"But if you want to disable someone and want to do it subtly and have it happen days or weeks or months after you have contact with someone, this can do it," Schecter said.
Four officers entered and tried to subdue Mr. Chamberlain, first with a Taser weapon, then with a shotgun loaded with beanbag-type ammunition intended to disable someone without causing serious injury.
An officer on patrol needs only enough firepower to establish authority in an arrest and to disable someone posing a direct threat to life.
Of course in order to disable someone's phone, you have to put your own on the blink, too; but there are always plenty of people who will make any sacrifice for the sake of bothering somebody else.
There's a Taser, there's a sound system you can use to disable someone, there's a high-frequency generator that you can use, there's a net that you can fire and it completely closes over the top part of the body.
Still, he said, that disabling someone's phone, "instead of just relocking it and to wipe out the apps, it seems like Apple is going way too far; I'd call it uncharacteristically evil".
It was considered more humane to mutilate someone than to kill them, but the mutilation was considered to be disabling.
But he said that whether someone was disabled had to be an individual determination.
When I first arrived in the mall a security team was trying to disable the elevators to prevent the attackers from moving between floors and popping out and surprising someone.
They said the men had apparently spent 30 days training for the home invasion, which was executed as planned except for one problem: someone failed to disable the surveillance system, which the couple had installed to monitor their children.
Meanwhile Malaysian police searched the home of the pilot at the helm of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, after the country's prime minister confirmed earlier on Saturday that the Boeing 777's communications were deliberately disabled by "someone on the plane".
