The lie detector you'll never know is there

[Celebration]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925335.800

THE US Department of Defense has revealed plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. The Remote Personnel Assessment (RPA) device will also be used to pinpoint fighters hiding in a combat zone, or even to spot signs of stress that might mark someone out as a terrorist or suicide bomber.

In a call for proposals on a DoD website, contractors are being given until 13 January to suggest ways to develop the RPA, which will use microwave or laser beams reflected off a subject's skin to assess various physiological parameters without the need for wires or skin contacts. The device will train a beam on "moving and non-cooperative subjects", the DoD proposal says, and use the reflected signal to calculate their pulse, respiration rate and changes in electrical conductance, known as the "galvanic skin response". "Active combatants will in general have heart, respiratory and galvanic skin responses that are outside the norm," the website says.

Because these parameters are the same as those assessed by a polygraph lie detector, the DoD claims the RPA will also indicate the subject's psychological state: if they are agitated or stressed because they are lying, for example. So it will be used as a "remote or concealed lie detector during prisoner interrogation".

But finding ways to fulfil the DoD's brief will pose a practical challenge, says Robert Prance, an electrical engineer at the University of Sussex, UK, who specialises in non-invasive sensors. "They might capture breathing rate with an infrared laser that senses chest vibration, but how they will measure a pulse through clothes, for instance, is a very big question."".

[oneighty]

1. Can we use it

on our politicians?

This plan will die a quick death.

180

[mark11727]

7. Hell, I wanna run it during the presidential debates...!

:popcorn:

[zonmoy]

16. good way to overload it with all the lying that goes on

in any type of political campaign

[rkc3]

2. So the device will tell the difference between an enemy fighter

who is worried about getting blown up and a noncombatant who is worried about getting blown up? And noncombatants who are terrified will stand still to distinguish themselves from combatants.

What a load of horseshit.

[trotsky]

3. Will this lie detector, unlike every other one ever invented...

actually WORK and implicate only guilty people? :eyes:

[Bernardo de La Paz]

4. Elevated pulse, respiration. Hmm, any civilian in a combat zone ...

It will check for elevated pulse and respiration. Let's see now, any civilian in a combat zone will be scared. Oops, elevated pulse! Oh my goodness, they must all be combatants! Kill 'em all!

Not so fast.

This proposal sounds like a hare-brained scheme.

[greiner3]

5. I'd like to get my hands on one of those;

Imagine the uses we could think of, and the people that we could use on, with a device like that.

[htuttle]

6. "You're in a desert, walking along when you look down..."

"...and you see a tortoise, Leon."

Leon: "What's a tortoise?"

Damn, we seem to be 5 out of 5 nowdays when it comes to fulfilling dystopic predictions...

[RaleighNCDUer]

9. It's a turtle, Leon.

[Orrex]

10. So I have to study for my Voigt-Kampf tests again?

Oh, great. And my Pennfield Mood Organ is on the blink, too.

[Festivito]

8. Would be great for hospitals, but, we'd never spend that much on health!

We need to conserve our compassion.

Just the same, sounds like a great emergency medical device.

[politicat]

11. There's no such thing as a lie detector.

We can't teach a machine to do what we can't do ourselves - period. It's that simple. People can't detect lies, so machines can't, either.

Yet another waste of our tax dollars.

I really want to put a budget office in that is made up of skeptics: if the skeptics think it is physically possible, the DoD can do it. You know how much money we would save???

[Celebration]

12. Really?

"We can't teach a machine to do what we can't do ourselves - period. It's that simple."

Guess we better ditch all the MRIs!!

[politicat]

14. No, because MRI is based on very well understood principles of

magnetism. Lie detection is based on intuition and instinct, at best, and those aren't understood.

[Celebration]

15. MRIs

May be able to be used as lie detectors........

http://www.temple.edu/temple_times/2-10-05/lies.html

Your pants won’t burst into flames, but Scott Faro thinks he can tell when you’re lying. At least, he thinks he’s on the right track.

Faro, a newcomer to the radiology department at the School of Medicine and Temple University Hospital, is the director of Temple’s Functional Brain Imaging Center and Clinical MRI. He and his team presented a new method of lie detection to the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting, held recently in Chicago. The world’s largest media outlets, including the BBC, Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio, have reported his findings internationally.

The concept, at least in summary, is straightforward. Using the same functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan that picks up brain tumors, Faro and his colleagues found that different areas of the brain were active when a person told the truth as opposed to when they lied.

In addition, more areas of the brain were activated when the person was trying to be deceptive. Although it’s too early to tell how effective the fMRI test is, the hope is that it will be a more accurate way of separating truth from fiction. While polygraph machines are common on detective shows and in courtroom dramas, their accuracy can be called into question.

[Orsino]

13. There is, sorta...

...but the placebo effect of an intimidating operator won't be present in the system proposed above. Might as well be remote phrenology.

A recent Scientific American, I think, has an article on lie detection via fMRI that sounds like the real deal. That won't be done remotely anytime soon, however.