A curious insight into current technology - helicopter and laser pointer

An interesting little observation from dispatches from TJICistan:

reading between the lines

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massach�

Maybe he thought it was funny to point a hand-held laser beam at a helicopter. But the three police forces and the U.S. Coast Guard were not laughing Saturday night as they chased down a Medford-area man who faces the possibility of federal charges�

State police pilots were on a routine security mission, guarding a liquid natural gas tanker, as it was near shore at about 9:15 p.m. Saturday night, Bousquet said. They noticed a laser light touching their helicopter. Using sophisticated equipment on their helicopter, including cameras, they pinpointed the origin of the light as somewhere in the Medford-Somerville area, Bousquet said.

The search was on � involving authorities from the U.S. Coast Guard, the state police, the Medford Police Department and the Somerville Police Department. About 90 minutes later, police found an adult male. Bousquet would not say exactly how police found him�

I find it quite interesting that

(a) state police helicopters have the capability to track down the origin of a laser flash with resolution tight enough to arrest a guy

(b) they won�t say what this technology is

I find even more interesting the unstated tidbit that there is, apparently, some credible threat that led authorities to install systems on helicopters to track down laser flashes.

Maybe I�m reading too much into this.

�but maybe I�, not.

Fascinating.

Most curious... I know that here, we had an incident in 2005 where some Boarder Patrol officers saw an object of interest, at night, at about 14 miles range from a land-based surveillance camera. The news item is only available to subscribers to the Bellingham Herald

A tiny dot on a Border Patrol surveillance camera turned out to be a kayak with more than 100 pounds of marijuana on board headed into the United States on Monday night. About 11 p.m., a U.S. Border Patrol communications operator in the Blaine sector noticed the "faint but unusual object" moving south in Boundary Bay from White Rock, B.C., toward Semiahmoo Spit, west of Blaine, said a news release from Deputy Chief Joseph Giuliano.

Agents met the kayaker as he landed.

We live a few miles from the Canadian border and have these cameras scattered around. I would love to take one of them for a test drive someday...