idea of directing all that energy at one particular area is something which I don't believe is exactly possible. Please correct me if I'm wrong, though - I'm not exactly a nuclear scientist.

    Luckily, international agreements outlaw space-based nuclear weapons, so we can all relax, safe in the knowledge that there are no nukes in orbit.

    Uh, yeah right...

    Dodge
  • Sawyer says:
    Lasers are short waves at high frequencies.

    wavelength=(speed of light)/frequency

    Anyone ever see long waves at high frequencies? Maybe physics works differently in the press.

    Sawyer says:
    20/20 has also learned from a well-placed Russian official that those rebels in Chechnya also used an RF weapon to knock out police communications during a hostage situation.

    Let's suggest to the CIA to have Sawyer place more well-placed Russian officials. Maybe even in other countries.

    I find the press to be fun entertainment.

    ~afniv
    "Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
    "We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
  • OK, I've finally had it with this fucking shit. If we didn't have anonymous posting I think we'd see a lot less of this idiotic bullshit cause they'd be too scared to post.
  • everything except the air vortex gun has been available to people for the past 20 years, the audio pain field generator was outlined with schematics in Pop-Electrinics in 1978. the neatest item which they didnt even show was an EMP generator that fits in a briefcase and is a single use item.. It generates an EMP strong enought to destroy all electronic devices within a 300 foot sphere.

    But everything they showed was trivial crap that most electronics majors have messed with at one time or another , depending on how demented one was.. I was rather demented.
  • Underground optics are good, as are the thick concrete buildings that COs reside in.

    Don't forget about all the rebar that's inside of that thick concrete... makes for a nice Faraday cage I would guess.

  • Well, we have. Anyone remember the test down in arizona with the huge laser that can take out a satalite? Yep. We blew up a satalite with a ground based laser, breaking a number of treaties in the process.

    This also a part of a slightly larger scheme that includes Boing 747s equipted with lasers meant to take out missles. Maybe even a space-born satalite killer or two. We use it also. Don't let the friggin' alarmist media let you think for a minute that we don't already have viable Laser weapons. This was in a popsci circa 1997-1998, the test with the satalite happened a couple of months later.

    ph43drus

    Early to bed, early to rise, and you get the best cerial.
  • Nearly 10 years ago, I used to work with a guy who did his tour of duty in electronic countermeasures. He had a home-made 'pain generator' in his car, as an anti-theft measure.

    What it was, really, was a bunch of speakers that oscillated between high and low frequencies, causing severe discomfort to whoever broke in to the car. Headaches, nausea, possibly a busted liver or spleen if you didn't go away - or so I was told.

    He'd also mentioned things like portable rail-guns, that would put a paperclip through a cinderblock wall; focused microwave emitters that would cook a 1 inch diameter cylinder through some poor bastards gut at 100 yards; and EM weapons that put matter into something called 'runaway mode', i.e. electro-magnetic ionization (huh?) - which on a large scale promises to make nuclear weapons look like sticks and stones... Fun stuff - very creative use of technology.

    He made a point of mentioning that none of this stuff was new - it just sounded new to people who assume that weapons must spit lead, and who never took the second semester of University physics.

    He also mentioned external combusion engines on something he called the 'Aurora'... SQUID devices that can read the state of a CPU from a half mile away, and cameras that will read newspaper headlines from 100,000 feet above Moscow.

    But then again, he also saw aliens over Groom Lake.
  • MAE east was dropping 30% of their packets during the daytime last year, and during peak intervals it was hitting 50%. Reaching a website that didn't peer somewhere else with yours was an absolute nightmare. It made traceroute fun, however: packets sent across the continental U.S. were sometimes routed through Europe, etc. I'm surprised there wasn't more media attention given to it.

    Isn't MAE east the facility located in a parking garage?

    In any case, this is old news. Yes, it's a risk, but so are neutron bombs. You can fit them in a grocery bag, and the charge is enough to end all life in a 40 meter radius. If you want to be safe from EMP, you'll need to use an all-optical system. An optical computer would also allow me to get rid of my thermonuclear Pentium.

  • Tesla was doing this thing many years ago with
    sound waves. I believe (it's been years since I read it) he was experimenting with what he
    called an objects natural period of oscillation.
    He nearly took down a building in one experiment.
  • Check out the Crypt Newsletter for a few facts to throw in the face of the electronic bogeyman.
    http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/

    First paragraph, "Electronic Pearl Harbor" should have been your first clue that the BS was about to get deep.
  • Isn't this type of technology the same as the plot of GoldenEye?

    -Jae
  • There's a whole ton of psychotropic devices that have been developed. Stuff that can (allegedly) cause seizures, flu like symptoms, vomiting, death, etc. Somewhere on www.infowar.com they have some papers/links about this stuf.

    As for planes, someone told me once that airplanes can act like faraday cages and that turning on certain devices (like portable TVs) on a plane causes the instruments to go haywire and spin randomly. But that's third hand stuff so take it with a grain of salt.
  • Hehe... how long until Microsoft decides they've had enough of all the bad press they receive on /. and target it with one of those machines?
  • Buy a deisel. No electronics at all. (Except glowplugs, but I doubt you could take those out)

    Just remember to push start it.

