Entries Tagged "lies"

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MRI Lie Detectors

Long and interesting article on fMRI lie detectors.

I was particularly struck by this paragraph, about why people are bad at detecting lies:

Maureen O’Sullivan, a deception researcher at the University of San Francisco, studies why humans are so bad at recognizing lies. Many people, she says, base assessments of truthfulness on irrelevant factors, such as personality or appearance. “Baby-faced, non-weird, and extroverted people are more likely to be judged truthful,” she says. (Maybe this explains my trust in Steve Glass.) People are also blinkered by the “truthfulness bias”: the vast majority of questions we ask of other people—the time, the price off the breakfast special—are answered honestly, and truth is therefore our default expectation. Then, there’s the “learning-curve problem.” We don’t have a refined idea of what a successful lie looks and sounds like, since we almost never receive feedback on the fibs that we’ve been told; the co-worker who, at the corporate retreat, assured you that she loved your presentation doesn’t usually reveal later that she hated it. As O’Sullivan puts it, “By definition, the most convincing lies go undetected.”

EDITED TO ADD (8/28): The New York Times has an article on the topic.

Posted on July 25, 2007 at 6:26 AM • View Comments

Cameras "Predict" Crimes

New developments from surveillance-camera-happy England:

The £7,000 device, nicknamed “the Bug”, consists of a ring of eight cameras scanning in all directions. It uses software to detect whether anybody is walking or loitering in a way that marks them out from the crowd. A ninth camera then zooms in to follow them if it thinks they are behaving suspiciously.

[…]

“The camera picks up on unusual movement, zooms in on someone and gathers evidence from a face and clothing, acting as a 24-hour operator without someone having to be there,” said Jason Butler, head of CCTV at Luton borough council. “We have kids with Asbos telling us they hate the thing because it follows them wherever they go.”

This is interesting. It moves us further along the continuum into thoughtcrimes, but near as I can tell, the system just collects evidence on people it thinks suspicious, just in case. Assuming the data is erased immediately after, it’s much less invasive than actually accosting someone for thoughtcrime; the costs for false alarms is minimal.

I doubt it works nearly as well as the article claims, but that’s likely to change in 5 to 10 years. For example, there’s a lot of research being done in the area of microfacial expressions to detect lying and other thoughts. This is the sort of technological advance that we need to be talking about in terms of security, privacy, and liberty.

Posted on April 19, 2007 at 6:20 AM • View Comments

The Doghouse: Onboard Threat Detection System

It’s almost too absurd to even write about seriously—this plan to spot terrorists in airplane seats:

Cameras fitted to seat-backs will record every twitch, blink, facial expression or suspicious movement before sending the data to onboard software which will check it against individual passenger profiles.

[…]

They say that rapid eye movements, blinking excessively, licking lips or ways of stroking hair or ears are classic symptoms of somebody trying to conceal something.

A separate microphone will hear and record even whispered remarks. Islamic suicide bombers are known to whisper texts from the Koran in the moments before they explode bombs.

The software being developed by the scientists will be so sophisticated that it will be able to take account of nervous flyers or people with a natural twitch, helping to ensure there are no false alarms.

The only thing I can think of is that some company press release got turned into real news without a whole lot of thinking.

Posted on February 16, 2007 at 6:55 AM • View Comments

Do Terrorists Lie?

Terrorists might bomb airplanes, take and kill hostages, and otherwise terrorize innocents. But there’s one thing they just won’t do: lie on government forms. And that’s why the State of Ohio requires certain license (including private pilot licenses) applicants to certify that they’re not terrorists. Because if we can’t lock them up long enough for terrorism, we’ve got the additional charge of lying on a government form to throw at them.

Okay, it’s actually slightly less silly than that. You have to certify that you are not a member of, a funder of, a solicitor for, or a hirer of members of any of these organizations, which someone—presumably the Department of Homeland Security—has decided are terrorist organizations.

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association is pissed off, as they should well be.

More security theater.

I assume Ohio isn’t the only state doing this. Does anyone know anything about other states?

EDITED TO ADD (1/18): Here’s a Pennsylvania application or a license to carry firearms that asks: “Is your character and reputation such that you would be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety?” I agree that Pennsylvania shouldn’t issue carry permits to people for whom this is true, but I’m not sure that asking them is the best way to find out.

Posted on January 17, 2007 at 7:34 AM • View Comments

Truth Serums

Interesting article on the history and current search for a drug that compels people to tell the truth:

There is no pharmaceutical compound today whose proven effect is the consistent or predictable enhancement of truth-telling.

[…]

Whether a search for truth serums has occurred in recent decades, and especially since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is a matter of differing opinion.

Gordon H. Barland was a captain in the U.S. Army Combat Development Command’s intelligence agency in the 1960s. Before leaving active duty in 1967 he was asked to write up “materiel objectives.” He put on the wish list a drug that would aid interrogation.

He later became a research psychologist and spent 14 years working at the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute. While psychopharmacology was not his specialty, trying to catch liars was.

