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Reading Terrorists' Minds About Imminent Attack
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."
"The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed--would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper--the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you." - George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 1
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
"they were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy in the lab"
Bet the accuracy wouldn't be so good in a non-controlled, non-laboratory environment. Of course, that wouldn't necessarily stop such a technology from being used, now would it?
Relax, citizen!
You only need a jury if you have something to hide.
THL phish sticks
Why is everything legitimized by putting the word terrorist in it? What does this have to do with terrorism?
As someone said here on /., terrorism is one of the magic keys, the other being child porn.
Where you just racial profiled and tortured... oh wait this wouldn't replace that just be added on top of it.
Never mind those silly details like due process and unreasonable search & seizure . We're talking terrorism here, so it's straight off to room 101 with you.
- - - Non Caffeine Drink or Drink Error
Our complex, chaotic modern society is already a great environment for psychopaths. Now we're giving them another advantage, with these scanners, which psychopaths will always, under all circumstances, pass with flying colors.
(An interesting note from Wikipedia: Findings indicate psychopathic convicts have a 2.5 time higher probability of being released from jail than undiagnosed convicts, even though they are more likely to recidivate.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
As long as public indecency is illegal we all have something to hide.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Done. Now imagine spending that money on something that will save more lives more effectively, for example on making the roads safer, rather than on trying to get into people's minds without their consent (or did you really expect terrorists to cooperate)?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
No. You have an indication that he lied. Maybe his brother knows Bob, and he has seen him once with his brother but didn't know who he was. Then he was 100% right when he said that he didn't know Bob, but he nevertheless recognized the person on the picture, although he didn't recognize him as Bob, but as the person his brother was talking to. Or maybe he was earlier shown a photo of Bob by another policeman who forgot to tell you about that detail, and he recognized the photo as the same one the policeman had showed him a week ago. Or maybe Bob looks quite similar to John, and he momentarily mis-identified the man on the picture as John, maybe not even long enough for this recognition to get into his consciousness, but long enough for his brain to cause the characteristic pattern of recognizing.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I was not asking how it is "different". I asked how it's "better".
I suppose that the fact that (today) it appears to be more accurate for a narrow range of stimuli, might be considered better. But it appears to have its drawbacks as well. The experiments seem to reasonably show the effect that they are describing, but it is still very possible that outside the lab, the correlations no longer hold. That is what happened with the polygraph, which seemed so promising at first. But expert polygraph operators have stated that in practice, anybody who knows you well can tell if you are lying just by watching you, better than any polygraph operator ever could.
The article states "... 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..."
BUT... in the actual experiment in which they did not have that foreknowledge, they were only able to determine 10 out of 12 "terrorists", and only 20 out of 30 of the plan details. That's not such a good hit rate. Not bad, but not great. You would think that with them crowing about their "100% correlation", they would have at least gotten 12 of the 12 terrorists. The other details would seem to be naturally more difficult, so I am not so surprised there. But in any case, in a simulated real-world scenario, their success was less than stellar. And that's in the lab.
I believe that in the real world, the success rate would be even lower. Perhaps much lower. Many variables are added to the mix.
Further, I strongly suspect that it is possible to generate false positives in this equipment, if one knows what they are doing. I do not know that for a fact of course. But I think it would be fun to give it a try.
Presumably, the students being tested were volunteers who knew little if anything about the nature of what was being studied during the experiment. That is common procedure. But -- as was made clear with the polygraph -- someone who does know what's up might be able to manipulate the results. I would like to see the same kind of test, using people who do know what's going on and who deliberately try to manipulate the results. That would be a much more realistic experiment and I suspect the success rate would be much lower. The only way to know is to try it.