ACLU Files for Info on New Brain-Scan Tech 257
An anonymous reader writes "According to their website, the ACLU has filed a FOIA request seeking information on the new Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging service being made available to the government for use on suspected terrorists which can produce 'live, real-time images of people's brains as they answer questions, view images, listen to sounds, and respond to other stimuli. [...] These brain-scanning technologies are far from ready for forensic uses and if deployed will inevitably be misused and misunderstood," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "This technology must not be deployed until it is proven effective -- and we are a long way away from that point, according to scientists in the field,"'"
Misunderstood? How about unreliable! (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at lie detectors, we still don't understand those and they have proven time and time again to be faulty at best. Depending on this a sole source of information is foolish.
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]The ACLU - some people's rights but not others (Score:1, Insightful)
Come on ACLU - you have more important things to spend your resources on. Start with US Citizens first.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others (Score:3, Insightful)
or is there?
Sounds like a good alternative to political debate (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like a good alternative to political deb (Score:3, Insightful)
Faulty systems can still work some of the time... (Score:4, Insightful)
In the field (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a joke right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, research into decision making processes and incentives by psychologist and economists using fMRI is in its infancy. To believe that we could accurately detect lies with fMRI when we don't even know how people make decisions or react to incentives is impossibly optimistic. The promise of a reduced sentence for telling the truth could completely change the fMRI results. The fact that the Guantanamo guard that kicked the sh*t out of you last week is in the room could completely change the fMRI results. The color of the room may change the fMRI results. And so on . . .
We just don't have enough historical data to do this reliably.
Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, the ACLU won't touch gun rights, because they don't believe they exist:
http://www.aclu.org/police/gen/14523res20020304.h
I think they're wrong, but that that doesn't mean I think the ACLU are doing wrong by defending my other rights. Interestingly enough, it appears possible for people to disagree on one subject while agreeing on a different one!
Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others (Score:3, Insightful)
The ACLU claims to defend "civil liberties." The 2nd, 9th, and 10th Amendments should be included in that, regardless of what other organizations do!
Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others (Score:2, Insightful)
Planned Parenthood and NARAL do a good job of defending the Abortion Amendment, yet this doesn't stop the ACLU from devoting resources to abortion rights.
The ACLU also duplicates the work of the NAACP, etc.
Yet when someone points out that the ACLU refused to defend the Second Amendment, somebody always points out that "The ACLU doesn't need to do that, because other organizations do," as though it was some great insight.
Can we just stop pretending that the ACLU cares about Constitutional rights, even if they are occasionally on the right side of some issues?
"Putting all that aside, I don't want to dwell on constitutional analysis, because our view has never been that civil liberties are necessarily coextensive with constitutional rights. Conversely, I guess the fact that something is mentioned in the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean that it is a fundamental civil liberty."
-Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU
"Life, Liberty, and the ACLU [reason.com]" (Reason, October 1994 [reason.com])
Re:First post(?) (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that a court of law is where most 'terrorists,' detained by the gov't, have ended up.
A better idea is if the Alphabet Agencies (CIA/DoD/NSA/DoJ/etc) uses FMRI's for security screenings, in the same way that polygraph's are used. That way science can build up a body of knowledge at the Federal Gov'ts expense and the results can be backed up with polygraphs.
RTFA, moran. (Score:1, Insightful)
As for your bullshit about the 2nd amendment, the ACLU doesn't need to defend it because the NRA does a great job already. OTOH, why is the NRA not involved in the fight to stop the Bush administration violating our 4th amendment rights? Does the NRA hate America?
Re:This is a joke right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others (Score:4, Insightful)
Reno v. ACLU:Communication Decency Act [cornell.edu]
Just remember that not all those that oppose the Neo-Con-Republicans are super liberals. Normal people seem to enjoy freedom as well.
Re:Why is this a "Civil Liberties" issue? (Score:2, Insightful)
But what are they using it FOR? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Developing intelligence to interdict terrorist acts.
