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WIRED Magazine presents: The Interrogation Bot!
wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/ff-lie-detector/all/
So the government just keeps trying and trying to tell when someone is lying. Check out the article from this month's edition of WIRED. This new virtual interrogation machine is the next wave in the pseudoscience of lie detection.
A few quotes from the article:
Just three sensors tell the Embodied Avatar kiosk everything it needs to know about whether someone is telling the truth. An infrared camera records eye movement and pupil dilation at up to 250 frames per second—the stress of lying tends to cause the pupils to dilate. A high-definition video camera captures fidgets such as shrugging, nodding, and scratching, which tend to increase during a deceptive statement. And a microphone collects vocal data, because lies often come with minute changes in pitch. Future versions of the machine might go even further—a weight-sensing platform could measure leg and foot shifts or toe scrunches, and a 3-D camera could track the movements of a person’s entire body....
The US Army founded a polygraph school in 1951, and the government later introduced the machine as an employee-screening tool. Indeed, according to some experts, the polygraph can detect deception more than 90 percent of the time—albeit under very strictly defined criteria. “If you’ve got a single issue, and the person knows whether or not they’ve shot John Doe,” Honts says, “the polygraph is pretty good.” Experienced polygraph examiners like Phil Houston, legendary within the CIA for his successful interrogations, are careful to point out that the device relies on the skill of the examiner to produce accurate results—the right kind of questions, the experience to know when to press harder and when the mere presence of the device can intimidate a suspect into telling the truth. Without that, a polygraph machine is no more of a lie-detector than a rubber truncheon or a pair of pliers.
As a result, although some state courts allow them, polygraph examinations have rarely been admitted as evidence in federal court; they’ve been dogged by high false-positive rates, and notorious spies, including CIA mole Aldrich Ames, have beaten the tests. In 2003 the National Academy of Sciences reported that the evidence of polygraph accuracy was “scanty and scientifically weak” and that, while the device might be used effectively in criminal investigations, as a screening tool it was practically useless. By then, other devices and techniques that had been touted as reliable lie detectors—voice stress analysis, pupillometry, brain scanning—had also either been dismissed as junk science or not fully tested.
wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/ff-lie-detector/all/
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Virtual Polygraph Machine of the Future (Read 7965 times)
