Reading Terrorists' Minds About Imminent Attack 206
An anonymous reader writes "Imagine technology that allows you to get inside the mind of a terrorist to know how, when, and where the next attack will occur. In the Northwestern study, when researchers knew in advance specifics of the planned attacks by the make-believe 'terrorists,' they were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy in the lab, said J. Peter Rosenfeld, professor of psychology in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences."
Re:Terrorists schmerrorists (Score:1, Funny)
I want to use this tech on the good Doctor himself and see what his actual plans for this device are.
Re:the villain doesn't know they're the villain (Score:1, Funny)
Dick Cheney does. His greatest regret is his inability to grow a twirlable mustache.
But then, reality has never operated under the same constraints as fiction.
Re:Thoughtcrime - doubleplus ungood... (Score:1, Funny)
"There is no use in pretending, your eyes give you away ..."
- Tom Petty, "Breakdown"
Re:Oh, I get it (Score:5, Funny)
Device to "smell" snake oil identifies terrorists (Score:5, Funny)
A device claimed to "smell" human fear is being marketed as identifying terrorists by detecting "snake oil pheromones" [newstechnica.com] in sweat.
"The challenge lies in the characterisation and identification of the specific chemical that gives away the signature of human fear," said project leader Professor Tong Sun of City University, "especially the fear of losing funding for security theatre. If we can reliably detect this fear, we should be able to land some eyewateringly lucrative contracts in the very near future."
The research is funded by the Home Office. "The project relies on a government with a firm commitment to policy-based science, but the Tories look as craven over David Nutt's firing as Labour, so we should be coining it in for a good while yet."
The technology will assist airport security officers in picking out suitable subjects. Sensors can reliably detect if someone is a bit brown, or a bit foreign-looking, or has a non-Anglo-Saxon name, or if they might be thinking of giving cheek to security officers. It will work in conjunction with the millimetre-wave "naked" radar, currently used to identify terrorist subjects with large breasts.
The false positive rate will be only 5% on a terrorist detection rate of 1 in 100,000, meaning only 99.95% of subjects flagged will be a complete waste of time to finger up the arse with a latex glove. "But we're sure the government will agree that mere statistical evidence is meaningless in the face of the vital necessity to send the right message," said Prof Sun, "that if you make trouble the government will quite literally forcibly fuck you in the arse until you bleed. So just shut the fuck up and keep giving us money."
New Movie (Score:1, Funny)
The Men Who Stare At The Men Who Sleep With Goats.
Re:How to defeat this (Score:3, Funny)
The designated distraction could still get a false positive on a breathalyzer. I wouldn't risk it.
Re:so PRE crime starts now and how do they jury tr (Score:3, Funny)
It is simply incredible the number of people here who assume that things are going to be radically different now that we are successfully researching into this kind of technology. You know, like suddenly we'll start juryless prosecutions, based on nothing more than guilty knowledge. That we'll suddenly start equating guilty feelings with guilt. Oh noes! It's the end of freedom!
I swear, it's worse than when the RIAA found out about the internet!