Move Over TSA: Make Way for the Passenger “Stun” Bracelet (w/video)

With all the grousing and grumbling over enhanced pat-downs and potentially cancer-causing scanners at airport security checkpoints, you might think the Department of Homeland Security would be investigating alternatives. According to an article at The Washington Times, officials at DHS are doing just that.

One promising technology they have “expressed great interest in” a “safety” bracelet that would be worn by all passengers from the time they board an airplane to the time they disembark.

Just to clarify, the safety is all theirs—not yours. You see the bracelet is a stun device, similar to a police Taser. It is to designed to shock the wearer silly, immobilizing him for several minutes. The stun would be effectuated by security personnel on board the flight. Try complaining that your seat doesn’t recline far enough, and you might find yourself snacking on 5,000 volts of electricity instead of stale peanuts.

The bracelet, which would take the place of a boarding pass, would contain personal information about the traveler and GPS tracking software to monitor his whereabouts as well as that of his luggage. The EMD Safety Bracelet, as this technological wonder is known, may be cutting-edge 2011 but it feels like 1984 all over again.

As the following educational video illustrates, EMD stands for Electro-Muscular Disruption. That’s more government speak for “we can paralyze you for several minutes.”
So how serious is the government about acquiring the technology? Perhaps this will provide some indication. Correspondence between the inventor of the device and Paul S. Ruwaldt of DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate, Office of Research and Development, appears to have been scrubbed from the Internet. A link to the letters in the Times article and an article at Prison Planet both result in a 404 error, “The page cannot be found.” A video by Lamperd Less Lethal, Inc., the manufacturer of the EMD Safety Bracelet, has also been removed.

Fortunately, the Times article provides a one-sentence quote from a letter by Ruwaldt as an artifact. That sentence, which states “it isconceivable to envision a use [of the EMD bracelet] to improve air security, on passenger planes,” speaks volumes.