Spin-on & the LAPD's "big new" tactical medium
Boing Boing writes about how "The Los Angeles Police Department is showing off a new GPS-enabled dart to help cops catch criminals who are speeding away. StarChase's Pursuit Management System consists of a tiny GPS receiver/cellular transmitter in a glue compound. The police officer uses an air launcher to fire the tracking device at the fleeing vehicle. The device then wirelessly transmits its location for display on a Web-based interface. From the Los Angeles Times: (LAPD Chief William J.) Bratton hailed the dart as "the big new idea"..."
While technology that originated with military training has "spun-off" to many new areas within the government and in non-military applications, some observers now how the military now often tend to absorb of "spin-on" ideas from civilian technology development. On this note, to me the GPS dart brings brings to mind an innovative hacker project, the BlueSniper, pictured here, and shown at last year's Defcon. While BlueSniper serves a quite different function than does the awkwardly named Pursuit Management System, with the former having been developed by hackers, it's not so hard to imagine the latter being presented as a proposal by radical hactivists as a technique for tagging and tracking the movements of, say, certain extaordinary rendition procedures.