Freedom Fighter Radio

Source: Wired

The military isn’t about to deploy its pain ray to the battlefield. But someone in the commercial sector is about to one. We don’t know who. The sale is mentioned in a presentation by Raytheon, who built the microwave weapon for the Defense Department.

The so-called “Active Denial System” works by heating the outer surface of the target’s skin using millimeter waves — short wavelength microwaves. The effect is painful, but generally harmless, and forces the target to get out of the beam. Recently, it’s been proposed as a possible defense against pirates; last month, Raytheon gave a presentation on Active Denial at a NATO workshop on anti-pirate equipment and technologies.

This presentation mentions an “Impending Direct Commercial Sale” of a commercial version of the Active Denial system known as Silent Guardian (pictured). This is Active Denial in a box, a 10,000-pound containerized system that can be mounted on a ship, a truck, or a fixed installation. It’s got an effective range of about 250 meters. The beam has a power of around 30 kilowatts.
The anti-pirate presentation shows how a set-up with two antennas could achieve almost 360-degree coverage for a small container ship.

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Source: Wired

LAS VEGAS — It’s one of the most hostile hacker environments in the country –- the DefCon hacker conference held every summer in Las Vegas.

But despite the fact that attendees know they should take precautions to protect their data, federal agents at the conference got a scare on Friday when they were told they might have been caught in the sights of an RFID reader.

The reader, connected to a web camera, sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks as they passed a table where the equipment was stationed in full view.

It was part of a security-awareness project set up by a group of security researchers and consultants to highlight privacy issues around RFID. When the reader caught an RFID chip in its sights — embedded in a company or government agency access card, for example — it grabbed data from the card, and the camera snapped the card holder’s picture.

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Note: Numbers USA is a major backer of The Real ID ACT (designed by DHS)