Big Brother has a new toy - The Free Speech Jammer
- The Jammer could be weaponized by police to silence protesters who demand silly things like lower taxes or putting crooked political hacks in jail.
- A gun that shoots Free Speech.
The First Amendment is meant to protect freedom of speech, but a new device could thwart it -- not through censorship but by affecting the brain's cognitive processes. The SpeechJammer gun could thus prevent a shot from being heard round the world.
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In George Orwell's seminal novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth controls news, entertainment and information, while the Ministry of Love is there to monitor, arrest and convert dissidents, real or imagined. However, even Orwell and his fictional ministries could not have imagined a potentially more sinister device -- the SpeechJammer gun invented by two Japanese researchers reports Tech News World.
Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University, have created a handheld device that reportedly offers the ability to "jam" the words of a speaker.
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This technology, which is still in prototype, combines a direction-sensitive microphone with a directional-sensitive speaker and has the ability to disturb the speech of a targeted person. It works by recording the speech of an individual and after a short delay of about 0.2 seconds playing it back. This causes the Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF) effect, which is known to interrupt speech.
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"This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately" when one stops speaking, Kurihara and Tsukada note in their report on the technology titled, "SpeechJammer: A System Utliziing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback."
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"Here we are seeing science fiction becoming a reality," said Billy Pidgeon, principal analyst at M2 Research "and here is one that [could] possibly even be weaponized in a way."
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It could be used simply to silence anyone the user disagreed with or potentially lead the way to confusing others or influencing them in worse ways.
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