There Are Bigger Threats to Gun Rights Than AI Chatbots and Flock Cameras

Technology is cool, but it can also be terrifying. Most bits of technology can be turned toward something nefarious. Look at Flock cameras for example. A license plate reader isn’t the end of the world, but Flock took it a different direction and made it horrifying. Now, a new bit of tech provides something that, at least to me, sounds even worse.

Especially if companies like Flock get a hold of it.

This one apparently lets someone detect a concealed firearm via Wi-Fi signals.

A group of AI researchers at the Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI) has developed an AI system that can identify concealed handguns using Wi-Fi signals, offering a non-intrusive alternative to visible cameras and cumbersome metal detectors. Detailed in a paper posted on arXivWi-Fi on October 13, the system, called WiFireNet, analyzes channel state information from how an object distorts ambient Wi-Fi signals. The full system comprises a Wi-Fi transmitter, a Wi-Fi receiver, and the WiFireNet AI.

When ordinary Wi-Fi signals encounter an object in their path, they penetrate and bounce off in ways specific to that object, based on its shape, orientation, and material. This data, the channel state information, can be analyzed to identify the object with high accuracy. Security researchers previously disclosed a technique that lets ordinary Wi-Fi routers identify people with 99.5% accuracy.

Researchers then trained it with video and Wi-Fi signals that taught it what to look for, including the difference between a plastic gun, a metal one, and other devices. At that point, the AI just needed a bit of additional work and voila! A system that can detect concealed firearms using an ordinary Wi-Fi signal.

Because that’s not terrifying at all.

While it’s easy to see how this could be used in supposedly gun-free zones to make those areas a lot more likely to be gun-free, at least if someone can respond quickly enough, but the issue is that there is hostility toward the lawful carry of firearms in far too many places.

Couple it with a company that doesn’t seem to care about pathetic concepts like privacy but loves surveillance — you know, like Flock, just to name one example — and now we have Wi-Fi signals that can detect a concealed firearm as a means of tracking gun owners specifically.

Is that what anyone intends on doing? Right now, probably not. 

However, the issue is that if people can do something, someone probably will do something. Especially if you get some town offering free Wi-Fi, but a system like this is put in place along with it.

1984 was intended to be a warning, not an instruction manual, and while there may be legitimate use cases for this, the fact that this uses something so ubiquitous as Wi-Fi makes me nervous to an extreme, and it should make you nervous, too.

Even if it never progresses beyond private businesses using this to ask people to leave for carrying a firearm, that’s still plenty of reason to be concerned but what we’re potentially looking at is far, far darker than any of that.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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