Comments

Alex • January 27, 2015 2:21 PM

Remembering old movie “Blue Thunder” (1983). There was hi-tech helicopter that can see through walls.

Jonathan Wilson • January 27, 2015 2:36 PM

The question is, are the police using this with or without a warrant. If they are using it to look inside someone’s house prior to executing an arrest warrant (e.g. to see how many people are inside and where they are and maybe whether they have a weapon) then its perfectly fine, especially if it means less use of force)

Michael And Ingrid Heroux • January 27, 2015 2:51 PM

We know that this is true. The radar they use not only sees through walls but they can focus the radar beam and burn your skin also, it can leave bad burns. They can also focus the radar beams on your head while you are awake or sleeping and it makes your brain swell in your head and causes severe headaches and you can’t focus your thoughts. We have been forced by Canadian Intelligence to live in hotels for the last 5 years and when they get the rooms on either side of you they are not to far away from a person to burn them. Most people would think that your government wouldn’t do that to people but we know that the Harper government does this. We have proof and witnesses. Follow the money.

G. Bailey • January 27, 2015 3:04 PM

@Jonathan Wilson

I agree in principle. This could reduce some of the ‘mistakes’ that occur with no-knock raids.

I have two problems, however:

1) Making an abused practice like no-knock raids more practical/less risky makes it more difficult to curtail their use. There are similar arguments around “less-lethal” weapons and the Geneva Conventions.

2) The police have whole-heartedly embraced “parallel construction”. They will use this device or its successors to look inside homes in lieu of proper, time-consuming, legitimate investigations. Then they will take what they’ve learned, and attribute it to an anonymous tip from ‘Fuzzy Dunlop’.

NobodySpecial • January 27, 2015 3:19 PM

The police claimed that using IR cameras to look for grow-ops didn’t need a warrant since the IR photons were leaking out into a public place.

I imagine they would claim that in this case that it is the equivalent of looking through your window from a public place. The same excuse celebrity photographers use.

The real issue is whether this allows “no-knock” SWAT raids to become even more no-knock. Simply target the radar return and shoot through the wall.

vas pup • January 27, 2015 3:34 PM

@Heroux:”The radar they use not only sees through walls but [they can focus the radar beam and burn your skin also, it can leave bad burns. They can also focus the radar beams on your head while you are awake or sleeping and it makes your brain swell in your head and causes severe headaches and you can’t focus your thoughts.” Active applications (after [) of this device should subject to criminal prosecution as torture. Period.
Clive, is Faraday Cage like metal mesh/thin foil attached to the wall and cover it totally prevent harmful usage of this technology? You input is important as always.

Serious Scientist • January 27, 2015 4:17 PM

@Heroux I know its cliche, but tin foil does work! Its usually most effective to stretch it over chickenwire, and earth the whole thing (e.g. run a wire to metal plumbing pipe in your hotel room).

Clive Robinson • January 27, 2015 5:43 PM

@ Vas Pup, All,

What we need is more technical information.

The three articles Bruce links to indicate movment an 50ft range, there is a sugestion that the device also gives range information, and the second article Bruce links to says doppler.

First off, we don’t know what sort of radiation this device emits, realisticaly it could be either sound or EM waves. I’ll assume for now it’s some kind of microwave EM system due to the size of the unit in the photographs.

A simple CW doppler radar using single source and single direct conversion detector does not give range information. For range information you need some kind of modulation appled to the EM source. Traditionaly this would be pulses but with the speed of light being ~3E8 m/S to get a sensible range indication –ie about 1-5% of total range– would mean having a pulse width of 5E-10 Sec which is not realy practical as that would put the transmisson frequency above 40GHz which would be problematic with many types of wall. Similar issues exist with Gold Code and swept frequency systems. If however you use a dual detector superhet receiver in an IQ formation at a suitably high IF frequency then you could modulate the carrier with a signal around 0.5-15MHz signal and measure the phase difference between the modulated and demodulated signals. However this gives rise to other issues, detecting somebody’s breathing means the doppler frequency difference is going to be very small. You can do this with modern DSP systems but it’s not simple, which might account for the 6000USD mil price tag meaning the BOM is going to be around 100-150USD. You can compare this with a simple 3cm traffic light doppler radar that has about 10USD of components in it or similar intruder detector down below 4USD.