2) Developing evidence to be used in criminal prosecution against the person being scanned.
1 is fair game. Terrorism and actions to prevent it is war, while MRI doesn't cause pain or damage to the subject (unless he happens to have, say, shrapnel in his body to be yanked on by the magnet).
2 is a violation of the prohibitions against unreasonable search and compelling an accused to testify against himself.
Seems to me the government has a choice: They can use the device on the suspected terrorist if they decide it's worth letting him go later (rather than prosecuting him) for detecting and stopping the plot.
Once they've extracted info with it and used it in their further actions, it will be essentially impossible to show that evidence they collect later was in no way derived from the information they extracted using the machine. It becomes "fruit of the poisoned tree" and inadmissable.
(By the way: Don't bring up the Geneva Accords. They specifically exclude people who violate certain "rules of civilized warfare", such as fighting in uniform, correctly identifying themselves, targeting only war infrastructure rather than civilians, etc. Terrorists miss on many of these qualifications, and it only takes one. Such people are NOT SUPPOSED to get the convention-specified treatment of a prisoner of war. This was done deliberately in the original formulation of the accords, to create an incentive for fighters, armies, and the organizations that field them to obey the rules in turn.)
Re:Why is this a "Civil Liberties" issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, I feel, my ACLU donation is being misused...
But not your tax dollars? (Which unlike your donation, isn't voluntary..)
Basically what you're saying here seems to be that law enforcement should be allowed to use whatever hokey crackpot ideas it wants to, and it's up to the courts to say if it's no good or not?
First off, if the government is subjecting people to any kind of scans, be it speed radars or palm-reading, that is a civil rights issue, and something we should be given the full and complete details of. That is definitely an ACLU issue in my book.
Second, the courts can only test what's being put in front of them. Should this stuff go unquestioned as long as noone uses it in court? I don't think so. In particular when it's being used on non-US citizens which you apparently can incarcerate nowadays without bothering with a trial.
Third, as a taxpayer, why the heck shouldn't I be concerned about the validity of any law-enforcement method (or any method in general) the government is blowing my money on? If the FBI is making phone calls to the Psychic Hotline to find out where Osama is, then you bet I'm concerned, regardless if that'll hold up in court or not!
Re:Why is this a "Civil Liberties" issue? (Score:1, Insightful)
Even if fMRI had anything like the accuracy needed (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that the polygraph works in this basic manner:
The examiner asks you a whole bunch of filler questions, claiming these are 'controls.' These results are all ignored. Questions in this phase are things like "Is today Tuesday?". Then the examiner intersperses the real controls (he's already lied to you about what they are), questions which they'll preface with ominous portents if you answer affirmatively, so the examiner assumes you're going to lie about them ("Have you ever cheated on a girlfriend? Have you ever used marijuana?).
Then the examiner takes the second controls and compares them to his test questions. If you're test questions exceed the response from the (presumed to be lying) controls, the examiner assumes you're lying. Thus, telling the truth throughout the entire procedure is liable to land you in hot water. (For more information, from an admittedley 'biased' site, but I think they're pretty clear can be found at http://www.antipolygraph.org/ [antipolygraph.org]).
However, a true lie detector test would require a much more coherent defintion of what a lie is, which is very hard to create. Most people would agree that actively misleading somebody with no regard to your factual knowledge is lying. This also tends to be a useless type of lie in these situations because people get there stories mixed up, or they don't think through all the details. Much more common types of lies, are witholding useful information while truthfully relating aspects of the response, or changing the context of the answer, and other things which mislead but do not show complete disregard for the truth. The best lies in the intelligence useful/lessness sense are those that only minorly distort the truth, but in a particularly significant way.
Until you can metrize all these different types of not being truthful, or of avoiding certain facts etc, and until you can metrize their reponses for each individual (my guess is that this type of thing will have a high variance between people), you can't produce anything that can reasonably be called a scientific lie detector.
