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

Life imitating... er... life?

[MrNemesis]

This is just precious - the Stasi in the GDR (east germany to most) did exactly the same thing with their suspects.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,484561,00.html
http://scent-lab.blogspot.com/2008/07/body-odor-preserved-and-exhibited-at.html

People being interrogated would frequently be asked to sit with their palms face down on a piece of cloth, usually stuck to the chair. After the interrogation, the cloth would be removed and placed in a jar for later analysis. I don't believe it's ever been admissible as evidence in any western court, but that's obviously what the whole DHS "proof" is all about.

Quite why one would invest so many resources in this when fingerprints and DNA are already reliable forms of identification I don't know, and I strongly suspect that the "indicator" of deception will be flawed for much the same reasons the results of a polygraph are flawed - I can understand how someone who's stressed might well emit a different sort of sweat than someone who's just hot, but trying to define a "liars sweat" reeks (hohoho) of pseudoscience to me.

Who knows, maybe there's something in it, maybe the article is making too much of things, maybe I've got my paranoid hat on. But it still seems worryingly like the whole "this man is the serial killer cos his writing is all weird" argument to me.