WIRED: Secret Directed-Energy Tech Protecting the President?

[kpete]

Secret Directed-Energy Tech Protecting the President?
By David Hambling EmailNovember 14, 2008 | 4:45:00 PMCategories: Bizarro, Lasers and Ray Guns, Less-lethal

The Secret Service is tasked with protecting the President of the United States from assailants; and given that President-elect Obama has already been the target of assassination plots they may have their work cut out after January. But they have more than earpiece radios and armored limos to help them; the Secret Service can call on the very latest technology. Documents from a recent court case indicate that they have advanced directed-energy devices which are highly classified.

You may remember Donald Friedman, who claims that government agencies are misusing non-lethal directed-energy weapons. It’s easy to dismiss him as a crank. But his obsessive digging has turned up valuable information. For instance, one of his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests unearthed a 1998 U.S. Army program looking at a microwave device to beam sound directly into the target's skull which the rest of us had missed. (The same technology underlies the Medusa non-lethal weapon.)

Now he's found something else. Friedman's current court case involves attempts to extract information about any directed-energy weapons such as lasers and microwaves used by the Secret Service. Do they really have anything of the kind? A "Motion for an Enlargement of Time" (in other words, a request for a few more weeks) by the Secret Service's attorney indicates that they have something, and it's pretty secret:

"Plaintiff's FOIA request is for document (sic) concerning directed energy technology that is very sensitive. Some of this documents (sic) pertain to research conducted by divisions within defendant agency that is used to carry out its mandate to protect very high government officials. In fact, in one case, the documents… could not be mailed but had to be hand carried interstate."a

So what is this "sensitive" technology? We don't know for sure, naturally. But we can sure speculate...

more at:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/11/presidents-secr.html