Are there any cheaper options that can be bought on Aliexpress? Since tear gas comes in larger particules, will a P100 do? What about pepper spray?
What about pepper spray?
Medium sized (molecular mass 305 g/mol) capsaicin molecules disscolved in alcohol. They come out of solution and get stuck when alcohol tries to find its way through a filter.
Much more potent than any kind of tear gas. Cannot be used as easily in ranged weapons. Flammable. Cops don’t break it out as easily. Also works on cops. Gratitude for a 20-second demonstration of function and first aid goes out to Bulgarian cops. :)
A long time ago, I once volunteered to be pepper sprayed for a test by a fellow anarchist from close range. I was wearing winter clothing, a hood, a fur hat, working goggles (polycarbonate goggles with air holes underneath and above, some of them probably blocked by the hat) and a scarf before my nose and mouth. I breathed out during the process (this is critically important). After being sprayed, I ran for 10 paces to get away from any residual vapour cloud.
I experienced mild discomfort. I believe (perhaps mistakenly) that a P99 (FFP3) mask would reduce effect on airways to tolerable levels, but protection around eyes should have good coverage. But in a protest / confrontation / riot setting, I would recommend a mask with colorful stripes on the filter (protection against multiple chemicals) just to be on the safe side.
On another occasion (a drunken husband beating his wife in the corridor of an apartment building) I have pepper-sprayed a person who hit me, after a warning that I would retaliate if he did that again. He almost blanked out and was not able to walk to his apartment for half an hour. That’s what happens if the spray is good and hits the mark. I brought some water and washing supplies but those didn’t help him much.
P.S. Do not expose any skin. Thick clothing will stop it, thin clothing - not so much. Rinse all skin hit by a liquid. Do not rub. I have pepper sprayed myself accidentally (lifting a heavy object against my leg pushed the lid down on the can). A burning sensation on my leg started in 3 minutes and remained 30 minutes after thorough rinsing. It would have grown very uncomfortable without access to water.
Also, with pepper, contaminated items are really contaminated. Touching those items and then touching your face is a big no-no. Washing in the wrong order can bring contamination to a new area.
I could suggest a half face mask (no more than 20-25€), combined with some cheap swim goggles (less than 5€).
Just to note that different chemicals can be used in different places, or in different times so not too sure if this will work where you live. For this reason, I would strongly suggest talking to people that currently attend protests or even better are on a med team, because they can suggest specific antidotes for the tear gas used and have the antidote with you (for you or anyone else). I say this because often people say stuff like wash your eyes with water but depending on the chemicals used, this could make the burning pain worst.
Military surplus is a better bet.
You can get full face for like 20-30 with a canister pretty regularly, and you need full face because it fucks up your eyes too.
No idea how you’re gonna test the seal tho, but if you don’t seal it we’ll when you put it on. It’s not gonna do anything. You can cover the hole the canister goes in with you hand and see if any air leaks in, but it’s not the same as actually getting tear gassed and seeing if it works.
In boot camp we had a kid not seal right, and he ended up throwing up inside his mask, then ripping it off flinging vomit all over the place. So even if you have the right equipment, you need to know how to use it.
There seems to be at least one story like that from every chemical training. They’re always gross in the funniest ways
Yeah, a good mask worn wrong just concentrates what gets in and it’s 100x worse.
Out in the open tear gas isn’t a big thing, you just move somewhere like 20 feet away and wait a very short amount of time before moving back.
It would be an issue if police had kettled a group, but by then you’re all fucked already. You need organizers aware of the situation to prevent it in the first place.
People should be organizing and buying radios not gas masks. But situational awareness doesn’t look as punk rock as a gas mask
People should be organizing and buying radios not gas masks.
A good reminder.
A side note on radios - most cheap radios don’t allow for encryption, revealing the speaker’s voice (which is enough to identify a person in these days). Encrypted tactical radios have silly prices however.
-
A crude way to cover one’s rear end somewhat is using a signal system. One beep = meaning A, two beeps = meaning B. Error-prone and inflexible.
-
Another way is using Morse code. Slow and raises the barrier for operating a radio, and high barriers will mean a lack of competent operators.
-
Another crude way is using voice synthesizer to speak (no identifiable voice) and a codeword table to authenticate transmissions against spoofing. This way, everyone can listen to unauthenticated broadcasts and those in need can check the code to authenticate the message.
E.g.
- Alice and Bob share a codebook
- In her book, Alice finds that the code word for 21:05 is “fish”
- Alice broadcasts “Ecilop moving into Sesame street from Aleph avenue fish”
- Bob wants to rebroadcast and confirm at 21:06 (the code for 21:05 is no good, being public)
- In his book, Bob finds that the codeword for 21:06 is “horse”
- Bob broacasts “acknowledged, Ecilop moving into Sesame street from Aleph avenue horse”
- Alice now knows that her message has reached
Bobsomeone with a codebook, and anyone downstream from Bob can hear - if Alice and Bob limit themselves to 1 message per minute, they can send 1440 authenticated messages per day
- the Ecilop can still listen and jam their comms, but can’t broadcast a false message
- if Alice and Bob share an extensive one time pad of quality data straight from /dev/random, and a method of picking “pages” from this data, behold, unbreakable DIY encryption and authentication :) they will need some “calculator” app however to ease their work since doing OTP by hand is slow and mind-numbing
Beyond that - the wonderful world of software.
There’s a lot of Android software out there (Briar comes to my mind immediately) that does various jobs decently. But most Android devices are recycled mobile phones which have a history of use during their “past lives” and can be traced to somewhere. This is a downside. A communications terminal should be clean and have no traceable fingerprint. But maybe that’s a compromise one must be willing to make.
Radio modems that plug into a laptop and have reach comparable to a tactical radio are better in that regard. They reach longer distances than WiFi on phones, cost relatively little (e.g. 20 €). But some are really slow. Sending full-fledged GPG messages over them could turn out somewhat annoying, but in return for annoyance, one would get hard privacy. Alice and Bob could talk of anything they’d like, and the Ecilop would not understand a thing.
Meanwhile, WiFi cards can be used to set up mesh networks. Some WiFi devices have outstanding reach, allow somewhat above-legal transmit power, and can broadcast in inject mode (spoofed MAC addresses, fill 802.11 headers with any info that you like), and listen in monitor mode. With a bit of code, they can even frequency-hop over the spectrum. I’ve seen drone video links implemented this way - quite fast, no problem moving 10 mbit/s to a distance of 2 kilometers (direct line of sight, cheap Chinese panel antennas). But most WiFi devices cannot do monitor and inject, and cannot go beyond 100 meters.
-
