DHS To Use Body Odor As a Lie Detector

The US Department of Homeland Security is studying lies, damned lies, and smells. They hope to prove that human body odor could be used to tell when people are lying. The department says they are already "conducting experiments in deceptive behavior and collecting human odor samples" and that the research it hopes to fund "will consist primarily of the analysis and study of the human odor samples collected to determine if a deception indicator can be found."

Comments

Best reply

[commodore64_love]

"I take the 5th amendment" or "I choose to remain silent"

Don't give the government anything, else they will use it later to entrap you or jail you. The right to free speech also includes the right to be quiet.

Re:Best reply

[xelah]

Well, okay, but here's the simple fact: DHS pulls aside for additional questioning or searches fewer than 10% of all passengers. If you don't want to be searched or questioned, simply don't give them a reason to do so.

That may be OK individually, but generally (not just with smells and aeroplanes) it's a dangerous route to go down collectively. Only a few are questioned, so everyone tries to conform to what they think the authorities consider normal. So the authorities lower their thresholds and then everyone becomes even more conforming, etc. It leads to everyone 'self-censoring' their behaviour to some degree to please government and security guard's prejudices.....it's far better for people to feel secure against unreasonable harrassment. It's not that your suggestion is necessarily bad - but if you can be bothered with baking soda then you ought to also be bothered opposing it politically.

A pack of dogs

[mc1138]

Just looking to smell the fear on you. Will it be able to tell if someone is actually lying or just really nervous that they're being questioned by a federal agency?

Re:A pack of dogs

[yttrstein]

It won't be able to reliably tell anything about anyone, except perhaps that they were a little bit nervous about something, just *exactly* the same way current lie detectors do.

The problem with lie detection, as quite a number of people have said endlessly over the years, is that the assumption is made that a lie is something that somehow the body has a physiological problem with. Clearly this is swan songs of morality, as amorphous and dynamic as they are, being applied directly to the human nervous system, and somehow people are surprised to discover that there hasn't been a lie detector in the world that's been proven unquestionably to work at all.

Beanz meanz fartz

[AliasMarlowe]

If they want odour, let them have it, full throttle. Eat chilli beans with garlic and cream cheese (or whatever supercharges your afterburner) a few hours before boarding a flight.
"I fart in your general direction! In fact, I fart uncontrollably in all directions!"

Same as always

[aepervius]

Polygraph, and other assorted gadget do NOT detect lie. Ever. What they possibly detect is stress, (fear and its little cousin nervousness for example) which in some case may or may not be correlated to a lie. It is all based on putting the idea that "it works" in the mind of people it tests, and indeed sometimes law enforcement get confession from people (they CAN use the confession but may not use any lie detector crap, and recently even that was put under fire). There isn't really a good scientific background on it The Lie behind the lie detector.

Using odor instead of breathing heart beat and so on will not bring anymore science is this than pissing into a violin and expecting a concerto.

Re:Should be cheap!

[silentsteel]

Um, no. Every creature on earth has an unique scent. Scent will actually come out of a human being, or other "game" in cone shaped form. This is why search and rescue units will work a patch of land moving in the expected cone shape (based on what the dog picks up) when trailing a victim in a search. I have done search and rescue and that is the logic they use because it works. The first thing they do when a new volunteer comes on is show them how it works. Tracking, what you were referring to, also uses the same concept but, with the individual scent being left by brushing against the ground itself.

In a nutshell, this scares the hell out of me.