They could be guilty of crimes against humanity or for violations of human rights (if one believes the International Court of Justice can just declare its jurisdiction applies beyond the borders of the country it operates in).

Technically, police don't go to war (usually). Unless you count MPs, but they are technically members of the military and subject to whatever conventions or agreements their country may have signed up to.

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 12:14 PM Cian Witherspoon <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
This is your reminder that the US and many other nations hold that police forces are legally incapable of committing war crimes.  

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 08:03 <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
And then there's that microwave or sonic weapon that (Cubans? Cubans with Russian help? Russians with Cuban help?) have been causing all sorts of injuries to Canadian diplomats and staff working in Havana (eyesight issues, brain issues, etc).... that's another fun one....

... and what about the mobile crowd control microwave systems for containing and directing crowds.... what's the effect of getting too close or getting too long of a dose? Not so good.....

The blinding tech advancement lately seems to be smaller hand held units with very strong emissions. And putting those on drones then using them to screw with people on the ground and aircraft on approaches or takeoffs when something going wrong would be the worst....

Another interesting bit from Niven was the laser with the dialable dispersion - on tight, it's a beam laser 'wand' or a fast slashing 'laser sword' with more than a 2m reach (anyone nearby) .... and if you dial it to full width, you get a rather useful flashlight. They did hit locations and damage per location so when you used it as a sword, you got to split the total output between several targets and then evenly by a number of hit locations.... quite a handy tool/close in weapon/mid-range weapon. Probably out towards tech 13 or 14 in Traveller terms.

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 8:12 AM shadow at shadowgard.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
On 27 Apr 2020 at 2:48, Kelly St. Clair wrote:

> For exactly this reason - temporarily or permanently blinding
> hundreds, if not thousands, of people who happen to be looking in your
> direction when you (almost effortlessly, if not automatically) sweep
> the laser over them - lasers /made/ for blinding are almost certain to
> be banned under most rules of warfare.  There are strong indications
> this will happen in RL, as soon as someone gets closer to actually
> making and/or deploying one.

Already done. Using lasers to blind is a war crime.

And we've been able to do it for a long time. My guess is at least
20-30 years. It doesn't take that much power to blind someone. Even
to make it permanent. There are handheld lasers that are powerful
enough.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com


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