As disturbing as the police use is, I am more disturbed by the possibility (inevitability?) of devices like these, and similar audio devices, becoming so cheap and readily available that even basic privacy from strangers while in your home becomes a thing of the past.
It seems to me that before too long anyone could pick up audio and video devices for a couple hundred bucks that would allow them to see you in your own house and hear your every word.
Bouncing lasers off window panes to detect audio is a worrisome development. The counter-measure is to install dual pane windows equipped with acoustic transducers that vibrate the panes with white noise. For the device mentioned in the article, when the technology becomes available to consumers and/or is open-sourced, anyone will be able to count the occupants of any location near to them. The question again becomes one of counter-measures.
Development? The technique has been well known for a long time, I remember hearing about it in the late 90s. It isn't widely used because it isn't practical. Also, your countermeasure doesn't work if there is another reflective surface inside the room.
> Development? The technique has been well known for a long time
The difference is that these things used to be the domain of major government agencies rather than a hobbyist with a few hundred dollars and a poor sense of privacy.
The bottom line with both of these technologies is that their usecases are simply too narrow to inspire causal use.
The radar-gadget is useful if you're about to storm a house full of armed adversaries - in most other cases, you can just peek through the window or knock on the door and get much the same information.
The laser-bouncer is great for eavesdropping on people who take some effort to hide their communication - if they don't, hiding a wireless microphone or a high-capacity dictaphone is orders of magnitude simpler and cheaper.
The other countermeasure is windows angled downward so that the laser would have to be on the premises to get a direct bounce. Not viable for most homes, though.
New homes (at least where I live) all have TechShield (or similar) radiant barrier installed for energy efficiency. It's basically siding or insulation covered with a thin layer of foil. It's effective enough as a Faraday cage that some of my friends with new homes can't get a cell signal in their home. I wonder if this will be enough to thwart the casual eavesdropper.
It's basically easy and cheap (once customer base grows from spooks & diplomats to general public) but it will seriously hamper your 4G, and wifi too if you want intra-building insulation.
By reading the article I would have thought it would be possible to walk down the street while pointing at a house and the device would show if/where someone is hiding but after reading this FAQ I don't think this device is working so well as people expect.
Maybe in houses with wooden walls but not in buildings with thick brick or concrete steal enhanced walls. They even recommend to press the device against the wall/floor to get the best results. This means that the device can be used to see if somebody is behind a specific wall but not just somewhere in the house a couple of rooms away.
In the warmer parts of the country, you are not looking at a lot of metal/brick. In California for example, you are looking at a lot of plywood and insulation mostly.
What if you could get a discount on e.g. your insurance payments for a similar device, permanently mounted on the outside of your residence, and readable on location by law enforcement or other responders (like rescue)? Would you be OK with other people taking the deal?
Seems like the type of thing Big Brother would do to make it more palatable. Personally, no, I would never do sacrifice my privacy for whatever amount they'd give you. But I guess that choice is up to each individual, really.
During a typical 2nd Amendment[1] debate ("flame war", really) a common argument was raised about how various "big, modern weapons" required a different set of rules. Regardless of how one felt about people having "small" (i.e. traditional arms with which society has experience), surely it must be obvious that "big" (new, unknown) things like nerve gases or atomic bombs are so dangerous they must be kept from civilian hands.
Technology eavesdropping in new ways is a similar "forbidden knowledge". While it may not be a weapon itself, when it becomes simple and cheap enough that containing the forbidden knowledge becomes impossible[2] we face the potential disruption of some of the very foundations of society.
The question isn't if the average person will gain access to cheap and powerful eavesdropping technology, or weapons as powerful as atomic bombs, or even worse technologies that we haven't discovered yet. The question is if society will be ready for when those technologies grow and become a cheap commodity.
The general purpose computer already did this, and other electronic devices like the one mentioned in this article are experiencing this transition right now. Biotech seems to be ramping up and I suspect we will see the biotech equivalent to the "cheap personal computer" in the near-ish future. The point is we, as a species, really need to learn how to deal with these technologies now, or a future "mass shooting" might instead be an "engineered plague" or "20 kiloton bomb".
How do we deal with these threats? I don't know. But I do know trying to keep technologies bottled up as "forbidden knowledge" is at best only a delaying tactic. I suspect that "fixing most social problems" (racism, extreme poverty, etc) is probably a prerequisite. I personally like Roddenberry's idea of fixing most of the basic physical needs with technology; it won't fix everything, but it would probably be a good start. Unfortunately, it is easy to succumb to a defeatist or nihilistic attitude when faced with these problems. Even Feynman thought[3] the success of the Manhattan Project necessarily implied that civilization "would all be destroyed very soon anyway".
For me, I try to remember that we can't predict change[4], and worrying about things we cannot change is a waste of time and energy. Big problems grow out of small problems, so I focus on those small things that I can change. There is a real risk that technology will happen faster than our ability to assimilate those technologies, but we should try anyway, because the alternative is to give into natural selection as yet another species that didn't adapt to its environment fast enough.[5]
[1] This post is not about the 2nd. Please, there is no need to re-open that highly-charged debate.
[2] "information wants to be free", or at least hard impossible to contain.
[4] See James Burke's ("Connections") non-teleological view of progress
[5] aka the speciation of humanity. I highly recommend Bruce Sterling's exploration of this type of "end result" for humanity in his novel Schismatrix[6]. (this is where my username ("pdkl95") comes from...)
That would depend on the purpose of the dike... and who/what was downstream.
That said, see my profile for a description of "PDKL 95". There is a good chance I'd grab the jackhammer if it would somehow lead to a useful re-framing of the consensual hallucination.
I would be so interested to see some research about information spread during active containment efforts. Obviously many institutions have developed highly effective measures of containment. They all involve coercing involved people into silence (NDAs, threats of criminal prosecution etc.) combined with, at least attempted, strict controls of where the data goes.
I feel like information just sort of succumbs to entropy and it will always "try" to leak out of containment like some fleeting gas.
Is that due to human nature? Or due to the nature of information itself? Would other intelligent beings with a different psychology/ social structure also spread information like a wildfire?
Obvious problem with that research: any information that was successfully contained are tautologically things we would not know about.
I completely agree with the entropy/leaking-gas analogy, and it may suggest an explanation for why information "leaks" so easily: compared to matter, the energy of information is extremely small. The energy cost of copying or moving is trivial, and easier movement implies faster diffusion.
> I suspect that "fixing most social problems" (racism, extreme poverty, etc) is probably a prerequisite.
Disagree completely. This smells of a "busywork" solution - we know something needs to be done, but we don't know what, so we try to do something for the greater good, hoping that we can redeem ourselves and somehow be protected (or at the very least more protected) from the threat.
Incidents such as mass shootings, which you highlighted, don't tend to have roots in racism or poverty situations, but rather psychopathy; a dramatic disconnect from the wholesome core of our human nature which develops in the soul of a deeply troubled individual.
This is a problem that our society with its culture is not equipped to handle. I do tend to think that there have been societies in the past, which did have the ability to contain such problems - I don't see a murderous psychopath arising within the company of Buddha and his travelling ashram of monks.
21st century Western civilization is taking a radically different path, investing itself fully in technological progress at the expense of everything else, and will reap the fruit of this choice, good and bad.
It seems to me that before too long anyone could pick up audio and video devices for a couple hundred bucks that would allow them to see you in your own house and hear your every word.