A laser from a DVD player is powerful enough to burn and cause painful stings, and can pop a balloon on the other side of a room.

Alternatively, one could try to build a HERF (high-energy radio frequency weapon) from salvaged microwave oven parts – in particular the magnetron. This can be combined with an appropriate power supply and a satellite dish to collimate the beam. Such a weapon would have to be run from mains power in a building adjacent to the action or a vehicle engine though.

Some of the protesters were armed with lasers in the Greek riots a couple of years ago, and I remember the startling footage that was shown briefly at the time. (I’ve not been able to find any uploads of it since however – perhaps another case of ‘responsible journalism’?)

Anything that we could build though would be pretty basic compared to the sort of weapons available to the spooks, who have devices that can be used with surgical precision to target selected areas of a person’s brain and cause temporary (or maybe permanent) impairment. Targeted individuals can be made to experience increasing disorganization and loss of memory, up to the point where they fall into the criminal justice show purely due to their inability to cope. Many cases of people ‘going postal’ might be attributable to this sort of targeting, if one looks at the sorts of sensations they report just before they ‘detonate’.

By drawing people’s attention to the DEW weapons they can build on their kitchen table, I’m not trying to cause trouble, but rather to bring about a situation where the sort of weapons the spooks are using are banned by international law, and are well known to the public. I hope also that it promotes a situation in which the electromagnetic environment is tightly and transparently monitored everywhere – the electromagetic spectrum is, after all, now a part of the modern battlefield.