Reading the Minds of Terrorists (And Yours), Literally

This is not science fiction, it's science reality. New technology being developed at top-ranked Northwestern University just north of Chicago can get us into the minds of terrorists, read them and even know how, when and where their next attacks will occur. Not bad for use on cheating partners, ethically-dead financiers and backstabbing bosses among others either, if you can get over the whole "my body is my temple" privacy thing. Here's how the mind-reading technology works, as well as possibilities and dangers of its use.

Neuroscientists studied P300 brainwaves, those correlating to guilty or concealed knowledge (prior and post-crime) with 100 percent accuracy in real-world simulated laboratory tests, according to J. Peter Rosenfeld, the lead researcher of the mind-reading project. Coupled with sophisticate analyses of "chatter," the scientific term for in-person and online rumors on websites and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, the technology is equally effective in exposing both the planning stage and after the perpetration of a crime.

"Without any prior knowledge of the planned crime [on the part of investigators] in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime- related details," Rosenfeld said. "The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity."

This places Phillip K. Dick, author of the novel behind the hit movie Minority Report in which "precogs" are able to predict crimes before they happen, above Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke in prophetic science fiction literature, at least in my book.

The process of reading minds in this way begins with placing electrodes on the scalp, which then detect  P300 brain activity (burst of electrical patterns in the cortex) when crime-related information is presented to a person with guilty or concealed knowledge. This next-generation polygraph, the popularized lie detectors invented in the 1920s, uses image, sound, and semantic stimuli to add predictive capabilities to the standard investigatory question and answer procedure. The city that study participants chose for their major terrorist attack (among Boston, Houston, New York, Chicago and Phoenix) evoked the largest P300 brainwave responses.

No question that it would be great to prevent terrorist attacks and other violent crimes, but do these means justify their ends? With the U.S. military and other U.S. government agencies funding online and social media "privacy protection" technologies, as I've previously reported on Change.org, we are witnessing George Orwell's Big Brother in his novel 1984 take on flesh and blood of gargantuan proportions. One would hope that science based on the fantasy of Lewis Carroll's Alice will also be able to shrink Him.

Photo Credit: digitalbob8