ACLU Files for Info on New Brain-Scan Tech

An anonymous reader writes "According to their website, the ACLU has filed a FOIA request seeking information on the new Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging service being made available to the government for use on suspected terrorists which can produce 'live, real-time images of people's brains as they answer questions, view images, listen to sounds, and respond to other stimuli. [...] These brain-scanning technologies are far from ready for forensic uses and if deployed will inevitably be misused and misunderstood," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "This technology must not be deployed until it is proven effective -- and we are a long way away from that point, according to scientists in the field,"'"

First post(?)

for somebody who wonders: why do scientists always insist on technology being "reliable" before the government can use it? I ask you, where would we be if we had left science to be "certain" that the A-bomb would work back in '45? I'll tell you where . . . not here!

Pesky scientists! Won't let the government fry terrorists just because the proof isn't surefire. Imagine!

Re:First post(?)

why do scientists always insist on technology being "reliable" before the government can use it?

Because unreliable tech won't hold up in a court of law?

Not that a court of law is where most 'terrorists,' detained by the gov't, have ended up.

A better idea is if the Alphabet Agencies (CIA/DoD/NSA/DoJ/etc) uses FMRI's for security screenings, in the same way that polygraph's are used. That way science can build up a body of knowledge at the Federal Gov'ts expense and the results can be backed up with polygraphs.

Re:First post(?)

A better idea is if the Alphabet Agencies (CIA/DoD/NSA/DoJ/etc) uses FMRI's for security screenings, in the same way that polygraph's are used. That way science can build up a body of knowledge at the Federal Gov'ts expense and the results can be backed up with polygraphs.

Polygraphs can't back up shit. They're a pile of crap. There are no physiological reactions that can be specifically atributed to deception. That's why they're not permitted as evidence in any court. Why do you think it is that the two possible results of a polygraph are "shows signs of deception" or "inconclusive"? Polygraph results are highly subjective interpretations of ill-defined measurements. Baseline questions are asked that supposedly set the thresholds for "truth" and "deception", but the machines largely rely on the subject's subconscious fear that the machine is catching them in the lie. There isn't a red light or buzzer on the machine that goes off every time the subject lies. What you have is just one man's opinion of what a lot of jumpy marks on graph paper mean in relation to your guilt or innocence-- influenced, of course, by his guess, based upon what he has heard about you, and deductions he draws from how you appear and act.

Re:First post(?)

Furthermore, if you know what you are doing, you can influence the polygraph any way you want it (trust me, I teach neurophysiology to medical students). There are other methods of lie detection that are harder to spoof such as the P300 method (cortical evoked potential at 300ms delay in normal persons signifying recognition) being investigated, but even this method has it's problems in that you cannot discriminate why someone may elicit a P300. I would also suspect that interpretation of fMRIs can also be confused by someone who "knows" how to lie. The trick is to avoid delivering "tells" that are physiologic manifestations of deception and build yourself a reality behind the lie. I've said it before, but the truth is that there is no foundation in physiology that mandates that one has to reveal anything when stating something that is not in fact, the truth. A good liar will be able to deceive the device and more importantly, the interpreter of the device because they are able to LIVE the lie.

Tinfoil hats

Guess the tinfoil hat brigade may of been on to something.

Re:Tinfoil hats

Never turn on an MRI machine in a hardware store. Trust me.

Silly people!

Surely they know that the only scientific way of telling if someone is a terrorist or not is to measure the space between their eyes. Terrorists are scientifically proven to have eyes closer together the The Good Guys(TM)

Re:Silly people!

Of course you'd say that, you have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter!

Re:Silly people!

I guess that makes hammerhead sharks the "Best" guys.

Re:Silly people!

I thought the reliable test was to see if the terrorist floats.

Misunderstood? How about unreliable!

Look at lie detectors, we still don't understand those and they have proven time and time again to be faulty at best. Depending on this a sole source of information is foolish.

http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]

Re:Misunderstood? How about unreliable!

I have had to take a lie detector test for work. I get really paniced under pressure and they could not get a good reading cause my vitals were always high.

Re:Misunderstood? How about unreliable!

As with lie detectors, I assume that these are used to cause the to usee spontaneously provide a (truthful) confession, not for accuracy. Hey, it's not torture.

Faulty systems can still work some of the time...

Thus, they can be a useful tool. Lie detectors aren't black or white type machines but they can give hints. For example, if someone is questioned about a large number of things, and he gets nervous when answering certain questions, that might be a good place to start investigating. And no one would ever use a single source of information for that kind of thing, so that isn't an issue.

