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posted by
janrinok
on Friday February 03 2017, @10:52AM
from the you-have-no-privacy;-get-over-it dept.
from the you-have-no-privacy;-get-over-it dept.
Cory Doctorow reports via Boing Boing
Ross Compton, a 59-year-old homeowner in Middletown, Ohio called 911 in September 2016 to say that his house was on fire; there were many irregularities to the blaze that investigators found suspicious, such as contradictory statements from Compton and the way that the fire had started.
In the ensuing investigation, the police secured a warrant for the logs from his pacemaker, specifically, "Compton's heart rate, pacer demand, and cardiac rhythms before, during, and after the fire".
[...] The data from the pacemaker didn't correspond with Compton's version of what happened.
[...] [The cops] subsequently filed charges of felony aggravated arson and insurance fraud.
Cory links to coverage by Network World.
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Arsonist's Pacemaker Rats Him Out; Police Subpoenaed Logs
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Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 03 2017, @03:33PM
It seems to me heart rate is not the proof they think it is. I have an implanted defibrillator/pacemaker I've had since I was 30, because they discovered I have a propensity for tachycardia (a race condition for the heart). At checkups my doctor would examine the readouts of when the device would pace me, often in the middle of the night when I was clearly asleep and I knew I had been asleep; it turns out your heart rate can spike while you're asleep because you're having a nightmare or something. The opposite is also true--you can have a heart rate consistent with sleep when you're awake, because you could be meditating or painting or merely sitting still.
Brainwaves are a different matter and a much better indicator of wakefulness, but pacemakers don't capture that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday February 05 2017, @03:26AM
We've discussed lie detectors before. There is no science involved in them. In effect, they take some scraps of scientific knowladge, try to wrap them all into the mantle of detective work, then convince a jury that they know what they are talking about. And, the courts have mostly rejected the entire concept.
This heart rate nonesense is just a side door into the same pseudoscience.
Even IF law enforcement were in possession of vast troves of recordings of heart rates during the comminssion of felonies, auto accidents, other accidents, how could they even begin to correlate all that data to an individual whose motives cannot be known?
Suppose that everyone here were an arsonist - we're all just a bunch of nuts who like fire. Does that mean that each and every one of us experiences the same sensations as we go about our dirty work? That's probably one of the stupidest assumptions I've ever heard. It presumes that we all have the same motivation, we all share the same psychological idiosyncracies, we all experience the same feelings at similar points during the commission of the crime - basically we were all stamped from the same mold at birth, and shared all the same experiences while maturing.
Pseudoscience - why do cops always want to rely on it? Maybe because they're to stupid to understand what science is?