Slashdot Mirror
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."
"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?
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.
It's not a problem. A jury trial is only required to prosecute you of a crime you actually have committed.
Holding you imprisoned based on a crime you thought about committing, doesn't require you to be guilty.
Also, your inability to gain access to a lawyer, see visitors, or have anyone be informed of where you are (or that you are held), due to restrictions imposed on people thinking about terrorism, will prevent you from challenging the authorities' decision to hold you.
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.
Some people in my research team are working on P300 detection - here's how it works.
Basically, a P300 is a peak of cortical activity recorded approximately 300ms after perceiving something you expect to perceive - it has nothing to do with emotion, as the paper says. It's about attention and expectation. A simple example is the P300 speller: letters are blinking on a screen, and you focus on the letter you want. when your letter blinks, your brain generates a P300.
When detecting P300 with external electrode, there are several problems:
- some people are not able to generate P300 peaks (approx 5-10% if I remember correctly)
- the 300ms delay can vary from one person to another, even for the same person depending on the situation
- the P300 is drowned in noise, so you have to reproduce the experiment several times to cancel out the noise
- if you blink your eyes or contract your jaws muscles, you generate artifacts in the signal that are several orders of magnitude stronger than a P300
- to make it work properly you have to be relaxed, in a quiet environment - that's why we generally use visual stimuli. i'm not sure where the state of the art is with auditive stimuli
- if you drug the guy so he is calm and doesn't move, you are very likely to also affect his brainwaves, thus defeating the purpose.
Long story short: from what I know of the subject, P300 detection on a non-willing subject sounds unrealistic to me. It's all about researchers getting fundings by putting the word "terrorist" in their research proposal, which is very sad.
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.
Hello, As both a) someone who works in this lab and b) someone who reads this site pretty religiously, I think I can address some of your guys concerns. 1) Specificity of questions - unlike a standard polygraph test, in a P300 CIT (concealed information test) subjects aren't asked questions as muscle movements or auditory stimuli may disrupt the electrodes ability to record P300. Instead, stimuli are presented silently on the screen and thus, if the subject 'recognizes' the stimulus he will generate a P300 whenever that stimulus is presented. However, in doing so, the list must initially be vetted with the subject who says if any of the items have specific relevance to him. (This would be like in an investigation if a police detective showed someone a list of people and asked if a POI knew any of them). 2. This isn't a 1 recognition stimulus identifies everything sort of thing. The same stimuli are shown to people literally hundreds of times and it takes a pattern of recognition to correctly identify someone as guilty. Also, there are levels of recognition. All of the responses are compared to one another to get a standard base, per each participant, of brain activity. Then each recognition pattern is compared to the pattern as a whole to determine guilty knowledge. 3. For critical information a more strict test can be performed which compares the strongest P300 to the second strongest P300. If that patters is statistically bigger then you can be certain that they have guilty knowledge of that item. 4. Several of the studies we have conducted have actually incentivized (given money) to people for trying any strategy possible to BEAT the test. 5. There ARE countermeasures for this test that you can do to try to hide your P300 responses - however this specific protocol is a COUNTERMEASURE RESISTANT TEST. Believe me, if you've thought of it - we've thought of it. 6. Yes, when using just a pure P300 analysis we don't get people with 100% accuracy. But after we adjust for countermeasure use, and analyze other behavioral and EEG data that is collected concurrently with the P300 we can get 100% accurate identification. 7. We do so without getting false positives. Like any tool in law enforcement (the polygraph, fingerprinting, etc...) it's not necessarily as important that any individual thing works as it is that of the array of tools used ONE of them catches the person. And you don't want to wrongly accuse anyone. Why our P300 research is special is because we get an extremely high detection rate with no false positives. 8. If you have more questions please respond to this comment and I will try to respond. --Alex Soko