"Please cite something in the scientific, engieneering, or hacker literature showing this." http://www.naimark.net/projects/zap/howto.html http://www.naimark.n

"Please cite something in the scientific, engieneering, or hacker literature showing this." http://www.naimark.net/projects/zap/howto.html http://www.naimark.net/projects/zap/howto.html Really, you can just try this yourself; it is entirely safe and causes no permanent damage to anything. Take a handheld laser pointer and aim it at a webcam from some distance (say, down a hallway). If you do not have a laser pointer, take your camera of choice to the supermarket and point it at a barcode scanner. "Because I think silicon detectors and solid state optics are a lot more resilient (and easier to repair) than human retinas." Well I'm not going to recommend that you shine a laser into anyone's eyes, but like I said, it is easy to see the effect a low-power laser has on a typical CCD camera. In simple terms, what happens is that electrons "spill" into neighboring pixels, which causes more "spilling" to occur (the technical term is "blooming"). The more light the CCD receives, the worse this effect becomes; lasers are an extreme case, since all of the energy is focused on a very small area. There are technologies that reduce this effect, but it is all relative: a cheap cell phone or webcam is easily blinded, whereas a decent point and shoot will still capture at least some of the frame (but with a big circle surrounding the laser dot). As for power levels, I have done the above with a red laser pointer that emits roughly 1mW. To my knowledge, there are no recorded cases of any permanent eye damage from such a laser. There is a reason such devices are considered safe even for indoor use.