Re:Faulty systems can still work some of the time.

if someone is questioned about a large number of things, and he gets nervous when answering certain questions, that might be a good place to start investigating.

Or they know that that question is the one you think they did. I had to be polygraphed for a job ("Of course it's voluntary. We're just not hiring you because we liked the other guy's hair better."). In the pre-interview, they ask if you've ever been questioned by police, so I said yes. Which is true. When I was a kid, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Didn't do a damn thing, and the cops knew it, but this guy didn't ask them. He asked me about it 45 times in the machine, and obviously that question was important, and it made me nervous every time.

They don't actually tell you the results of those things, but for some reason, I went from being a lock with, "It's just a formality. Call when they're done, we'll get you set up," to not answering my calls for a week until they called to tell me they offered the job to someone else.

Obviously I can't be sure that's why. Maybe my fly was open. But the polygraph's the only reason I can think of.

What I particularly loved was at the end, the guy looks upset and says, "Were you controlling your breathing?" Yes! You strapped a frigging cable around my torso and told me to keep still! Stupid frigging *grumble* *grumble*...

ACLU

Why does ACLU hate America so much?

One step closer...

... to foiling thought crime forever. By the way, oil production is up 20%, the Dow Jones is up 12 points, unemployment is down to 1%, North Korea has agreed to halt their missle testing, and the war in Iraq is over.

Sounds like a good alternative to political debate

Monthly Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of candidate or elected politicians to find out what part of what they spew is intended to be deceptive.

Re:Sounds like a good alternative to political deb

Cool. Honest government with enforced altruism. It won't happen though. I think there's a great interest for lie detectors to be considered as not reliable enough for court use by our elected officials.

Re:Sounds like a good alternative to political deb

And if will filter out the purposefully deceptive ones, the only politicians we will have left are compulsive liars or sociopaths.

Effective?

Why would it need to be effective? If you could use this thing to trick the suspected terrorist into revealing information, isn't that an effective use of the system? The ACLU seems to want the world to know that the technology doesn't work. All that will do is make interrogation of suspects less effective.

Wha tdoy ouge twhe nyo udis ectahu manbra in?

I pulled this out of my scrabble bag. If those pan-dimensional beings would've had this technology, they wouldn't have wanted to disect Artur's brain.

Re:Wha tdoy ouge twhe nyo udis ectahu manbra in?

I pulled this out of my scrabble bag. If those pan-dimensional beings would've had this technology, they wouldn't have wanted to disect Artur's brain.

No entry found for disect.
Did you mean dissect [reference.com]?

Are you really that lame, or did you just spell it

In the field

"This technology must not be deployed until it is proven effective -- and we are a long way away from that point, according to scientists in the field,"

I imagine anyone likely to find themselves in this thing's "field" would agree.

This is a joke right?

fMRI is pretty primitive . . . just realtime video of where the blood goes in the brain. Using it to detect lies is like using Sherlock Holmes magnifying lens to scientifically examine the Moon from the Earth. The resolution and focus is horrible with respect to the density of information processing in the brain.

Additionally, research into decision making processes and incentives by psychologist and economists using fMRI is in its infancy. To believe that we could accurately detect lies with fMRI when we don't even know how people make decisions or react to incentives is impossibly optimistic. The promise of a reduced sentence for telling the truth could completely change the fMRI results. The fact that the Guantanamo guard that kicked the sh*t out of you last week is in the room could completely change the fMRI results. The color of the room may change the fMRI results. And so on . . .

We just don't have enough historical data to do this reliably.

Re:This is a joke right?

Well, you don't necessarily need to know much except how the overall pattern differs between lying and telling the truth. There have been several studies to do it recently that have had some success. For example:

Kozel FA, Johnson KA, Mu Q, Grenesko EL

Re:This is a joke right?

I think that's exactly the point the ACLU is trying to make. This technology shouldn't be used by the government as part of any decision-making process. The article writer may have added a bit of sensationalism.

I for one

welcome our new government overlords



oh crap......now they can tell I'm lying about that.

Comments

First, a correction. The article says:

The most likely technology to be used for anti-terrorism purposes is Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which can produce live, real-time images of people's brains as they answer questions, view images, listen to sounds, and respond to other stimuli.

fMRI does not produce live, real-time images of brain activity. At best, this is misleading. First, temporal resoultion of fMRI is very poor when compared with the speed of firing of neurons. A typical fMRI experiment takes a picture of the whole brain every 1.5-4 seconds. Furthermore, the blood oxygenation changes measured with fMRI are slow and cause an effective temporal blurring of the data (blood peaks about 6 seconds after brain activity). To determine which changes relate to changes in psychological function, much offline processing is necessary. Yes, it is possible and has been acheived in some cases to have semi-real-time online analysis, but this is certainly not the norm. What you typically end up with at the end of an fMRI experiment is a static map showing the extent to which signal at each voxel correlates with your task of interest.

