That's Using Your Head...Not!

This story in today’s New York Times tells us about a court ruling in India, in which a woman was sentenced to life in prison under the following circumstances…

The woman, Aditi Sharma, was accused of killing her former fiancé, Udit Bharati. They were living in Pune when Ms. Sharma met another man and eloped with him to Delhi. Later Ms. Sharma returned to Pune and, according to prosecutors, asked Mr. (Udit) Bharati to meet her at a McDonald’s. She was accused of poisoning him with arsenic-laced food.

Ms. Sharma, 24, agreed to take a Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature (BEOS) test in Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra. (Suspects may be tested only with their consent, but forensic investigators say many agree because they assume it will spare them an aggressive police interrogation.)

After placing 32 electrodes on Ms. Sharma’s head, investigators said, they read aloud their version of events, speaking in the first person (“I bought arsenic”; “I met Udit at McDonald’s”), along with neutral statements like “The sky is blue,” which help the software distinguish memories from normal cognition.

For an hour, Ms. Sharma said nothing. But the relevant nooks of her brain where memories are thought to be stored buzzed when the crime was recounted, according to (Sunny) Joseph, the state investigator. The judge endorsed Mr. Joseph’s assertion that the scans were proof of “experiential knowledge” of having committed the murder, rather than just having heard about it.

And by the way, Ms. Sharma insists that she’s innocent.

And in case you were wondering about whether or not Bushco is “on board” with this (I'm sure you already know the answer, though)…

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has plowed money into brain-based lie detection in the hope of producing more fruitful counterterrorism investigations.

…

“I find this both interesting and disturbing,” Henry T. Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford Law School, said of the Indian verdict. “We keep looking for a magic, technological solution to lie detection. Maybe we’ll have it someday, but we need to demand the highest standards of proof before we ruin people’s lives based on its application.”

…

If brain scans are widely adopted, (Mr. Greely and his colleague Judy Illes) said, “the legal issues alone are enormous, implicating at least the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”

This tells us about brain-based lie detector test conducted by No Lie MRI (clever) in Philadelphia in July or August 2006; no further word on that. Also, this tells us of further funded research into this experimental science in '07, and this tells us that…

Police may soon be able to monitor suspicious brain activity (not only by people watched by hidden surveillance cameras, but) from a distance as well. New neurotechnology soon may be able to detect a person who is particularly nervous, in possession of guilty knowledge or, in the more distant future, to detect a person thinking, "Only one hour until the bomb explodes." Today, the science of detecting and decoding brain activity is in its infancy. But various government agencies are funding the development of technology to detect brain activity remotely and are hoping to eventually decode what someone is thinking. Scientists, however, wildly disagree about the accuracy of brain imaging technology, what brain activity may mean and especially whether brain activity can be detected from afar.

Yet as the experts argue about the scientific limitations of remote brain detection, this chilling science fiction may already be a reality. In 2002, the Electronic Privacy Information Center reported that NASA was developing brain monitoring devices for airports and was seeking to use noninvasive sensors in passenger gates to collect the electronic signals emitted by passengers' brains. Scientists scoffed at the reports, arguing that to do what NASA was proposing required that an electroencephalogram (EEG) be physically attached to the scalp.

But that same year, scientists at the University of Sussex in England adapted the same technology they had been using to detect heart rates at distances of up to 1 meter, or a little more than three feet, to remotely detect changes in the brain. And while scientific limitations to remote EEG detection still exist, clearly the question is when, not if, these issues will be resolved.

And if all of this isn’t scary enough, it looks like this guy would be making his “expertise” available on this stuff given what he said here to the late Tim Russert (snark).



(By the way, Blogger seems to be cooperating for now, but they’d better get rid of this goddamn word verification for my posts or else I’ll post at Wordpress exclusively from now on; this is definitely not a “spam blog” – please take a look at this on “Governor Hottie,” if you would.)

Update 9/16/08: And speaking of Coburn, he's a total assclown for opposing this.