8 ms·
ADE 651
- savant_penguin 5y agoThe amazing Randi would talk about those often during his interviews. Apparently some were a bunch of random hardware glued together + a bunch of ants in the inside
- xabi 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruTmqfGJhTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruTmqfGJhTI
- kabdib 5y agoI guess they tried it without the ants, and it didn't work?
- 0xcde4c3db 5y agoRandi also spoke about the ideomotor effect, which is the basis of how these things "work". The short version is that if someone believes a force is present, there is a tendency to subconsciously generate a corresponding body movement. To the extent that any actual information is involved, the user is feeding information to the device, not the other way around. See also: Ouija boards, facilitated communication, no-touch martial arts, etc..
- kumarvvr 5y agoThis looks like a scheme to siphon off money. No one in the military would be that stupid.
- 0-_-0 5y agoIraqi Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani defended the use of the ADE 651.
- ceejayoz 5y agoWhich is exactly what you would do if you were part of said scheme to siphon off money, or at least paid off by its participants.
- chrisseaton 5y agoEven the Belgian government bought them - it's not like it was just less educated countries.
- hollerith 5y agoSure, but they bought only one, then quickly concluded it did not work.
- otikik 5y ago> A scheme to siphon off money. The war in Afganistan was exactly that. I wouldn't put it past the US military.
- indymike 5y agoI served in the US Navy and can confirm that people can be that stupid.
- glenneroo 5y agoA friend of mine was in the Marines and witnessed a guy blow his hand off after someone else bet him that he wouldn't hit a 50mm round with a hammer.
- tyingq 5y agoHah! That's over the top brazen. Like purposefully designing the scam device to not require a battery? And making it look/work just like a "dowsing rod", which should raise suspicions? Including a bit of fake circuitry seems like it would have made sales easier, though he seems to have sold plenty as-is. It feels like he was trying to make a point about how stupid people can be.
- aww_dang 5y agoI imagine the device may have been as effective as other parts of security theatre. Operators simply had to observe how nervous their suspects were. The high price added a needed prentense to the technobabble. Wondering if some buyers understood this?
- tyingq 5y agoMaybe, but it's a handle with a hole in it and a rod with a 90 degree bend at one end. Pretty sure you could find a cheaper source :)
- jdavis703 5y agoWhere I grew up they had checkpoints and would sometimes scan for car bombs. One guy had a mirror he’d use to look under the car, while a couple of other guys had assault weapons strapped to their chest. That seems like enough to make someone nervous without needing a $60k kit.
- CivBase 5y ago> The high price added a needed prentense to the technobabble. How is a bomber supposed to know how much you payed for your high-tech dowsing rod?
- garyfirestorm 5y agoIf they haven’t seen one in wild it must be very exclusive and hence expensive.
- riazrizvi 5y ago10 years for selling a thousand of these? That feels like the bargain sentence you get because other people were in on the scheme and you are the guy that takes the fall.
- ollybee 5y agoHe only served 5 years and is now a free man
- riazrizvi 5y agoSweet deal. I wonder how many people died.
- ThePadawan 5y agoIt definitely reads like the beginning of a revenge action movie.
- spamizbad 5y agoAmazing. I'm reminded of a similar scam where a conman claimed to have developed a device that could decode terrorist messages sent via Al-Jazeera TV and sold the CIA on it.
- jovial_cavalier 5y agoHonestly, the pitch here is so over the top, so brazen, and so patently unbelievable, I don't think he should be charged with fraud. I think the people he defrauded should be charged with incompetence.
- teddyh 5y agoYou are quite literally blaming the victim.
- chrisseaton 5y agoNo the victims are the dead people it didn’t protect - they aren’t blaming them. They’re blaming people who didn’t do due diligence when buying it.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoExactly, these people are in position of power, with mutiple degrees, staff and million dollar equipment. They are not just a rando off the street
- jovial_cavalier 5y agoExactly. I'm being tongue-in-cheek when I say he shouldn't be charged with fraud. But if people died because of this, he definitely should not be considered liable for their deaths. That lies strictly with the people who bought this without thinking about it for even two seconds.
- teddyh 5y agoPeople who spend money on a useless products are also victims. Of fraud. Yes, even particularly clueless people should be held blameless of the crimes of fraudsters.
- jaywalk 5y agoTo be fair, you have to be pretty damned stupid to actually believe this device would work. So it's hard to believe that the "victims" weren't in on this somehow.
- zozbot234 5y agoDetecting fake bombs might be quite useful in some cases. I think it's well worth the price.
- anonymousiam 5y agoThe perfect accessory to go with some fake explosives! https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/prop-bomb-explosive-fake-gag-toy-539096352 https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/prop-bomb-explosive-f...
- causi 5y agoFraud that resulted in the violent deaths of potentially hundreds of people and he only got ten years.
- da_chicken 5y agoHe got quite rich off it, too. > James McCormick, 56, of Langport, Somerset, is said to have made £50m from sales and sold more than 6,000 in Iraq, the Old Bailey heard. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22266051 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22266051
- jpxw 5y agoAnd ten years in prison.