Now as for the issue at hand, it is certainly premature to use fMRI as a reliable lie detector or something like it. However, the article does not really specify how it is being used. If data is being collected to advance the reliabilty of this tool as a lie detector then it could be effective sooner rather than later.

Something similar

There was one of these late-night Open University* programs on a few years ago that covered something very similar (although I suspect a little less advanced).

Basicly people were sat infront of a screen and displayed keywords, pictures of people or places etc. and had the general level of electrical avtivity going on in their brains recorded. Later on the activity log was matched against the timeline of what they were looking at and you could very clearly see the difference between questions that had no relation to them and questions that did.

It's not a magic solution to interigation, but if you ask the right questions properly (which includes things that they know nothing about, or for example showing pictures of cute puppies or family members etc.) then it could really help as there's no known way to control these specific reactions (as it's possible with traditional lie detectors.

I'm sure the professor was an American, but I can't remember his name.. any help finding how this progressed and how it compares to what's discussed in the article would be cool.

* To you non-british people, the OU is a university in which you can study at home/abroad and shows educational material late at night on the 'public' TV channels.

Why is this a "Civil Liberties" issue?

These brain-scanning technologies are far from ready for forensic uses and if deployed will inevitably be misused and misunderstood.

The results, if any, will be presented in courts, with experts from defense and prosecution debating their merits in front of juries. This happens to fingerprints, DNA, speed radars, and all other technologies used in crime-fighting.

In short, I feel, my ACLU donation is being misused...

Re:Why is this a "Civil Liberties" issue?

It is important to note that the ACLU has only file a FOIA request at this point: they haven't filed expensive lawsuits or spent a ton of money yet -- so don't jump to complain just yet.

Re:Why is this a "Civil Liberties" issue?

The results, if any, will be presented in courts, with experts from defense and prosecution debating their merits in front of juries. This happens to fingerprints, DNA, speed radars, and all other technologies used in crime-fighting.

In short, I feel, my ACLU donation is being misused...

But not your tax dollars? (Which unlike your donation, isn't voluntary..)

Basically what you're saying here seems to be that law enforcement should be allowed to use whatever hokey crackpot ideas it wants to, and it's up to the courts to say if it's no good or not?

First off, if the government is subjecting people to any kind of scans, be it speed radars or palm-reading, that is a civil rights issue, and something we should be given the full and complete details of. That is definitely an ACLU issue in my book.

Second, the courts can only test what's being put in front of them. Should this stuff go unquestioned as long as noone uses it in court? I don't think so. In particular when it's being used on non-US citizens which you apparently can incarcerate nowadays without bothering with a trial.

Third, as a taxpayer, why the heck shouldn't I be concerned about the validity of any law-enforcement method (or any method in general) the government is blowing my money on? If the FBI is making phone calls to the Psychic Hotline to find out where Osama is, then you bet I'm concerned, regardless if that'll hold up in court or not!

 

But what are they using it FOR?

Seems to me there are two possible uses:

  1) Developing intelligence to interdict terrorist acts.
  2) Developing evidence to be used in criminal prosecution against the person being scanned.

1 is fair game. Terrorism and actions to prevent it is war, while MRI doesn't cause pain or damage to the subject (unless he happens to have, say, shrapnel in his body to be yanked on by the magnet).

2 is a violation of the prohibitions against unreasonable search and compelling an accused to testify against himself.

Seems to me the government has a choice: They can use the device on the suspected terrorist if they decide it's worth letting him go later (rather than prosecuting him) for detecting and stopping the plot.

Once they've extracted info with it and used it in their further actions, it will be essentially impossible to show that evidence they collect later was in no way derived from the information they extracted using the machine. It becomes "fruit of the poisoned tree" and inadmissable.

(By the way: Don't bring up the Geneva Accords. They specifically exclude people who violate certain "rules of civilized warfare", such as fighting in uniform, correctly identifying themselves, targeting only war infrastructure rather than civilians, etc. Terrorists miss on many of these qualifications, and it only takes one. Such people are NOT SUPPOSED to get the convention-specified treatment of a prisoner of war. This was done deliberately in the original formulation of the accords, to create an incentive for fighters, armies, and the organizations that field them to obey the rules in turn.)

