Australia's Laser Pointer Ban Isn't Working Very Well

From Russia to the US, pilots are complaining about getting lasers pointed squarely into their eyes while they're trying to land. That's obviously illegal, but it's also a hard crime to track, so, in response, Australia went as far as banning high-powered laser pointers back in 2008. While Australia's firearm restrictions are a model of success, their laser-pointer ban is turning out to be something of a flop. An Australian researcher found that he had no problem buying laser pointers that are ostensibly banned.

Lasers seem innocent enough on the ground, but as they travel far distances—up to a landing airplane for instance—the light diffuses and gets big enough to fill the cockpit and temporarily blind a pilot who is trying to land a fucking airplane fer Chrissakes.

Trevor Wheatley at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, bought 44 laser pointers through clearly Australian sites like Google.com.au and eBay.com.au and got 40 of them without a problem. Seventeen were ordered from Oz itself, 13 from Hong Kong, 11 from China and two from the UK. All but two of them exceeded the 1 milliwatt* limit prescribed by Australian law, even though Wheatley specifically searched for “laser pointer 1 mW.”

According to Wheatley's results, few laser pointers actually lived up to their advertised specifications. Most, in fact, vastly exceed the 1 mW power level they are supposed to stay below. “Suppliers in this market have learnt how to bypass the prohibition,” he explained in the MIT Technology Review.

The most expensive laser pointer only cost $80 (Australian), and “it was the only one of the entire sample that performed as claimed and was compliant with laser safety standards,” he said.

I mean, it seems pretty easy to do, but this, you know, is a problem.

“From a laser safety perspective: the one thing more hazardous than a correctly labeled high power laser pointer is a high power laser pointer labeled as safe,” Wheatley said.

As Motherboard's Meg Neal covered back in February, there's been 1,100 percent increase in laser strikes on aircraft in the US since 2003, which has lead the FBI to offer a $10,000 reward for information that helps police bust the perpetrators. In 2012, pointing a laser pointer was designated as a felony that carried a five-year jail sentence.

As the Technology Review points out though, the Australian ban is “a salutary lesson to governments in other parts of the world. If laser pointers are a problem, then legislation of this kind is probably not the answer.”

*Update: This sentence was changed for accuracy, to read "milliwatts" not "megawatts." One megawatt laser pointers, if they exist, are also prohibited under Australian law, by virtue of being much much more than a milliwatt.