However there is an issue, US single and two story buildings are often not made of brick cavity walls, they tend to be timber frame with foam insulation with some form of exteria fascia/cladding that might be brick, wood or even aluminium. Modern sheets of foam insulation also tend to have aluminium foil on them to help with refecting heat back into the building this could render the use of such a device fairly inefective if the person building the property decided to bond the aluminium to earth and ensure there were no slots between panels. Which would probably be to much of an issue as the device could just be put up against a window and work (the gaps and windows are why cell phones still work indoors).

This leaves two other solutions absorbers and dummy bodies. Absorbers still suffer from the window issue so what is required for a dummy body.

As far as EM is concerned the human body is aproximatly a 1.5-1.8 meter long bag of salty water when standing upright and about .7 meter length body with .8 meter arms and legs jointed in the middle when not standing or prone. It radiates about as much heat as a 100W light bulb with 60% from the head and 10% from the hands when dressed for ~65F tempratures. When sitting quietly you can detect both breathing and blood flow with EM radiation. Breathing is between 5-15/min pulse between 50-120.

You can probably fake these if you have a lamp stand with a hundred watt light bulb in it, where the heat rising in a light weight “chimney shade” will cause a ducted fan to turn quite easily, sufficient to be geared down to cause a light weight rotor to turn. You used to be able to get “childrens night lights” that did this with pictures of “furry animal friends” on the chimney shade, if these are replaced with two strips of aluminium foil that could be sufficient to fake breathing, with the fan blades if foiled up faking blood flow. Put next to chairs as “table lights” they might well be sufficient to cause the device to falsely register people in the room.

You would need more technical information and a “test unit” to experiment with.

If the frequency of operation is known then window/chaff tricks could cause the unit to fail, think in terms of a “tubular bell” wind chime where the bells are aluminium tube cut to a correct wavelength or multiple there of, or “dream catchers” with apropriate length coloured plastic coated wire woven in to make a broad band fractal antenna, just hanging from hooks in the ceiling with the wind to move them comming from an oscillating fan. Such things with insense burners and yoga mats new age crystal healing pendents and wale song meditation music etc would probably not be regarded as suspicious just “hippy”.

MiddleONoWare • January 27, 2015 5:47 PM

I think some foil faced rigid insulation or vapor barrier might be called for here. Be green and secure at the same time.

Michael And Ingrid Heroux • January 27, 2015 9:43 PM

We can detect it if they are in the opposite room from us. If you have a CRT television or a Nintendo DS and hold it about a foot from the wall about half the screen will get distorted and when you pull it away from the wall the screen will go back to normal. It gets a half circle distortion effect. They have used that on my wife and kids and I for over 5 years. I have sensitive skin and I would lay in bed and my family would tell me it looked as though I had a sun burn. When they started using it on my family and I in Windsor Ontario in 2008 we lived in a house without anyone on either side of us and we had a big CRT television 32″ and we would push it to the southern facing wall of our house towards the US Canada border and half of the screen would go distorted and when we moved it away from the wall it would go back to normal. It must of been coming from the US somewhere. My bedroom was on the south side of the house and when my wife and I would lay in bed I would get a sunburn at night and I would get severe headaches and my teeth would ache right down to the nerves. We didn’t know what it was at the time. After we were forced out of Windsor Ontario and into living in hotels they would get the rooms on either side of us and harass us all day and night. It went on for over 5 years. When we were in Windsor Ontario my wife and I would meet them at the bars and they would tell us everything that my wife and I were doing sexually in our bedroom. They would tell us every sexual position we did and they would tell us which ones they liked the best and they would tell us which ones they wanted to do with us. We had sex with some of them. When we got to B.C. and we were forced to live in hotel rooms they would focus the beam on our heads as we lay in bed and it would make our brains swell in our heads and cause severe headaches and you wouldn’t be able to think, it would make you very irritated and we would have to leave the hotel to get things done and they would come up to us on the streets and try to pick fights with us when we were disoriented from the radiation. Follow the money.

