In the United States, there have been several reports of thugs using
stunners on victims to disable them while a crime was being committed, but
I don't believe I have heard any stories about one-man thunderstorms:-)
yet.  I'm sure it isn't long before somebody tries it here.

        I would think that regular fiber optics could harden a system quite
a bit.  The main problem would be that all the alarm sensors would have to
work with light rather than electricity.  Another more practical possibility
would be to have a PIC do all the sensor monitoring and send a status
message via an optical coupler to a well-hardened PIC circuit that looked
for this status message and turned in an alarm if anything strange happened.
This would mean that the thief would most likely just set the alarm off as
he was trying to zap it.  The PIC that was out on the front line and reading
all the sensors would need to have some kind of validity checker on each
sensor like the resistor used to terminate fire alarm networks so that if
that particular sensor were blinded by a zap, it would do something different
rather than just not respond to the opening of the window or whatever.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 36.7N97.4W
OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Data Communications Group