Listen up!

Back on March 11 I posted an item reporting the assertion of arms control expert William Arkin that the US was about to deploy "a new, untested weapon" in Iraq. It's a powerful megaphone that could produce 145 decibels at 300 yards. That's more than four times louder than the threshold of pain, sufficient to cause not only severe pain but permanent hearing loss and possible cellular damage.

I don't know if that was ever actually deployed in Iraq, but I do know of one place where it or it's first cousin has been deployed: New York City.

Mercury News (CA) for August 27, in an article about how technology is affecting protest, reported that

[e]arlier this month, the New York Police Department showed off a machine called the Long Range Acoustic Device, developed for the military and capable of blasting at an earsplitting 150 decibels - as loud as a firecracker, a jet engine taking off or artillery fire at 500 feet, according to the Noise Center at the League for the Hard of Hearing.

The NYPD said it would use the machine to direct crowds to safety if there's a terrorist attack or remind protesters where they're allowed to march. Police said they wouldn't use the earsplitting screeching noise feature at the convention.

"It's only to communicate in large crowds," Inspector Thomas Graham of the police department's crowd control unit said.

"Communicate" as in "What we have here is a failure to communicate?"

What's being "communicated" to me is that the NYPD is in possession of a device intended as a weapon to be used for dominance, for crowd control and dispersion through the infliction of pain on a mass scale. Its "trust us" reassurances do not impress me.