“I would have expected that if there was some sort of truth drug in general use I would have heard rumors of it. I never did,” said Barland, who retired in 2000 and now lives in Utah. He further doubts that the government would again engage in such experiments, given the MK-ULTRA experience.

“It would be very difficult to get a project like that off the ground,” he speculated.

Another psychologist who spent 20 years in military research said he also “never heard anything like that or knew of anyone who was doing that work.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity because interrogation is not his specialty.

Some doubt the practicality of running, or keeping secret, such a research agenda.

“I can’t imagine it,” said Tara O’Toole, director of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“We haven’t been able as a government to create anthrax vaccine. The idea that we could develop a [truth] drug de novo strikes me as outlandish,” she said. “That would be a really major research and development project that would be hard to hide.”

For the record, spokesmen for the Army medical research command, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the CIA say there is no work underway on truth serums.

Posted on November 22, 2006 at 8:43 AM • View Comments

Behavioral Profiling Nabs Warren Jeffs

This is interesting:

A paper license tag, a salad and stories that didn’t make sense pricked the suspicions of a state trooper who stopped the car of a wanted fugitive polygamist in Las Vegas.

But it was the pumping carotid artery in the neck of Warren Steed Jeffs that convinced Nevada Highway Patrolman Eddie Dutchover that he had cornered someone big.

This is behavioral profiling done right, and it reminds me of the Diana Dean story. (Here’s another example of behavioral profiling done right, and here is an article by Malcolm Gladwell on profiling and generalizations.)

Behavioral profiling is tough to do well. It requires intelligent and well-trained officers. Done badly, it quickly defaults to racial profiling. But done well, it’ll do far more to keep us safe than object profiling (e.g., banning liquids on aircraft).

Posted on August 31, 2006 at 1:11 PM • View Comments

Lying to Government Agents

“How to Avoid Going to Jail under 18 U.S.C. Section 1001 for Lying to Government Agents”

Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001 makes it a crime to: 1) knowingly and willfully; 2) make any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation; 3) in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative or judicial branch of the United States. Your lie does not even have to be made directly to an employee of the national government as long as it is “within the jurisdiction” of the ever expanding federal bureaucracy. Though the falsehood must be “material” this requirement is met if the statement has the “natural tendency to influence or [is] capable of influencing, the decision of the decisionmaking body to which it is addressed.” United States v. Gaudin, 515 U.S. 506, 510 (1995). (In other words, it is not necessary to show that your particular lie ever really influenced anyone.) Although you must know that your statement is false at the time you make it in order to be guilty of this crime, you do not have to know that lying to the government is a crime or even that the matter you are lying about is “within the jurisdiction” of a government agency. United States v. Yermian, 468 U.S. 63, 69 (1984). For example, if you lie to your employer on your time and attendance records and, unbeknownst to you, he submits your records, along with those of other employees, to the federal government pursuant to some regulatory duty, you could be criminally liable.

Posted on June 5, 2006 at 1:24 PM • View Comments

Surreptitious Lie Detector

According to The New Scientist:

THE US Department of Defense has revealed plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. The Remote Personnel Assessment (RPA) device will also be used to pinpoint fighters hiding in a combat zone, or even to spot signs of stress that might mark someone out as a terrorist or suicide bomber.

“Revealed plans” is a bit of an overstatement. It seems that they’re just asking for proposals:

In a call for proposals on a DoD website, contractors are being given until 13 January to suggest ways to develop the RPA, which will use microwave or laser beams reflected off a subject’s skin to assess various physiological parameters without the need for wires or skin contacts. The device will train a beam on “moving and non-cooperative subjects”, the DoD proposal says, and use the reflected signal to calculate their pulse, respiration rate and changes in electrical conductance, known as the “galvanic skin response”. “Active combatants will in general have heart, respiratory and galvanic skin responses that are outside the norm,” the website says.

The DoD asks for pie-in-the-sky stuff all the time. For example, they’ve wanted a synthetic blood substitute for decades. A surreptitious lie detector would be pretty neat.

Posted on January 20, 2006 at 12:37 PM • View Comments

Automatic Lie Detector

Coming soon to airports:

Tested in Russia, the two-stage GK-1 voice analyser requires that passengers don headphones at a console and answer “yes” or “no” into a microphone to questions about whether they are planning something illicit.

The software will almost always pick up uncontrollable tremors in the voice that give away liars or those with something to hide, say its designers at Israeli firm Nemesysco.

Fascinating.

In general, I prefer security systems that are invasive yet anonymous to ones that are based on massive databases. And automatic systems that divide people into a “probably fine” and “investigate a bit more” categories seem like a good use of technology. I have no idea whether this system works (there is a lot of evidence that it does not), what the false positive and false negative rates are (this article states a completely useless 12% false positive rate), or how easy it would be to learn how to fool the system, though. And in all of these trade-off discussions, the devil is in the details.

Posted on November 21, 2005 at 8:07 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.