Scared • January 27, 2015 10:13 PM

They kindly give you the FCC ID here:
http://www.cyterra.com/products/ranger.htm
So you can go here:
https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/GenericSearch.cfm
(Grantee code = YKD)
and read the manual and test reports etc.

Looks like it was originally designed for 3.xxGHz but also changed to operate in the 2.4GHz ISM band (Sharing it with microwaves and WiFi???).

Anyway, since it uses Doppler shift and not time-of-flight it will be confused by any slow moving conductive material, so the bad guys better not turn on their ceiling fan or have a dripping faucet or…. This thing is supposedly so sensitive it can detect someone breathing 7 meters away.

SchneieronSecurityFan • January 28, 2015 12:58 AM

Does the long-term monitoring of occupants in a building with this type of equipment, a stakeout for example, pose a health risk either to the occupants or to the operators of the equipment?

I think more testing is in order especially if the 2.4 GHz ISM band is used.

Ole Juul • January 28, 2015 3:12 AM

Thirty milliwatts is nothing. It’s like your wireless router on a bad day. Although it’s jumping over different frequencies, a broadband signal to jam it all would be easy to produce – although illegal, and probably irritating to other spectrum users. The frequencies involved in this “radar” (in case somebody doesn’t know) are a little lower than cell and cordless phones. I also really feel like commenting on the comments about the dangers of this level of radiation: BS.

That said, I do have some sympathy for those that feel effected. Being autistic myself I know the feelings. However, the physical world follows rules of physics. I’m grateful for having grasped that while still a youngster. It really helps. Those that haven’t can still suffer much.

Snarki, child of Loki • January 28, 2015 6:42 AM

Hey kids!

Time for a fun project that you can make at home!

It’s called a Cube-corner reflector, and it’s perfect for doing microwave ‘experiments’.

Here’s how: get some large flat sheets of corrugated cardboard, glue aluminum foil to the cardboard, then tape three sheets together at right angles to each other, so that they make a “corner” just like on the corner of a cube.

What does it do? It reflects microwaves right back at their source! In fact, it’s a much better reflector than a ‘person’ or a ‘dog’ or a ‘pot grow light’ or a ‘portable howitzer’ (okay, maybe not that last one).

Fun for the whole family!

Sidelobe • January 28, 2015 7:33 AM

If you want to see if anyone is at home, start by looking at traffic on the Internet connection. You don’t even need to be at the home to do it.

paul • January 28, 2015 9:04 AM

It’s not what you don’t know, it’s what you know that ain’t so.

The returns from systems like this, even if they look images, require careful interpretation and (as several people have pointed out) are subject to artifacts and errors. So even if this equipment were used purely in conjunction with warrants and warranted entries to premises, it could make things more dangerous rather than less. If anything in the actual room/house doesn’t match the image inferred from the radar return, officers will be in more danger and will be more likely to endanger others.

But I’m sure there’s a whole pile of money to be made selling these systems.

65535 • January 28, 2015 11:34 AM

“I have two problems, however: 1] Making an abused practice like no-knock raids more practical/less risky makes it more difficult to curtail their use.”

“2] The police have whole-heartedly embraced “parallel construction”. They will use this device or its successors to look inside homes in lieu of proper, time-consuming, legitimate investigations. Then they will take what they’ve learned, and attribute it to an anonymous tip from ‘Fuzzy Dunlop’.” –G Bailey

I agree on both items – but number 2 is the most problematic. Parallel construction must be stopped before it becomes the norm among law enforcement entities.

I find this paragraph to be very interesting:

“…privacy advocates said they see more immediate questions, including how judges could be surprised by technology that has been in agents’ hands for at least two years. “The problem isn’t that the police have this. The issue isn’t the technology; the issue is always about how you use it and what the safeguards are,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.” – usatoday

How could judges and officers of the court be completely unaware of this radiation-imaging activity for two years? Is it sheer lies from law enforcement – or sheer ignorance on the part of judges? Or, could it be something nastier [collusion within the criminal proceedings].

