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."

Comments

Re:From Someone Who Works In This Lab

[alexsoko]

We are not accusing them of a crime, necessarily. We are looking for guilty knowledge. Like I said, P300 deception detection is looking for guilty knowledge. If we could, for example, narrow down a list of potential targets for a terrorist attack, or figure out what kind of weapon will be used, or figure out, in a forensic scenario, if someone recognizes pieces of information that weren't released to anyone - it could help drive an investigation. Like I said before, this is just one of an array of tools that can be used by law enforcement to help make their case or help drive an investigation in a certain direction. Calling someone 'guilty' is just the terminology of the field when someone is caught lying - but I'll play semantics if you want. --Alex Soko