ACLU objects as two companies offer 'mind reading' technology to government

From http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/ACLU_objects_as_two_companies_offer_0628.html

ACLU objects as two companies offer 'mind reading' technology to government

RAW STORYPublished: Wednesday June 28, 2006

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The American Civil Liberties Union today announced that it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the primary American security agencies for information relating to the use of "cutting-edge brain-scanning technologies" on suspected terrorists, RAW STORY has learned.
Two private companies have announced that they will begin to offer "lie detection" services using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), as early as this summer. fMRI 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 companies are marketing their services to federal government agencies, including the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, the National Security Agency and the CIA, and to state and local police departments.

"There are certain things that have such powerful implications for our society -- and for humanity at large -- that we have a right to know how they are being used so that we can grapple with them as a democratic society," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project.
Equally worrisome to the group is the fact that experts in the field have told the ACLU that the science to back up any reliable use of fMRI as a "lie detector" or "mind reader" simply does not exist. At most, correlations have been observed between certain brain patterns and particular, highly controlled behaviors produced in laboratory experiments.

Experts also note that these early experiments on a few American college students are a long way from real-world settings, involving individuals in widely varying situations and with widely varying cultures, intelligence levels and states of mind.

"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," said Steinhardt. "What we don't want is to open our newspapers and find that another innocent person has been thrown into Guantánamo because interrogators have jumped to conclusions based on a technology no one understands very well."