Re:Faulty systems can still work some of the time. (Score:2, Insightful)
Today we scan terrorists (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The ACLU - some people's rights but not others (Score:3, Insightful)
"Baldwin's pro-Communist leanings lasted until 1939 when he was disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet pact and broke off all radical ties"
Yes, that's what I said.
Re:They're not even consistent. (Score:3, Insightful)
that's ridiculous. The collectivity notion stems directly from the interpretation of 'militia.' The right to petition has no such clause.
Calling them hypocrites for not supporting gun rights, when they've come out and said "we don't believe gun control is unconstitutional" is sort of dumb. You're just being mad at them because they're named badly. You might as well be angry with Grape-Nuts cereal, which contains neither grapes nor nuts.
Voight-Kampf? (Score:2, Insightful)
Holden: You look down and you see a Terrorist, Leon, he's crawling toward you-
Leon: Terrorist, what's that?
Holden: Know what a Democrat is?
Leon: Of course.
Holden: Same thing.
Re:They're not even consistent. (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise, why wouldn't the writer just have said 'the right of the militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed'? Or just shortened the whole thing and said "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, their right to bear arms shall not be infringed"?
No, it's pretty obvious that "the people" were introduced intentionally, and it's silly to assume that "the people" in the context of the 2nd Amendment refers to such a fundamentally different concept than the same word does when used in the 1st (and in all the other Amendments).
It's a two-part phrase; really it's not that complicated. The form is "[justification], [directive]." The whole bit about the militia doesn't change the essential fact that the Authors said "the right of the people...". If you want to change the meaning of that use of "people," then you necessarily have to be open to varying its meaning based on context elsewhere, and for reasons I've already pointed out, that's not something that most people want to do. In fact, it would be rather dangerous.
And while you may think my accusation of hypocrisy at the ACLU is merely sour grapes, I think it's far from it: the ACLU purports to defend 'civil liberties,' but in picking and choosing how they want to interpret the very documents that define civil liberties in this country in order to fit their preferences, it undermines their accountability as far as I'm concerned. If you can twist the meaning of a line so straightforward as the Second Amendment, then certainly you can't be trusted on other, far more complex issues.
Therefore I have no problem in using one's interpretation of the Second Amendment as a sort of litmus test for one's understanding of the Constitution, and of civil liberties generally. If you manage to fuck something that basic up, I don't even want to know what sort of a mess you're going to make of some of the higher-digit Amendments.
Re:But what are they using it FOR? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gosh I hate this stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see it happening right now, I get interrogated because I'm a suspect who was near a crime scene I don't know about. They hook me up to a lie detector/FMRI, then the big question comes along, "did you murder [person]?" I would freak regardless of whether or not I'd done it, simply because of the weight of the situation. Possibility of prison for life, even if I hadn't done a thing. I have a feeling people are too interested in their own agenda (which in this case would be convicting _someone_ like me, even if I didn't do it and they don't think I did) to worry about looking at all the evidence. They can't even fight for their own rights, why should they give a hoot about mine? Lie detector says I broke out in sweat and my pulse quicked when they asked me if I was the murderer. There's no way that thing could ever know my history and interpret the results objectively in light of the evidence. I'd be the 20% that lie detectors incorrectly fail.
Re:Spanking a moonbat (Score:1, Insightful)
I agree that foreigners don't have many rights in our system. The Bible teaches an absolute morality, independent of race, creed, gender, and prior crimes. The ACLU promotes these rights.
>But to date the ACLU has yet to commit an overt act of treason, unlike say the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Neither the NYT or LAT have been convicted of treason.
>You guys are just unhappy at the judgement your fellow citizens rendered and looking at getting sympathetic judges to give do overs.
I don't know who "you guys" are. The process of "getting sympathetic judges to give do overs" is called judicial review [wikipedia.org], and is a hallmark of our government's legislative process.