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posted by martyb on Wednesday September 27 2017, @08:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the I'll-drink-to-that! dept.

There is growing interest in the potential for a technology known as brain fingerprinting to be used in the fight against crime and terrorism, but it's far from reliable.

Its use without consent violates human rights. And importantly, the technology (as it currently exists) can be tricked.

Brain fingerprinting seeks to detect deception by essentially reading thoughts. It works by using electroencephelography (EEG) to read the electrical activity of the brain, with the aim of trying to identify a phenomenon known as the P300 response [DOI: 10.1097/00004691-199210000-00002] [DX].

The P300 response is a noticeable spike in the brain's electrical activity, which usually occurs within one-third of a second of being shown a familiar stimulus. The idea is that our subconscious brain has an uncontrollable and measurable response to familiar stimuli that the machine can register.

Imagine, for example, that a particular knife was used in a murder, and police show an image of it to their lead suspect who denies the crime. If the suspect registers a P300 response and thus a positive recognition of the knife, this would seem to suggest he's lying. Alternatively, if the suspect doesn't register a positive recognition, maybe police have the wrong guy.

Could you escape culpability for your crimes by taking a roofie afterward?


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  • (Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Wednesday September 27 2017, @08:57PM

    by lgsoynews (1235) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @08:57PM (#574037)

    You missed my point.

    That guy was saying that technology is never wrong (which is clearly false). That's a very dangerous point of view!

    It's easy to find examples where the labs made a mistake or were malicious (see the quite recent huge scandal of the lab person who faked the results for years).

    We also know that DNA testing is not a perfect, magical, thing, the tests have some serious limitations.

    Don't get me started on fingerprints!

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