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/19/police-radar-see-through-walls/22007615/

I am sickened by the idea of military radar equipment being used against a civilian person’s home/abode [or any radiation equipment for peeping into homes]. It smacks of circumventing the search warrant laws. It reeks of invasion of privacy.

It also could be a real health issue. Last this device could “trickle down” to private detectives and other snoopers to be used in unsavory ways.

Further, I am sure that said police would not like such radar used against their homes.

The more militarization of civilian police means more of the ‘one-way mirror’ effect where the government can watch you but you can’t watch the government. That is a horrid trend.

John Campbell • January 28, 2015 12:24 PM

Hasn’t there also been work on more passive detection, using, say, the 2.4GHz (and 5GHz) sources as illuminators?

If you have cordless phones, the handsets also work as illuminators, don’t they?

Admittedly the antenna technology might be (ahem) entertaining.

Y’know, I wonder…

The whole argument in LA about Waze reporting speed-traps (I don’t think there’s much value in “beat cop sightings”) and the desire to suppress the information (as if there are people insane enough to actively hunt cops, though, really, for a traffic stop there is a lot of risk regardless) strikes me as problematic.

Frankly, this is multi-purpose technology; When this gets in the hands of, say, organized criminals (we can’t call the government “organized”) you’ll see far more entertaining applications of the tech. The ability to test countermeasures might be entertaining, too.

Human beings seem to be driven, almost at an instinctual level, to look for loopholes and ways to avoid– or work around– externally imposed inhibitions.

Daniel • January 28, 2015 1:36 PM

Re: parallel construction.

And how pray tell is this practice going to be stopped? By definition it’s secret. Anyone who has followed recent developments on the exclusionary rule know that it is not only being weakened but becoming obsolete. So even if the police get caught there is likely no foul and even if there is a foul in an individual case the police will still use it when they have too.

Part of the problem is that people have this idea that there is a difference between “terrorism” and “petty crime”. But there is no difference as far as most LEA as concerned–(1) that is the basis of “broken window” community policing and (2) there is no right to crime. This idea follows along with the reality that there is no meaningful legal distinction left between felonies and misdemeanors.

As for the idea of shielding, shielding is like encryption. The fact that one blocks data is data and is likely to invite more scrutiny rather than less. Besides, most people do not want to live their life in a Faraday cage.

Duff • January 28, 2015 3:04 PM

So how do we keep these prying eyes out of our homes? Would something like this do the trick?

You’d have to put it over the windows too, and maybe the roof/ceiling. Your wireless phone would also probably be a no go once you turn your house into a faraday cage.

FriedApe • January 28, 2015 4:46 PM

Is this an application of the ultra wide band stuff that Lawrence Livermore were working on a few years back?

Figureitout • January 28, 2015 10:17 PM

There’s also work on Terahertz radar for imaging under your pants I mean shirt. Guess who wants it?–TSA.

The new implementations and the hardware/software required to process these signals is what’s advanced, the underlying principles, are not (FMCW, which are being built by a lot of people ( http://hforsten.com/6-ghz-frequency-modulated-radar.html ), thanks in large part to a “coffee can” design from Gregory Charvat http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-ll-003-build-a-small-radar-system-capable-of-sensing-range-doppler-and-synthetic-aperture-radar-imaging-january-iap-2011/ ).

But they aren’t dealing w/ the “terahertz” range (300GHz-3THz). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation

http://thz.caltech.edu/siegelpapers/Cooper-SPIE2010.pdf

http://www.nrao.edu/meetings/isstt/papers/2008/2008300303.pdf

None of this is possible w/o the advanced software and high speed computers; you can’t homebrew this…yet.

Nick P • January 28, 2015 10:47 PM

@ Figureitout

Yeah, the Terahertz research made it into PopSci many years ago. I was looking forward to it because it was safer than X-rays. Wherever we can eliminate such radiation, I’m in favor of it. Not in favor of what comes with that: expanded invasion of privacy.

