India's use of brain scans in courts dismays critics

International Herald Tribune ^ | Sept 15, 2009

[ancientart]

MUMBAI, India: The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete. Some scientists predict the end of lying as we know it.

Now, well before any consensus on the technology's readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question.

For years, scientists have peered into the brain and sought to identify deception.

[ancientart]

Creates some tricky dilemmas. But if it really ends lying, well then the Dems are in the biggest trouble here.

[FormerACLUmember]

Utterly bogus science. Would not pass the Daubert rule for scientific validity in U.S. Federal courts.

[FormerACLUmember]

Utterly bogus science. Would not pass the Daubert rule for scientific validity in U.S. Federal courts.

[ancientart]

Not sure I’ve heard of the Dogbert rule. What does it say?

[chaos_5]

This sounds like something from the Onion. Either way, is deftly Orwellian. I think this technology would have to evolve a lot before we would ever think of using it. Heck, even tried and tested DNA evidence is often disputed in court.

[MyTwoCopperCoins]

This latest Indian attempt at getting past criminals' natural defenses begins with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, in which electrodes are placed on the head to measure electrical waves. The suspect sits in silence, eyes shut. An investigator reads aloud details of the crime — as prosecutors see it — and the resulting brain images are processed using software built in Bangalore.

The software tries to detect whether, when the crime's details are recited, the brain lights up in specific regions — the areas that, according to the technology's inventors, show measurable changes when experiences are relived, their smells and sounds summoned back to consciousness. The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between peoples' memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed.

The Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test, or BEOS, was developed by Champadi Raman Mukundan, an Indian neuroscientist who formerly ran the clinical psychology department of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bangalore. His system builds on methods developed at American universities by other scientists, including Emanuel Donchin, Lawrence Farwell and J. Peter Rosenfeld.

 

Disturbing, and interesting!

[phatus maximus]

Sounds like the movie Minority Report.

I fear for our children’s grandchildren in the next century. Intrusions into people’s personal lives that we cannot imagine will be put into place as more and more.

Scary stuff.

[fella]

It would put a lot of defense lawyers out of work. So their brethren in the legislatures will never allow it to be legalized. Why you could have a criminal trial for under 5 million dollars.

Just think about hoe that would devastate the economy, the high dollar call-girls would starve, the high dollar restaurants would go broke the high dollar hotels and casinos would have to down size and worst of all all levels of our government would start running in the black and taxes would have to be reduced giving the riff-raff more liberty and freedom.

[FormerACLUmember]

In Daubert, the Supreme Court held that federal trial judges are the “gatekeepers” of scientific evidence. Under the Daubert standard, therefore, trial judges must evaluate proffered expert witnesses to determine whether their testimony is both “relevant” and “reliable”, a two-pronged test of admissibility.

1.The relevancy prong: The relevancy of a testimony refers to whether or not the expert’s evidence “fits” the facts of the case. For example, you may invite an astronomer to tell the jury if it had been a full moon on the night of a crime. However, the astronomer would not be allowed to testify if the fact that the moon was full was not relevant to the issue at hand in the trial.
2.The reliability prong: The Supreme Court explained that in order for expert testimony to be considered reliable, the expert must have derived his or her conclusions from the scientific method.[1] The Court offered “general observations” of whether proffered evidence was based on the scientific method, although the list was not intended to be used as an exacting checklist:
Empirical testing: the theory or technique must be falsifiable, refutable, and testable.
Subjected to peer review and publication.
Known or potential error rate and the existence and maintenance of standards concerning its operation.
Whether the theory and technique is generally accepted by a relevant scientific community

[Still Thinking]

Even if this works, which is arguable, if it were made admissible in the US, it wouldn’t be six months before they were using it to verify tax compliance and check for “thought crimes” and downloading of RIAA material. You see, our goobermint is genetically incapable of limiting the use of new powers to the threat they used to pitch for the grant of those powers. (like they couldn’t just write the limit into the law itself)