I’m seeing conflicting reports of LRAD use in Minnesota (probably not by ICE/CBP despite some reports, more likely to be state police).
Most detailed report here:
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/minnesota-state-patrol-long-range-acoustic-device/
LRADs have been used for civilian crowd dispersal in the US before and have quite a range of operating settings, from benign focused audio transmission over a distance to REALLY EFFING LOUD AND DAMAGING TONES AT 160 dB
One of the original use cases for an LRAD is actually to communicate between ships across distances prior to boarding to provide warnings (e.g., mounted to a coastguard vessel). They weren’t really designed for civil urban use (although that’s a slippery one) but have wide military applications both as communication (including psyops) and in a more weaponised form.
Sounds louder than 85 dB(A) require hearing protection at work for context).
Interestingly even the CIA back at the height of black site torture recommend that music or noise louder than 79 dB(A) shouldn’t be used in ‘interrogation’ so that gives you another interesting yardstick.
State police say above that they are using them at the benign end of the spectrum but I haven’t seen anything that confirms this.
(I spent a whole year researching sonic weaponry/use of sound in interrogation so know far too much about this stuff most of which I never used)
#LRAD