Michael And Ingrid Heroux • January 29, 2015 12:30 AM

@Clive Robinson

“First off, we don’t know what sort of radiation this device emits, realisticaly it could be either sound or EM waves. I’ll assume for now it’s some kind of microwave EM system due to the size of the unit in the photographs.”

You mention sound. We don’t want to sound too crazy but we think there was some kind of sound device also. They had some way of vibrating our bed. The vibrations were very small, we used to call it a sound resonance. They would do it day and night and it would make our bodies ache all over and they used it to keep us awake. We had to take ibuprophen day and night to keep the swelling in our brains down and to keep the headaches quelled from the radiation and to keep the body aches quelled from the sound. It sounds strange but it’s true. Not sure what type of device that would be but there was no noise just small vibrations.

Ole Juul • January 29, 2015 12:25 PM

@Michael And Ingrid Heroux:
“First off, we don’t know what sort of radiation this device emits, . . .

Yes we do. Read the pdf posted by albert above. Then read my earlier comment. I wasn’t kidding. RTFM. The radiation is insignificant. Here’s the relevant bit:

The RANGE-R cycles through a sequence of 120 frequencies in 2 MHz increments from 3.18 GHz to 3.42 GHz. At each of the frequencies, it transmits a maximum 32mW power level with no modulation.

Clive Robinson • January 29, 2015 12:43 PM

@ Figueritout,

None of this is possible w/o the advanced software and high speed computers; you can’t homebrew this…yet

There are other tricks that bring quite a bit of it into the realm of the home constructor if you think laterally…

I’ve mentioned VOR before as well as “offset radar” you can use the principles from them in interesting ways…

A VOR system effectivly combines two signals of the same frequency using antennas, one signal is AM modulated the other is FM modulated. The effect is a signal where the phase difference between the demodulated FM signal and AM siganal tells you your bearing from the antenna, provided it’s a line of sight path with no multipath. With multipath you get a vector sum of the direct path and the reflected path, which with a bit of niffty math you can subtract the known from the sum to give you the unknown and it’s also possible to calculate the path difference thus distance of the unknown reflector. That Datong direction finder uses a similar principle only it rotates it’s antenna array electronicaly to provide the extra modulated component on the received signal.

If you have a couple of synchronised transmitters and a couple of receivers you can take the demodulated signals into a PC and calculate a lot of information about the environment in and around the system. Also I’ve recently mentioned that to EM radiation the human body looks like a bag of salty water which is saying it is conductive and absorbs and reradiates EM radiation thus appears as a refecting target. With DSP that will run on a PC you can remove static signals from moving signals relativly easily and thus you have quite an effective indicator not just of the prescience of a person put their position direction and speed…

The last time I did this was a few years ago and it was with oldish UHF cellular radio equipment running in the 37cm band, it worked well enough to demonstrate it. Things have moved on you can make the radio equipment at 5GHz quite easily and small and you have the GNU SDR stuff so the grunt coding is already done for you.

It won’t be a “weekend project” but it is doable over a few months…

Michael And Ingrid Heroux • January 29, 2015 3:41 PM

We remember one day when we were in Victoria B.C. and we were leaving our hotel room and they had a not-so-smart agent monitoring us, he was in the room next to us and he left his curtains open a crack and as we walked by we could see the hotel T.V. screen and there was an infrared image on the screen of my kids in our hotel room. We thought to ourselves, how can you not close the curtains when you are illegally watching children with some sort of infrared device. Follow the money. Thanks

Figureitout • January 30, 2015 12:15 AM

Nick P
was looking forward to it because it was safer than X-rays
–I’m not so sure about that. We do know that smartphones are considerably more hazardous for your health compared to “dumb phones”; they’re “radiation footprint” is worse. You shouldn’t be putting them in your pocket (I still do…) and long conversations w/ it on your ear…probably not good for your brain.

Clive Robinson
–Uhh maybe…I’m not convinced in terms of dealing terahertz signals and image processing. It takes special equipment to deal w/ THz signals, I’ve never “tripled, amplified, sextupled, and transmitted” a signal at “662-688” GHz. That’s insane, even a 1 GHz signal to me is insanity, so fast, might as well be a particle beam at that high freq., few devices can even measure those signals. Even reading what they did, I’m still not 100% sure what they did; even though they use a lot of what are commercially available parts.

