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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,"'"
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/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 and 10th amendments, and NEVER defended the individual's rights under the 2nd amendment.
Come on ACLU - you have more important things to spend your resources on. Start with US Citizens first.
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Monthly Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of candidate or elected politicians to find out what part of what they spew is intended to be deceptive.
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.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
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.
My other first post is car post.
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.
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.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
They are concerned about the use of brain image scans as an adjunct tool for interrogation of suspected terrorists. You would almost certainly be singing a different tune about the ACLU if it were you, or someone in your family who was merely accused of somehow supporting terrorism and then "convicted" of it using evidence gained from questionable evidence.
As for your bullshit about the 2nd amendment, the ACLU doesn't need to defend it because the NRA does a great job already. OTOH, why is the NRA not involved in the fight to stop the Bush administration violating our 4th amendment rights? Does the NRA hate America?
How often have people suspected of terrorism been put infront of a judge and jury lately?
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.)
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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!
Considering the ACLU is usually the group defending those who are unable to defend themselves from the US government in those cases, I think it is perfectly reasonable for them to use a FOIA request to keep tabs on this technology. That way when they're defending you in court, they know the strengths and weaknesses of this technology so they can put the prosecution's arguments in the proper context.
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/).
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.
You submitted to it, voluntarily. (Yes, it was voluntary unless someone was forcing you to try for this particular job.) You pretty much forfeited your right to bitch about them using it. You can't argue about your convictions if you don't have the courage to uphold them.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Tomrrow we scan little billy in gradeschool, "just in case he has some tendencies"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
that's ridiculous. The collectivity notion stems directly from the interpretation of 'militia.' The right to petition has no such clause.
Calling them hypocrites for not supporting gun rights, when they've come out and said "we don't believe gun control is unconstitutional" is sort of dumb. You're just being mad at them because they're named badly. You might as well be angry with Grape-Nuts cereal, which contains neither grapes nor nuts.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Anyone else think of this?
Holden: You look down and you see a Terrorist, Leon, he's crawling toward you-
Leon: Terrorist, what's that?
Holden: Know what a Democrat is?
Leon: Of course.
Holden: Same thing.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
My problem with these things are that they immediately begin putting me on my guard to prove my innocence. Think about it. This machine is trying to discern truth from chemical processes and electrical pulses on my skin. There are too many stupid people who don't understand how it works, and therefore think it is failsafe (sort of like the person that doesn't understand a digital lock and therefore thinks it is somehow more secure. Nevermind that pressing buttons 4 and 8 together while pressing "Enter" always unlocks the door). I know I would fail one of these the moment they put me on it. I get incredibly nervous whenever I'm questioned about things, mainly because I often got in trouble for the smallest offences as a child (rolling a pebble across the room after a kid threw it at me in 4th grade...stupid stuff like that...private school garbage). Taking notes home to mom had to be the most inhumane punishment ever. Talk to ME about it, don't leave me in the dark for hours on end worrying if I'm gonna get spanked when I get home.
I can see it happening right now, I get interrogated because I'm a suspect who was near a crime scene I don't know about. They hook me up to a lie detector/FMRI, then the big question comes along, "did you murder [person]?" I would freak regardless of whether or not I'd done it, simply because of the weight of the situation. Possibility of prison for life, even if I hadn't done a thing. I have a feeling people are too interested in their own agenda (which in this case would be convicting _someone_ like me, even if I didn't do it and they don't think I did) to worry about looking at all the evidence. They can't even fight for their own rights, why should they give a hoot about mine? Lie detector says I broke out in sweat and my pulse quicked when they asked me if I was the murderer. There's no way that thing could ever know my history and interpret the results objectively in light of the evidence. I'd be the 20% that lie detectors incorrectly fail.
I agree that foreigners don't have many rights in our system. The Bible teaches an absolute morality, independent of race, creed, gender, and prior crimes. The ACLU promotes these rights.
>But to date the ACLU has yet to commit an overt act of treason, unlike say the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Neither the NYT or LAT have been convicted of treason.
>You guys are just unhappy at the judgement your fellow citizens rendered and looking at getting sympathetic judges to give do overs.
I don't know who "you guys" are. The process of "getting sympathetic judges to give do overs" is called judicial review, and is a hallmark of our government's legislative process.