Original reporting and commentary about polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, and other purported "lie detectors."
Jenifer Johnston reports for the Sunday Herald: THE creator of a new lie detector which scans brainwaves before a subject even speaks has admitted she fears what could happen if it falls into the wrong hands. “We assume that the people asking the questions are going to be noble and working for something that is …
Noah Schachtman reports for Wired News. Excerpt: The military may have ways — gruesome ways — of making people talk, as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal has shown. But it still doesn’t have a reliable method for figuring out whether those people are telling the truth or not. Nearly 75 years since the introduction of …
Ranjani Ramaswamy reports for The Indian Express. Excerpt: Mumbai, January 7: WE wasted reams of newsprint wondering if Salman Khan had indeed been driving that night. His inebriation aside, how could it have been conclusively verified beyond any doubt that his was actually the hand on the steering wheel? The truth, concurs Dr C R …
Eric Swedlund reports for the Arizona Daily Star in an article titled, “UA on Security’s Cutting Edge.” Excerpt: John Allen, a psychology associate professor, will try to answer this question: “Is Brain ‘Fingerprinting’ Ready for Prime Time?” Conventional polygraphs measure factors such as heart rate and sweaty palms to determine nervousness or anxiety, but “brain …
Brandon Spun reports in the 4 February 2002 issue of Insight magazine on experimental detection of deception/concealed information techniques. Spun specifically addresses Dr. Larry Farwell’s “brain fingerprinting” technique, Dr. Daniel Langleben’s fMRI research, and Dr. James Levine and collaborators’ thermal imaging technology.
Matt Bean of Court TV reports. AntiPolygraph.org’s Gino J. Scalabrini is among those interviewed for this report. Excerpt: A tablet made in ancient Babylon warned, “When a man lies, he looks down at the ground and moves his big toe in circles.” Ancient Chinese lore professed that a liar who held rice grains in his …
Clive Thompson reports on Dr. Lawrence A. Farwell’s brain fingerprinting technique in this New York Times magazine article. Excerpt: The police have tried for years to get into the heads of criminals. But the accuracy of polygraphs, which measure pulse rates and blood pressure, has frequently been questioned — since steely-nerved liars can quell these …
Sarah Sturman Dale reports on Dr. Larry Farwell’s brain fingerprinting technique in this short article. Excerpt: He went to Harvard, works in Iowa and loves swing dancing. That’s not the typical profile of an anticrime crusader, but Lawrence Farwell is an unusual guy. While developing technology that would allow the vocally paralyzed to speak, he …
Ronald Bailey reports for Reason magazine’s ReasonOnline website. Excerpt: “It’s happening much faster than I thought it would,” says James Halperin, author of the 1996 science fiction novel The Truth Machine. The novel describes how humanity would react to the invention of an infallible lie detector in the year 2024. “When I was talking about …
Barnaby J. Feder reports for the New York Times about Dr. Lawrence A. Farwell’s brain fingerprinting technique. Excerpt: Since the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Dr. Lawrence A. Farwell has been arguing that terrorist operations can be investigated through careful monitoring of the brain waves emitted by suspects during interrogation. The claim did not …