So what you mention, we’re not just looking for “direction and speed”, we’re looking fo detection of objects underneath multiple layers of clothing.

They’re not dealing w/ UHF and 37cm bands, it’s THF (tremendously high frequency), 5GHz…yeah we have that in what’s becoming wifi for some things (smartphones, ipads..).

Speaking of what’s in hobbyist range, and OT somewhat, but I just got RFID working for arduino last night (I got a kit w/ a bunch of modules, still haven’t messed w/ all them yet). Damn, never realized what a powerful chip is in this module and how much you can do w/ RFID! Example code just has SPI working when you got I2C and UART as well (unimplemented still!), but works pretty good. Neat b/c I’m just studying electric fields now. But you can read/write data to the card itself (encryption too). Lol, not much use besides tracking and access control, but they’re fun to play w/.

This is in hobbyist range for sure lol: http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/MFRC522.pdf

Michael And Ingrid Heroux • January 30, 2015 2:45 AM

There are a couple other technologies they used on us but we couldn’t figure them out at all. We understand the radar thing and the sound wave vibration thing, we understand how they could work but they had a way that they could give us zaps to the head. We don’t talk about it because we don’t know how they did it but it was very strange. They would zap us in the head quite a few times a day with it. It was like a combination of a sharp pinch and an eletric shock on the scalp, the only way to explain it was like being shocked with static electricty in the winter time but it would feel like it went into your head like a cold spike going into your brain. That’s the only way to explain it. We know the brain doesn’t feel pain but it was like a cold spike being pushed into your head. After they did that 1 time your brain would swell right away in your head and you wouldn’t be able to think properly for the rest of the day. If they were mad at us for one reason or another sometimes they would give us 2 or 3 zaps in a row and it would make it very hard to think about anything, it would leave us in a daze and it would make you very irritable and then they would bang on the walls and kick the walls from both side of the room because they would usually rent the rooms on both sides of us and they would get the rooms above us and below us also, they would stomp from above and bang from below also. They did that for years. Every hotel we lived in the hotels would give them the rooms on all 4 sides of us. They wanted to kill us. They told us that all the time. Believe it or not it was the Chinese that probably saved us. We moved into a Chinese neighborhood it was like China Town, not to far away. They probably have alot of Chinese spies here but the Chinese knew what they were doing to us so they help us get away from them. The Chinese let us live in their places and we were able to get away from their abuse. They were pissed at the Chinese and wanted us to help them set up the Chinese but you don’t bite the hand that saves you. Thanks for reading. Follow the money.

Clive Robinson • January 30, 2015 5:10 AM

@ Figureitout,

I know of simple ways to generate broadband THz, it’s called a spark gap in a waveguide resonator followed by multipliers, the problem is you need a microscope to make the resonator 😉

Joking aside THz stuff is at the moment just a thing of dreams for amateur constructs, but thirty or fourty years ago so was X-Band working. Back in the 80’s a friend and I got hold of a 10GHz TWT with 40watt output, I remember digging deep in my pocket to buy an IMPAT diode at 120GBP to injection lock it and get enough power to drive the TWT reliably. We did manage with suitable dishes to do an EME work CW. FM was just to fuzzy for EME but we did do tropo quite successfully. Now getting a couple of hundred watts of high stability NBFM at X-Band is not that difficult even if it isn’t comonplace. Things move on and whilst armatures don’t break initial ground these days, they quickly follow others as they put second hand equipment to more interesting uses.

As for detecting things under clothing you don’t of necessity need THz equipment. You can find conductive objects with the modern version of a GDO as they come into resonance at various frequencies down in the high UHF and low microwave frequencies. You can also use good quality thermal imaging as well.

I sometimes wonder if various people are using THz to make “anti-terror” systems simply to get equipment made to open those bands up for other uses (why pay through the nose on commercial R&D when the Gov will give you a big fat grant for Anti-terror equipment, even if it is of less use than an old fashioned metal detector…).

As for what I was talking about, it is the ability to detect people in your garden or larger areas before they get up to your walls and windows such that the system knows where to point the cameras etc.