Ob. Futurama Quote

Just think what this device could do for politics!

Morbo: "Morbo demands an answer to the following question. If you saw a delicious candy in the hands of a small child. Would you seize and consume it?"

John Jackson: "Unthinkable."

Jack Johnson: "I wouldn't think of it."

Morbo: "What about you, Mr. Nixon? I remind you that you are under a truth-o-scope."

Nixon [sweating]: "The question is vague. You don't say what kind of candy and whether anyone is watching. And anyway I certainly wouldn't harm the child."

Even if fMRI had anything like the accuracy needed

I won't rehash posts about how far fMRI is away from being a useful measuring device in this regard, since deviations are generally small enough that measurements over many trials must be aggregated to achieve significant results in carefully controlled conditions. But even if fMRI's were much better, and we understood how the brain worked much more closely this would still be of limited to no usefulness as an actual scientific method (it would probably would better than the polygraph, but would still be pseudoscience).

The problem is that the polygraph works in this basic manner:
The examiner asks you a whole bunch of filler questions, claiming these are 'controls.' These results are all ignored. Questions in this phase are things like "Is today Tuesday?". Then the examiner intersperses the real controls (he's already lied to you about what they are), questions which they'll preface with ominous portents if you answer affirmatively, so the examiner assumes you're going to lie about them ("Have you ever cheated on a girlfriend? Have you ever used marijuana?).

Then the examiner takes the second controls and compares them to his test questions. If you're test questions exceed the response from the (presumed to be lying) controls, the examiner assumes you're lying. Thus, telling the truth throughout the entire procedure is liable to land you in hot water. (For more information, from an admittedley 'biased' site, but I think they're pretty clear can be found at http://www.antipolygraph.org/ [antipolygraph.org]).

However, a true lie detector test would require a much more coherent defintion of what a lie is, which is very hard to create. Most people would agree that actively misleading somebody with no regard to your factual knowledge is lying. This also tends to be a useless type of lie in these situations because people get there stories mixed up, or they don't think through all the details. Much more common types of lies, are witholding useful information while truthfully relating aspects of the response, or changing the context of the answer, and other things which mislead but do not show complete disregard for the truth. The best lies in the intelligence useful/lessness sense are those that only minorly distort the truth, but in a particularly significant way.

Until you can metrize all these different types of not being truthful, or of avoiding certain facts etc, and until you can metrize their reponses for each individual (my guess is that this type of thing will have a high variance between people), you can't produce anything that can reasonably be called a scientific lie detector.

Today we scan terrorists

Tomrrow we scan little billy in gradeschool, "just in case he has some tendencies"

The government will prevail, unfortunately

These brain-scanning technologies are far from ready for forensic uses

So are polygraph tests, yet these are routinely used in a "forensic" capacity.

Since when has the unsuitability of polygraphs for forensic use [psychologymatters.org] ever stopped the government from using such technology to their own purposes?

Bravo to the ACLU for taking this on. Unfortunately, their actions will be minimalized over the government's assertion that this technology will catch more terrorists. And before you know it, you'll be submitting to brain scans during your next employment interview, or police interrogation.

I can see it now....

*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***

Investigator: What were you doing on the 8th of June?

*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***

Suspect: What?

*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***

Investigator: What were you doing on the 8th of June?

*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***

Suspect: WHAT?!

*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***

Investigator: WHAT WHERE YOU DOING ON THE 8TH OF JUNE?!

*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***

Suspect: WHAT?! I CANT HEAR YOU!!

*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***

Investigator: WHAT WHERE YOU...

Investigator: Can you turn the noise on this thing down?

Technologist: Not really, but I'll see see what I can do.

*** THUNK *** THUNK *** THUNK ***

Investigator: What were you doing on the 8th of June?

*** THUNK *** THUNK *** THUNK ***

Suspect: WHAT?!

(those MRI scanners are *real* loud)

Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others

There are plenty of other organizations willing to defend your 2nd amendment rights. The ACLU is a private association, it can defend rights however it sees fit.

Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others

The ACLU claims to defend "civil liberties." The 2nd, 9th, and 10th Amendments should be included in that, regardless of what other organizations do!

Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others

There are plenty of other organizations willing to defend your 2nd amendment rights. The ACLU is a private association, it can defend rights however it sees fit.

And they're even welcome to print their poster on the bill of rights that leaves off the second

Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others

would you rather have some of your rights defended or none?