- joncrane 5y agoIf someone told you they'd pay you $5m per year spent in prison, would you take it?
- da_chicken 5y agoI'd be a model prisoner.
- Majestic121 5y agoTo me the person to blame here are the people spending 52M buying it and using it as a protection without testing it. I know it's a bit blaming the victim, but in this case we're not talking about regular people, but about higher ups whose responsibility is precisely to be able to find solutions and handle a budget : if they get scammed (or more probably corrupted) by such ridiculous devices, the blood is on their hand from the minute they accepted the responsibility.
- lqet 5y agoThis reads like an April's fool joke: > The ADE 651 consists of a swivelling antenna mounted via hinge to a plastic handgrip. It requires no battery or other power source; its manufacturer claimed that it is powered solely by the user's static electricity. > After a substance-specific "programmed substance detection card" is inserted, the device is supposed to swivel in the user's hand to point its antenna in the direction of the target substance. The cards are claimed to be designed to "tune into" the "frequency" of a particular explosive or other substance named on the card > The cards were supposedly "programmed" or "activated" by being placed in a jar for a week along with a sample of the target substance to absorb the substance's "vapours". Initially, McCormick reportedly used his own blood to "program" the cards for detecting human tissue > [McCormick] told The Times that ATSC had been dealing with doubters for ten years and that the device was merely being criticized because of its "primitive" appearance. He said: "We are working on a new model that has flashing lights."
- thaumasiotes 5y agoIt reads just like a dowsing rod.
- sitzkrieg 5y agohow do you spend 10s of thousands of dollars on something without checking such comical red flags like that?
- AdrianB1 5y agoYou do government acquisitions.
- MattGaiser 5y agoYou don't know how, your boss wants action, and it will cause you problems now to put up a fuss but not if you just go with it. You really don’t need corruption, just people under pressure who don’t want to push back.
- smnrchrds 5y agoThe answer is usually corruption and kickbacks.
- daveslash 5y agoReminds me of Wilhelm Reich, who believed in "orgone energy". He built these "orgone accumulators", which were boxy, small-phone-booth-looking, Faraday Cages. You'd sit in them for hours to accumulate your orgone energy and it would increase your libido. According to Wikipedia, "A professor at the University of Oregon who bought an accumulator told an FDA inspector that he knew the device was phoney, but found it helpful because his wife sat quietly in it for four hours every day." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich#Orgonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich#Orgonomy
- _joel 5y agoI remember this story in the UK press. The awful thing is, how many died due to this?
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoIf your goal is to reliably manufacture probable cause on demand $60k for some glorified dowsing rods is a hell of a lot better than multiples of that for a trained dog that requires a "handler" and isn't as reliable.
- samhw 5y agoThe police literally said as much, in the Wikipedia article for a similar device, the Quadro Tracker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro_Tracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro_Tracker), which hilariously "could detect hidden drugs, explosives, weapons and lost golf balls": > The Jefferson County, Texas narcotics task force spent $3,250 on a Quadro Tracker. The task force's commander later said: "We played with it in the office and got mixed results. Sometimes we'd find something, sometimes not. Our rate of success was about half. I think it was either blind luck or a ouija board effect. It's not near as consistent as (drug-sniffing) dogs, but there are no vet bills."[13]
- kleiba 5y agoSurely customers would have returned the device after trying it out for five minutes?
- sdiq 5y agoI saw Kenyan police use it on a bus I was in. At the time, I didn't think much about it for being asked to alight the bus and be searched was already an inconvenience for. Not shocked that the Kenyan government was duped. I am certain some top officials also made their killing off of this probably even getting them at a price a multiple of the quoted 60k. Fraud and corruption work together very well.
- Toutouxc 5y agoThe GT200 article that this one links to is even more absurd (horrifying), especially the Thailand part.
- mastax 5y agoMy uncle is an Industrial Engineer. He has worked for every company imaginable, setting up their production lines and fixing all manner of problems. He can fix or repair anything, and probably has. This past weekend I saw him walk around the yard with divining rods. I asked him about it later. He said he was using them to find where the sewer pipe was run. He told me a story about how he got his first job in maintenance after passing a divining rod test. Said he always keeps the rods in the back of his truck. Wasn't sure what to say.
- rjsw 5y agoI have used it to search for a pipe between a water spring and a storage tank. Some family members could do it, some could not. Still think that the subject of the linked article is a fraud though.
- 0cVlTeIATBs 5y agoYou could have won James Randi's million dollar prize if you had a working dowsing rod.
- rjsw 5y agoDon't think the rod matters, it is just the indication that the person holding it has reacted to something. It was very accurate the one time we tried it.
- marcodiego 5y agoDon't think the users of this device are dumb or unintelligent people. Devices like this are successful for two reasons: 1 - corruption and 2 - blind faith. Although education may reduce the second, it does nothing to minimize the first.
- avh02 5y agoHad seen a few of these "protecting" malls in Beirut... Eventually I'd borderline ignore the mall security guard operating the worthless device. Shame they weren't using them near the port...
- emsign 5y agoCould have prevented this disaster if they not turned it on but taken it apart first.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]