Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Xvareon]

We had an incident here just yesterday, where a bunch of federal officers and U.S. army guys came down on my grandfather's property and hauled some storage units away. Apparently their reasoning (as we only found out later) was because 8 years ago, he'd bought some pallets of uniforms that contained infrared dye. He deals in military surplus, so this would seem to be nothing new. But apparently those were not supposed to be resold, and they were tracking them down. Whoever my grandpa bought from is apparently the one in trouble, and probably also whichever officer signed off on letting a wholesaler have those uniforms.

In case you're wondering, no, my grandpa's not in trouble or anything. Though the Army did tear up his lawn bringing in flatbed trucks to haul some semi trailers away. What I want to know is what is the problem with infrared dye in uniforms. After 8 years, would that stuff start to break down into something toxic, explosive, or radioactive? Or are there some secrets to its production they just don't want getting in the hands of the wrong people? I mean, the list of federal agencies that got involved in this looks like this:  U.S. Department of Commerce Special Agents (who are criminal investigators), ATF, ICE, FBI, and I'm pretty sure DHS as well.

[smjjames]

I'd suspect that it's more that there's some pattern or something or other that they don't want getting into the hands of the wrong people. Since they said it has infrared dye, I doubt that in itself is classified.

Or maybe those just weren't ready to be resold yet.

Given how they treat their own people when it comes to hazardous products, I doubt it breaking down into something toxic was their concern.

[scourge728]

I find it likely they meant to take it quite a lot earlier, and just didn't because this is the U.S government we're talking about here, nothing ever gets done efficiently unless it screws someone who isn't rich over and even then it'll probably still get delayed

[Akura]

A quick look-up of invisibile ink on Wikipedia, which is the article that popped up when I typed in "infrared dye", says that information regarding "invisible inks" was exempted from mandatory declassification until 2011 due to "relevance to national security". If your grandpa got it 8 years ago, which would be 2010, those IR dyes would probably have been "classified material" then. As to why it took 8 years, well, as scourge728 suggests, it's the US government.

[scourge728]

You'd think once it became declassified they wouldn't take it but eh

[Doomblade187]

You'd think once it became declassified they wouldn't take it but eh

I mean, once it goes on the improperly sold list, it probably never comes off.

[smjjames]

They probably needed to get them in order to declassify them properly, as in paperwork or somesuch.

It just all comes down to bureaucratic mess and red tape.

[Greiger]

I'm going with the assumption that the "infrared dye" is actually alien blood and that the uniforms are from the Reptilians working at Area 51 and they were sold by mistake. 

Naturally such things need to be tracked, can't let it get out that there are aliens, or that reptile people evolved from dinosaurs control the world, so they have a tracking chip installed.  But they can't have the Greys know where to find their agents so they also have a tracker scrambling chip.  Unfortunately the scrambling chip is too good and it took them 8 years to develop the technology to cut through the scrambling and get the tracking signal again.

It all makes perfect sense really.

* Greiger was banned, detained, and sent to a Mars blacksite for this post.