Mission Statement - De-Spinning the Pro-Taser Propaganda

Yeah right, 'Excited Delirium' my ass...

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The primary purpose of this blog is to provide an outlet for my observations and analysis about tasers, taser "associated" deaths, and the behaviour exhibited by the management, employees and minions of Taser International. In general, everything is linked back to external sources, often via previous posts on the same topic, so that readers can fact-check to their heart's content. This blog was started in late-2007 when Canadians were enraged by the taser death of Robert Dziekanski and four others in a short three month period. The cocky attitude exhibited by the Taser International spokespuppet, and his preposterous proposal that Mr. Dziekanski coincidentally died of "excited delirium" at the time of his taser-death, led me to choose the blog name I did and provides my motivation. I have zero financial ties to this issue.



Tuesday, January 8, 2008

On the subject of RF emissions...

I received a kind reply from Industry Canada (the folks there are very nice). Apparently the tasers are exempt from licensing in Canada, because there are more important things to worry about than regulating RF emissions from battery-powered torture devices.

Anyway, thank you to Industry Canada for their detailed and speedy reply. The details are appended to the applicable post below.

But before you run off to review the updates to the 'FCC & IC' post, consider this...

What also falls out of this RF emission issue is that the use (and misuse) of tasers behind closed doors could theoretically be detected by means of their (apparently perfectly-legal in Canada) burst of RF noise on either 50 or 100kHz. Each taser model would probably have a distinctive signature in both the frequency and time domains. Direction Finding techniques could triangulate the location.

The torture victim's variables (his conductivity, perhaps his dielectric properties) may also impact the details of these signature elements.

Buzzz-Buzzz-Buzzz. "Hey Fred look at this. They're tasering Bob again..."

Human-rights organizations and others, if they have the requirement, may wish to investigate this possible 'technical means' of detecting and tracking taser use and abuse by way of RF remote sensing. I have no idea what the radio range would be (probably up to 1km [a guess] more or less, depending on conditions and techniques). Some quick-and-dirty experimentation would be required to confirm the concept.

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