  • Do your local building codes check for RF leaks in your Faraday-cage home where you live?

    Didn't think so.

  • Not as slow as EMP'd gasoline burners.

  • Tesla (Score:1)

    by Fizgig ( 16368 )
    As I recall, he also set fire to about 4 square miles of corn fields with his 5-story Tesla coil.
  • I see lots of "This is old" and "I want one" posts, but would someone please tell me the good news? The transcipt was quite low on explaining what we're doing to prepare against these things. The thought of invisible weapons sounds really, really bad. These would go in the category with biological weapons in my mind, but at least I know we're doing something to prepare for those. What are we doing to prevent these kinds of attacks? Someone make me feel better!
  • The were *zapping* a late-model corvette. It was going nuts. Wintel boxes were hosed by this frequency cannon.

    I only have one question:

  • They were *zapping* a late-model corvette. It was going nuts. Wintel boxes were hosed by this frequency cannon. The possibilities looked extremely promising.

    I only have one question:

    Where can I get one??!!

    _______________________
  • Hate to say it, but *come on*
    Like it or not, military technological advancements are responsible for a great deal of the technology we take for granted.

    This *could* lead to stuff like wireless power transmission, advances in scientific lab equipment, and eventually, someone will invent or perfect a technology impervious to these weapons. Yeah it sucks that they can be used to hurt, maim, destroy, and kill, but doing that's the easy part.

    Once they figure out how to put this to good (as in moral or even a-moral) use, that's where the fun begins.

    V-2 Rockets----*time*---->Moon Landings
    Atom Bomb ----*time*---->Nuclear power
    Military Radar ---*time*---> Microwave oven
    ARPANet ---*time*---> The Internet

    It's the nature of the beast.

    And no I don't believe they "forget" what their product does to people. *Military* weapons have but one purpose....they understand or they wouldn't be working for the DOD or
  • It's enough to make you store your spare server in an underground vault! What? no spare servers?

    Seriously though. Much of the major bandwidth which carries the Internet is effectively shielded because it is carried in underground fiber optics and cables, and are generally immune to RF, except in the computers at the terminations. Many of these are also underground and isolated just for that reason -- a solar storm puts out enough stray frequecies to mess up communications on occasion if they don't.

    EMP is a much greater danger to the global economy than single strike weapons, because it has the capacity to down all of our machines at the same time. A "single strike" RF weapon such as shown to 20/20 would be much more of a terrorist weapon, because it's ability is limited to causing local damage.

    What would be a more interesting story is how a community/organization/etc. could protect themselves against such weapons.



  • This stuff has been around forever. The first
    laser weapons were powered by the hydrogen-
    fluorine reaction and were tested by the Army
    in the 60s. You could melt through tank armor so
    long as a) you could keep the beam up for long
    enough, and b) no one sneezed and caused your
    fluorine tanks to explode. Presumably the
    technology has improved but is still inferior
    to good old guided missiles; high powered
    lasers have serious problems in an atmosphere
    due to plasma tube effects as well as simple
    attenuation due to dust and smoke.

    As for electromagnetics, they too have been
    around for a long time. Anyone with a maser
    can mess up a lot of electronics, and the
    police have been trialing anti-vehicle
    weapons for several years at least. If
    you take apart a high-power microwave
    oven (and survive the experience; be careful
    out there boys and girls) you would
    probably wind up with a pretty decent
    anti-electronics device.

    The transcript gives the impression that
    these weapons are innovative and grounds
    for immediate alarm when in fact they have
    been used and understood for many years.
  • Underground optics are good, as are the thick concrete buildings that COs reside in.

    What about the buildings that Mae West and East, AADS, and PAIX reside in? I have heard that Mae East is well underground and protected from this sort of RF attack, but what about the rest? Taking out Mae West would be enough to effectively grind the internet to a halt.

  • Here's a place you can order some of this 'futuristic warfare' stuff from:


    Information Unlimited
    800-221-1705 Orders
    603-673-4730 Orders
    603-672-5406 FAX
    Snail-Mail:
    PO BOX 716
    Dept R3 Amherst,NH 03031


    - Lasers, Pain-Field generators, Tesla Coils, Security Devices, and more

    Call for a catalog. They say they want $1.00 for a catalog. Screw 'em ! They'll send you one for zero. They also sell kits for stun guns, 100,000 volt pain field machines, and lots of high-voltage toys.

    For other sites check out L0PHT Heavy Industries: More High Tech Toys [l0pht.com]

    ---
    The statement below is true.
  • this stuff has been around for YEARS..
    you have to be really stupid to think that the US
    Govt. doesn't have weapons like this and protection from those weapons I mean jeez all the money the DOD has?

  • Crazy? (Score:1)

    by El ( 94934 )
    So, my friend who always lines his hat with tinfoil to block the beams being sent at him by the government isn't as crazy as we thought?
  • Shouldn't your stuff be safe if encased in metal, like a Faraday cage? It seems to me that the case of the computer would block the signal... anyone care to share why it doesn't?
  • If the Feds decide they don't want you to leave city limits (Y2K panic, Good Citizens would understand) but you want to leave anyway, one zap and blammo! You are immobile and ready to be taken in for um, questioning.

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