Big Government wants to wrap its mind around yours

Washington Post | Apr 15, 2008

By Nita Farahany

Imagine a world of streets lined with video cameras that alert authorities to any suspicious activity. A world where police officers can read the minds of potential criminals and arrest them before they commit any crimes. A world in which a suspect who lies under questioning gets caught because his brain gave him away.

Though that may sound a lot like the plot of the 2002 Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report,” it’s not science fiction: We’re not so far from that world. But does it sound like a very safe place, or a very scary one?

It’s a question we should be asking as the federal government invests millions in emerging technology aimed at detecting and decoding brain activity.

Consider Cernium Corp.’s “Perceptrak” video surveillance and monitoring system, recently installed by Johns Hopkins University. This technology grew out of a project funded by the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense to develop intelligent video analytics systems. Unlike simple video cameras, Perceptrak integrates video cameras with an intelligent computer video. It uses algorithms to analyze streaming video and detect suspicious activities, such as people loitering in a secure area. Since installing Perceptrak, Johns Hopkins has reported a 25 percent reduction in crime.

That’s only the beginning. Neurotechnology soon may be able to detect a person who is particularly nervous, in possession of guilty knowledge or, eventually, to detect a person thinking, “Only one hour until the bomb explodes. …”

In 2002, the Electronic Privacy Information Center reported that NASA was developing brain monitoring devices for airports and was seeking to use noninvasive sensors in passenger gates to collect the electronic signals emitted by passengers’ brains. Scientists scoffed at the reports.

But that same year, scientists at the University of Sussex in England adapted the same technology they had been using to detect heart rates at distances of up to 1 meter to remotely detect changes in the brain.

But don’t panic: The government can’t read our minds — yet. So far, these tools simply measure changes in the brain; they don’t detect thoughts and intentions.

Scientists, though, are hard at work trying to decode how those signals relate to mental states such as perception and intention. Different EEG frequencies, for example, have been associated with emotional states such as fear, anger, joy and sorrow and different cognitive states such as a person’s level of alertness.

Early researchers have claimed high accuracy at detecting deception. But there’s a problem: Most brain-based lie-detection tests assume lying should result in more brain activity than truth-telling because lying involves more cognition. So these lie-detection methods may fail in sociopaths or in individuals who believe in the falsehood they’re telling.

The very fact that the government is banking on its future potential raises myriad questions. Imagine, for example, a police officer approaching a suspect based on Perceptrak’s “unusual activity” detection. Equipped with remote neural-detection technology, the officer asks her a few questions, and the detection device deems her responses to be deceptive. Will this be enough evidence for an arrest? Can it be used to convict a person of intent to commit a crime?

Americans have been willing to tolerate significant new security measures and greater encroachments on civil liberties after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Could reports of significant crime reduction be enough to justify the use of pre-crime technology? Could remote neural monitoring together with intelligent video analytics have prevented those tragedies? And if they could, should they be allowed to?

These are just some of the questions we must ask as we balance scientific advances and the promise of enhanced safety against a loss of liberty. And we must do it now, while our voices still matter.