Most of this tech is only of use if they can use it covertly and currently they are not going to get a warrant for using it. Thus getting picked out in a spot light before they have snuck across your lawn “with their tools in their hands” etc is one of those “worst case” events that they don’t like. The usuall advice given to the troops when this happens is “Chew dirt before you get to chew lead”.

They are also in an akward spot because if they don’t have the propper legal reason to be on the property and have not made their status known, getting shot by a “stand your ground” householder who thinks they are armed intruders may be the least of their worries, if the householder is not a sufficiently good shot to make it their last worry.

As for RFID look up Helmhotz coils and GTEM cells, you might be surprised at just how easily you can use the near field devices at range…

Andrew_K • January 30, 2015 7:30 AM

Clive has a very good point: To use such tools, attackers must be near. The exact definition of “near” depends on frequency spectrum and used power.

I’d like to point out that as long as those utilities use active methods (i.e. send signals), they can probably be detected from a range greater than their “vision” since they rely on reflected radiation. My guess is that completely passive methods are under heavy development.

Jimmy Jones • January 30, 2015 11:58 AM

Why not just do away with evidence, warants, courts plus all that other bothersome stuff and riddle homes with full metal jackets or drone strike based on the usual minority, religous, sexual orientation or “I don’t like the look of you” based suspicion. The pigs all ready beat the crap out of homeless people and those with different coloured skin when they think nobody is looking, so why not dish out the harrasment and killings based on an equal opportunity to undeserved violence and intimidation.

Getting evidence against real criminals (especially those white collar types who steal millions dollars of other peoples’ hard earned retirement savings using computers and other easily followed systems like paperwork), then submitting it to a judge, then having to arrest them and finally present a reasonably intelligent case sounds like really hard work for mostly rude and obnoxious people with only a small IQ rating.

It’s 2015 for crying out loud, disdain for properly following laws, proceedures and excercising a modest amount of politness and persumption of innocence is not Total enough for the modern day filth-force! Someone might start to get the idea that they are fellow human beings trying to help the community and some actually might possibly deserve our respect, ….if they are not very, very careful. Spy radars! Why are they wasting unused or old missile launchers, biological weapons and jets when the pigs could be putting them to use against families who don’t mow the lawn everday and fly the flag out front, now those people sound suspicious, quick get the radar.

Figureitout • January 30, 2015 9:26 PM

Clive Robinson
problem is you need a microscope to make the resonator 😉
–Ha, yeah and probably a bit more equipment and expertise. Think you were wearing your infamous “rose-tinted glasses” sipping a pina colada in la-la land and just trying give hope where there isn’t much lol. Proof of concept w/o extensive testing and refining isn’t something you’d be willing to put out in the field eh? Especially considering malicious input (that’s another one of the big problems areas I concern myself w/ sensors, you eventually end at obscurity if you’re “lucky” to have any real-world experience to make this very clear to you).

Your “X-band” mention led me to a nice bit of info and neat site ( http://www.g3pho.free-online.co.uk/microwaves/wideband.htm ) that I think is the frequency on one of these cheap motion sensors that use microwaves and PIR. Haven’t set up the module yet but it has some nice things like jumpers for the LEDs so your typical burglar won’t even realize they’re detected and handy labled output lines for something nice and easy like an arduino. Microwaves are superior as far as I’m concerned in terms of detection. It was way better than my hand soldered PIR kit w/ a sh*tty “datasheet” (literally just one sheet of paper, full of Chinese spelling errors (by the way, don’t laugh when a Chinese person w/ a strong accent tries to say “fork” lol) and IIRC wrong component values, but the circuit still worked).

Yes, I think the use of the tech. is garbage and a huge waste instead of the legitimate scientific purposes (eg. cancer/particle detection). As it stands, you have to stand for like 10 seconds as the person blasts you w/ THz waves cooking your organs (but no! they said it’s safe!) and peaks at your penis like they will (the bright & professional TSA wants it).

