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ACLU Files for Info on New Brain-Scan Tech
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jun 28, 2006 05:11 PM
from the also-requesting-information-on-psychics dept.
from the also-requesting-information-on-psychics dept.
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,"'"
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Tinfoil hats (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Tinfoil hats (Score:5, Funny)
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Silly people! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Silly people! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Silly people! (Score:5, Funny)
I thought the reliable test was to see if the terrorist floats.
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Misunderstood? How about unreliable! (Score:5, Insightful)
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! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Faulty systems can still work some of the time... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Faulty systems can still work some of the time. (Score:5, Informative)
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*...
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ACLU (Score:5, Funny)
One step closer... (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a good alternative to political debate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like a good alternative to political deb (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is a joke right? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Comments (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
But what are they using it FOR? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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."
Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:They're not even consistent. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:First post(?) (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:First post(?) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Why is this a "Civil Liberties" issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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