Yes, the ACLU won't touch gun rights, because they don't believe they exist:

http://www.aclu.org/police/gen/14523res20020304.ht ml [aclu.org]

I think they're wrong, but that that doesn't mean I think the ACLU are doing wrong by defending my other rights. Interestingly enough, it appears possible for people to disagree on one subject while agreeing on a different one!

Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others

What's awesome is that you totally blow off the very next sentence:
"Baldwin's pro-Communist leanings lasted until 1939 when he was disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet pact and broke off all radical ties"

it makes perfect sense why the ACLU doesn't protect 2nd

Re:They're not even consistent.

That's silly. First, the first phrase in the 2nd Amendment is merely informative -- it doesn't convey any rights, it merely outlines their reason for granting the right they're about to. Discussing the militia in the first part of the sentence doesn't modify the meaning of "the people" in the second part.

Otherwise, why wouldn't the writer just have said 'the right of the militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed'? Or just shortened the whole thing and said "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, their right to bear arms shall not be infringed"?

No, it's pretty obvious that "the people" were introduced intentionally, and it's silly to assume that "the people" in the context of the 2nd Amendment refers to such a fundamentally different concept than the same word does when used in the 1st (and in all the other Amendments).

It's a two-part phrase; really it's not that complicated. The form is "[justification], [directive]." The whole bit about the militia doesn't change the essential fact that the Authors said "the right of the people...". If you want to change the meaning of that use of "people," then you necessarily have to be open to varying its meaning based on context elsewhere, and for reasons I've already pointed out, that's not something that most people want to do. In fact, it would be rather dangerous.

And while you may think my accusation of hypocrisy at the ACLU is merely sour grapes, I think it's far from it: the ACLU purports to defend 'civil liberties,' but in picking and choosing how they want to interpret the very documents that define civil liberties in this country in order to fit their preferences, it undermines their accountability as far as I'm concerned. If you can twist the meaning of a line so straightforward as the Second Amendment, then certainly you can't be trusted on other, far more complex issues.

Therefore I have no problem in using one's interpretation of the Second Amendment as a sort of litmus test for one's understanding of the Constitution, and of civil liberties generally. If you manage to fuck something that basic up, I don't even want to know what sort of a mess you're going to make of some of the higher-digit Amendments.

Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others

Their "silly agenda" is in their name already: "Civil Liberties." If you don't want to help protect American Civil Liberties, don't join, as said before it's private. Also it might seem like just another super-liberal activist group to you, but this is only because they are aggressively trying to slow the current Conservative Government's oppression of our liberties. The same was true for Clinton's administration:

Reno v. ACLU:Communication Decency Act [cornell.edu]

Just remember that not all those that oppose the Neo-Con-Republicans are super liberals. Normal people seem to enjoy freedom as well.

Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others

because there's no possibility a US citizen would be charged with terrorism.

or is there?

Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others

Paraphrasing, the 10th amendment [wikipedia.org] covers state's rights. The ACLU doesn't really come on my radar screen as staunch defenders of state's rights, but then again, most of what I know about them comes from the ranting of their detrtactors. That the ACLU wouldn

Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others

They are concerned about the use of brain image scans as an adjunct tool for interrogation of captured terrorists - and yet have seldom (if ever) lifted a finger to defend my rights under the 9th

The 9th amendments is about implied rights not specifically otherwise mentioned in the constitution. The ACLU certainly can't be accused of not defending implied rights, such as those of privacy, death, etc.

and 10th amendments,

Look into Gonzales v. Raich.

and NEVER defended the individual's rights under the 2nd amendment.

ACLU: "The national ACLU is neutral on the issue of gun control. We believe that the Constitution contains no barriers to reasonable regulations of gun ownership. If we can license and register cars, we can license and register guns... The ACLU agrees with the Supreme Court's long-standing interpretation of the Second Amendment [as set forth in the 1939 case, U.S. v. Miller] that the individual's right to bear arms applies only to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia."

It ain't their bag, baby. The NRA is pretty good at that one though.

Come on ACLU - you have more important things to spend your resources on. Start with US Citizens first.

1. Suspected terrorists aren't necessarily, or even generally, foreign nationals.
2. The ACLU's concern is that this type of interrogation will be used on US citizens.
3. The ACLU is a private organization that can choose to take on the battles it finds to be important.

As a final point, your subject says "some people's rights but not others", but your argument seems to focus on "some rights and not others". There's a big difference.

Re:do not mod this up..

My scanner says no, you dont.

Prepare...