Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • January 7, 2015 7:10 AM

Hmm any one else read,

… we set out to see whether a full body motion capture suit, which records the position, velocity and orientation of 23 points in the subject’s body, could yield a better signal of deception.

Does anyone think forcing people into “gimp suits” which have lot’s of trailing wires to not be a form of torture?

Another issue is humans actually have very few major symptoms for hundreds of different triggers.

That is the major response to intense stress is the same as travel sickness and quite a few others the primary evolutionary one being “I’m poisoned”. So your brain detects anomalies from normal operation assumes it’s poisoning and responds by making you evacuate food fluids etc…

Thus a reasonable supposition –as found with other lie detectors– is that all manner of inputs will produce the same major responses as telling lies… Which will almost always fail to give valid indicitive responses whilst leaving the door wide open to abuse…

I was once told by a researcher that people had it wrong about “bad cop good cop” it was not the fear of the bad cop or the hope the good cop would be nice. No it realy only works with those who have sufficient empathy that actually feel sorry for the good cop and don’t want him to look bad infront of the bad cop…

That is we instinctivly don’t like Hawks so we help Doves, apparently most of us have a deep seated primative desire to protect “young” from Hawks as a species survival mechanism.

These deep seated survival mechanisms primary purposes may long be gone in normal life, but the brain/body has recycled them for a myriad of other reasons. And as with all such things the edges are ill defined and very very broad and thus close to impossible to diagnose the trigger that gives rise to the symptoms. Such one wayness is ideal not just for those wishing to abuse the questioning of individuals, but also for those trained to resist such questioning.

Then of course there are the eighty percent of the population who are not “average” whose triggers, physiological responses and physical anomalies tend to create more noise than signal with these types of techniques. I often wonder if in twenty or fifty years people will look back on this sort of thing in the same way we now regard the art of phrenology, and similar where it was believed that bumps on your head, or the shape of your ears etc was proof positive you were in “the criminal class” and thus “must be guilty”.

Any way time to eat lunch, hopefully my body won’t think it’s being poisoned 😉

Clive Robinson • January 8, 2015 7:37 PM

@ GreenSquirrel,

This is what I was taught in the late 90s and even then it was generally regarded as something people had known since Tin Eye Stephen’s time.

Hmm I wonder if it might have been the same person that “told” me, as I’ve wondered befor, have our paths crossed…

@ All,

Col Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens methods are often described as original, but I suspect the seeds of them came from his non academic learning whilst away at school. Even today some of the schools that date back to that time can be fairly evil on children via fagging / bullying.

Tin Eye honed his skills on POWs in Latchmear House in what was then Surrey, just a few hundred yards south west of Richmond Park, a place I used to pass very frequently when young. However by that time it was not full of POWs but “delinquents” as post war it became a Borstal / Correctional facility for minors. The fences around it were around three stories high and fairly imposing in the choice of wire etc they were made of. Oddly although it’s only a couple of miles up the road, I’ve not been back that way since going to a party in the prison officers social club twenty years ago, so I’ve no idea if it’s even still there.

For those that are wondering why he was called Tin Eye it was because of his monacal, which looked like it had been made from the bottom of a “shot glass”. Apparently it was also joked that he had “a key in his back” because his behaviour was often like that of a “clock work soldier”. As they say “appearances can be deceiving” because behind the martinet exterior was a very acute mind. His methods were apparently rather more successful than you would imagine from hearing them described, and worked by getting inside the other persons head one way or another. I have a book or two in my dead tree cave where he and his groups activities get mentioned indirectly along with the work of Sefton Delmar’s black propaganda which used the aspidistra transmitter Bruce has blogged about in the past.

From what I can gather Tin Eye was very averse to the “rough em up” interrogation technique and all forms of physical torture, beliving that you only get to hear any old nonsense from the prisoner that will stop the pain for even a short while.

The results he got if reported historicaly correctly proved his point, thus with recent revelations from the CIA further indicating physical interrogation does not produce real intel, you would have thought the tortures trade would be on the wane. But apparently not, which suggests there is something not right in the heads of those who advocate it. It has been suggested that they get some kind of gratification power trip similar to that of rapists, which might account for some of the degradation methods used in Iraq that ended up with photos etc and eventual conviction of those in the photos, but not those who had devised the methods and ordered them to be carried out.