Schneier on Security

Richard Steven Hack • August 9, 2011 10:15 AM

From the article: “Her most interesting claim, though, is that her measurements can predict a lie before the liar has decided on it. Thus, she sees the first changes in the person’s EEG about 250 milliseconds after the statement appears on the computer screen, while it takes between 400 and 600 milliseconds before the pattern showing a decision appears.”

This doesn’t surprise me. This phenomena was discovered decades ago by Gray Walter. He hooked up an EEG to a TV set and trained the subjects to think of turning the set on and off. He determined that the set actually came on or off BEFORE the subject actually decided to think about it.

Your “conscious” mind that is aware that you made a decision is not running the show. It’s merely the monitor to the computer which is your unconscious mind which makes the actual decision.

An MRI scanner won’t be very useful unless it can become external. As long as the right to refuse to self-incriminate is in law, no one in their right mind would submit to such a thing voluntarily. So a lie detector needs to be external and usable regardless of the subject’s cooperation.

If a lie detector is external and does not require a user to cooperate, it can be used in all cases and the results submitted as evidence in court (once the scientific testing proves it really works, unlike polygraphs). The issue of self-incrimination would no longer apply because the suspect is no longer required to cooperate. It becomes “external evidence”, not “interrogation”.

Despite what the article said about not being able to have a functioning society without lying, that is exactly what I’d like to see – a way to perfectly detect lies making lying no longer a feasible human behavior. If we could detect lies externally perfectly – even through media such as TV or radio as well as in person – the religions and governments and corporations of the world – not to mention most relationships – would last five minutes. This would mandate major changes in human behavior, most of which would be beneficial to society.

I remember last season’s British con show, “Hustle”, had an episode where a blow to the head rendered Ash Morgan unable to lie – a problem since he was in the middle of a con. Funny stuff.

Richard Steven Hack • August 11, 2011 11:14 PM

Tommy: “how long would any human society last without the little “white lies” that grease the social wheels? If you told everyone exactly what you think of them, and everyone else did the same …”

Society would adapt…or disintegrate.

Either of those works for me. 🙂

Seriously, the point is two-fold:

1) it’s highly unlikely to occur unless you first train everyone to be highly rational and not emotional and if you did that the effect of never lying would be mostly beneficial; a statement such as “You’re ugly, and your mother dresses you funny” would be received rationally as a matter of opinion and thus irrelevant to one’s own perception or an attack on one’s self-esteem which would be ignored in terms of effect on one’s own perception and then used as a judgment of the attacker;

and 2) if it occurred before such training of society, it would either force society to develop rationality on pain of disintegration if it didn’t.

In short, like most things, it can’t be taken out of the surrounding context of the state of human and social development. But that said, in the context of “what would we really like a rational society to be like”, it would be entirely beneficial to never lie.