h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6306901.stm

I thought the burden of proof in UK law didn't accept lie-detectors as admissible evidence (unlike in US law).

So I'm just wondering what people's reactions to this story are?

Is it another 'quick-fix'; will it work?; are civil liberties at stake, if lie-detectors become an establish element of law enforcement?

Your comments and opinions sought.

Clive

The reason lie detectors are not accepted as evidence is because they're pretty unreliable. They don't actually detect lies, but rather how nervous th person being interrogated is. So, while it can probably be used as a handy interogation tool, I'd be wary of accepting it as standalone evidence in a court case (though it might make reasonble supporting evidence).

I also wouldn't trust it to detect whether paedophiles are likely to reoffend, as the article suggests. Even those who sincerely don't want to reoffend could easily suffer a relapse.

I really don't see how trying to get a paedophile to tell the truth is an invasion of civil liberties.

I suppose its one extra piece of evidence to add to the picture, but I hope they know not to put too much weight on it. For one, people can be trained to defeat lie detector tests. For another, some paedophiles will not know for sure whether they would reoffend - you can only measure their current intent with this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph

Most research is unreliable...

turvy

There's a better test. Attach some explosives to a certain part of their anatomy then show them a picture of Jimmy Krankie. Any twitches and you get an answer and a solution at the same time

Naw, I can imagine there's a small sub-sect of society that finds Krankie attractive and aren't paedophiles.

I don't think this is on for any number of reasons, but their is a guy doing research in the states on brain activity and lying, and he does seem to be producing some interesting (and reliable) results. It'll be a while before it's viable on a large scale, I suspect, but it's worth thinking about. (For anybody more interested, we saw this in the science museum on Saturday, it's in the Wellcome Wing.)

I suppose in the long run it's feasible we'll be able to do a variation of the Voight-Kompt tests from 'Bladerunner'/'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'.

Yay, mind reading devices. What the world so sorely needs.
But as mentioned earlier a lie detector just shows how nervous you are. Not sure how nervous a psychopath would feel when lying.

It wasn't mind reading. It appeared to be a sort of MRI technique, because certain centres of the brain are stimulated by lying.

It was a very interesting display all round and raised some very interesting questions about the direction medical research may be heading in the future.

It is still too close for comfort. Like a technique MIT is working on called Brain Fingerprinting. Some people also claim you can tell if a person is lying by checking if their eyes move towards the right, where the creative part of the brain should be.

Pretty much a variation on the Balderunner technique then.

I'm inclined to agree with you, but I do think that it will come in time, because it's too good for the forces of law and order to ignore. Just as lie detector tests are a quick knee jerk reaction to the problem of paedophiles. It plays well to the press.

I was actually much more interested in the other stuff on display that suggests we aren't very far away from being able to literally download stuff straight into our brains, a la Johnny Mnemonic. Interesting and scary stuff.

>>"Some people also claim you can tell if a person is lying by checking if their eyes move towards the right, where the creative part of the brain should be."

Are any of those people actually any good at spotting lies in practice?

No, I think statistically there is currently no method. The MRI method is promising, and scary. But...MRI is very expensive and difficult. However, MRI (and the related NMR) are making huge leaps and bounds, so who knows?

Good call with the Blade Runner analogy Blues.

It seems that with all of these methods - even the MRI - that with a bit of training you could fool the test.

Potholer: It is really a rather vague memory so I don´t know. I think there was also a movie or series using this, training a person especially to keep their eyes staying still to get away with lying.

From what I understand, the eye-movement thing is a claim of followers of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

While some of the ideas of eye movement correlating with mental activity may work with some people, they don't seem to work with others (According to Derren Brown).
Even if for a particular person, some eye movement tends to correlate with imagination rather than memory, it could be misleading if (for example) asking someone about their *intentions*, since even honest replies could require a deal of imagination.

In any case, if you don't know whether a particular technique is any use with a particular individual, it could be of limited use in law enforcement.

Can I just say that Jeanette Krankie was our football team pin up.

Todays main headline from the Grauniad, basically reporting on the latest brain scanning for 'intentions';

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2009217,00.html

Kind of a short-term meaning of 'potential' though.
The idea that it's possible to detect intentions regarding imminent actions (even before a person is consciously aware of them) isn't that new in neuroscience.
What may be fairly easy for some simple test case may be much harder, if not outright impractical, when it comes to more complex thoughts.