RE: spotting people in the lawn
–As stated above, external malicious input (like your lovely HERF gun frying the circuits or jamming RF signals warning me offsite is an actual issue of concern for me, so it needs to be shielded and not be “neutered” in terms of detection) is a huge issue. Likewise the cameras need to be high resolution to get a good picture of the person and already dug out shielded cables 20-30ft deep to send a copy of the data offsite to be useful. Unless some random thug wears a mask/gloves, burns all clothing when done, does a false “gait”, and maybe wears thick shoes to give a slightly false height to cover up some of the identifying info. Good OPSEC like not hitting the same target twice and bruteforce and you’re still “in & out”. I made mention recently, I stumbled across truly atrocious physical security where all I needed was some tape on a stick (the door locks were touchable from outside too) and someone w/ the skill level of the “sticky bandits” could get the keys to multiple cars sitting right outside. The hard part would be “moving”, “sanitizing” and “flipping” the cars professionally; which would be a criminal operation, not some crackhead one-off attack if they want to remain in business.

I’m not going to indulge in a paranoid orgasm as to how I’d stop the problem as the building stages would all be vulnerable still to the same problems. But “analog death traps” is the final straw I’m afraid, you know like a 2X4 w/ nails swinging down and a shotgun w/ fishing line on the trigger etc.

RE: RFID stuff
–Neat, yeah but long range external activation would need to crack the tech. itself, and activation of an electric lock only lasts a second or 2 so someone would have to be close and get ID’d at the least. If they can just “hold it open” that means they’ve rendered the actual keys in the cards worthless which is a full compromise of the tech. anyway, long range or not.

Michael And Ingrid Heroux • January 31, 2015 3:23 AM

The other technology is even stranger and they still use it on us. Every building my family and I have lived in in the last 5 years have been wood frame buildings. They have technology that seems like they are monitoring us from above. We always thought it might be satelites or drones or planes or something. We first noticed it in Victoria B.C. in 2009. The ceiling of our places we have lived in in the last 5 years will start to creak. It is hard to hear because it is a very low creak. You can hear it best when there is no other noise. When we get up and walk across the room the creaking sound will follow us overhead from room to room. It sounds like there is some force pulling on the wooden roof making it creak. I know it sounds crazy but we all hear it. We can lay in bed and listen to the creak slowly move from one side of the ceiling to the other side and back again and it is as though it is scanning the room back and forth. We have lived in about a dozen places in the last 5 years and they have all been wood frame buildings and it has been the same in every place. We have talked with Intelligence while hearing the creaking and they have told us everything we were doing in our room in real time. We would do something and they would tell us “you just did this, you just did that” they wanted us to know that they were watching us. They also told us what we are saying in real time. They wanted us to know that they were monitoring us in real time no matter what we did. I’m not sure if it was to try and intimidate us but it doesn’t bothered us, we don’t break any laws, they can watch and listen to us all they want. We go about our business anyways. We used to wonder if they use that technology for political gain. They would alway know what their political opponents were up to. It reminds me of that one judge in the U.S.A that ruled what they are doing as far as violating peoples privacy is “Orwellian at best.” I guess with that type of technology you could be King if you played your cards right. The only bad health effects I have noticed with that technology is sometimes I will get an itchy rash with little itchy bumps because I have sensitive skin, the doctor told me it was eczema and I use hydrocortisone to take the rash away. I only get the rash after hearing alot of creaking on our ceiling and I started getting the rashes just over 5 years ago. Thanks for reading. Follow that trail of money dude.

3jgn3jgnkigjn • February 1, 2015 11:39 PM

Seeing through walls and matching feedback based on basic radar technology are two different things..

It’s basically WW2 radar tech with modern components to miniaturize..

Dean in MT • June 30, 2015 10:39 PM

Don’t recall how I even stumbled into this thread but just had to read it all to see how the Heroux family made out…still hoping for a followup post which wraps up most of the details and maybe even includes WHY the bad guys began harassing them originally.

The List • July 17, 2016 8:56 AM

The Heroux family ended up on a list of acceptable targets. They were used as training for the new scanner-ray technology – just as the FBI and U.S. Marshalls office uses test subjects for scanner-ray testing in the United States.

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