DHS To Use Body Odor As a Lie Detector 206
The US Department of Homeland Security is studying lies, damned lies, and smells. They hope to prove that human body odor could be used to tell when people are lying. The department says they are already "conducting experiments in deceptive behavior and collecting human odor samples" and that the research it hopes to fund "will consist primarily of the analysis and study of the human odor samples collected to determine if a deception indicator can be found."
Re:Should be cheap! (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>All they need to collect the samples is already at hand.
It just dawned on me. Collecting "scent samples" is the same thing the East German government did. For every citizen. Is Homeland Security taking us down that same road?
detection speed (Score:1, Interesting)
seems silly (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Something stinks around here (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it sad that even after all these years and having actually been forced to upgrade to Vista, I still think of this UAC [wikia.com] when people talk about it?
Life imitating... er... life? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is just precious - the Stasi in the GDR (east germany to most) did exactly the same thing with their suspects.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,484561,00.html [spiegel.de]
http://scent-lab.blogspot.com/2008/07/body-odor-preserved-and-exhibited-at.html [blogspot.com]
People being interrogated would frequently be asked to sit with their palms face down on a piece of cloth, usually stuck to the chair. After the interrogation, the cloth would be removed and placed in a jar for later analysis. I don't believe it's ever been admissible as evidence in any western court, but that's obviously what the whole DHS "proof" is all about.
Quite why one would invest so many resources in this when fingerprints and DNA are already reliable forms of identification I don't know, and I strongly suspect that the "indicator" of deception will be flawed for much the same reasons the results of a polygraph are flawed - I can understand how someone who's stressed might well emit a different sort of sweat than someone who's just hot, but trying to define a "liars sweat" reeks (hohoho) of pseudoscience to me.
Who knows, maybe there's something in it, maybe the article is making too much of things, maybe I've got my paranoid hat on. But it still seems worryingly like the whole "this man is the serial killer cos his writing is all weird" argument to me.
Re:Same as always (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also worth noting that the lie detector has been involved in securing many FALSE confessions. DNA evidence later exhonerates the poor soul, but the lie detector was an important part of convincing him to sign the confession.
It's not just that the like detector is unscientific, it's that it is used to railroad people into confessing, rather than finding the truth.
Re:Best reply (Score:4, Interesting)
Going with Google Maps' predictions, he drove for about 12 hours straight, a distance of 785 miles.
Land's End, Cornwall (the most south-westerly point of Great Britain) to Inverness (most northerly city in Scotland) is only 730 miles.
Many people in the UK would fly that distance -- though it would be awkward, both places are very remote. But our alternative -- a train, with lots of legroom, space for luggage, a table, a power point for your laptop, a toilet etc -- doesn't really exist in the USA, outside a few locations.
(A train from Land's End (Penzance) to Inverness takes 14 hours, or 16 hours if you take a sleeper train overnight.)
Re:Should be cheap! (Score:2, Interesting)
For those that are wondering why this would scare me, coming from the perspective of search and rescue: Well-trained dogs who get the scent from something that the person they are searching for was physically touching at some point recent to the search, will hit on that person 999 times out of 1000. The prospect of a scent being put into a database to be pulled out by an algorithm leaves the possibility that there could be massive error before a dog ever gets to scent off of the sample. Or they could use a machine, and I for one do not trust a machine to be right 99.9 percent of the time, in a situation like this.
Re:A little joke to make you think (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, let me explain some things: yes, I used genius word wrongly, should be "genie" (in portuguese they are translated to the same word, sorry).
Second: about USA position as being the bigger influencer and/or attacker since WWII. Can you just count WWI as 1 conflict and count all big conflicts that happened from WWII up to today? I was trying to say that almost every conflict from 1945 to now has USA deeply entrenched or playing behind curtains. Say Vietnan, Korea, Iraq (2 times), Israel, Lebanon (helping Israel), Afghanistan (2 times), Cold War (ok, not a conflict, just almost one, god bless), and whatever conflict you choose (with exception to some tribe conflicts on Africa). Are you sure any other nation, even old Soviet Union or new Russia or Israel can stand above USA in this infamous dispute?
Ok, let's see: Vietnan started as a French conflict, but USA got there (objective: get mineral resources); Afghanistan started with Russia but USA got there to counter all the influence from Russia (Cold War) and got there again after some towers got down; Kuwait (I was forgetting it) got invaded by Iraq and USA (wanting to ensure oil would not get too expensive and to keep it available) got there; then, after some towers got down, USA decide it was time to fake some reports and go after Iraq again (to get all oil this time); Nicaragua, Panama and Grenada was there just to counter URSS. See, not even the Soviets could ever get close to USA. And I did not count all Israel backing on every conflict they got involved. Like I said, every major conflict known to us has USA in some "privileged" position or playing "World Police" (see North Korea, Libia and a lot of others).
My intention was to show that a paranoid state is not a good response but an expected one from a country that made a lot of enemies and consider eveyone as potential enemy. The better response should not be "every stranger is a potential terrorist" but "let's try to smooth things out" with everyone you can. Good faith and a real demonstration of change can make wonders in destroying terrorist arguments that USA is the representative of Satan on earth (an argument used a lot by terrorists). People all over the world got on USA side cause they were the victims on 09/11 events. The terrorists got arguments of being victims (at least for the population they wanted to influence) when Iraq got attacked for nothing more than oil greed, for example.
I'm not on the side of the terrorists in any way, they are wrong on every aspect, in my opinion. What I'm trying to show is that excluding all the world and making everyone suspicious of trying to destroy USA is not the answer. You can get your wish granted (by a GENIE or by everyone else) and people just exclude USA too. Bad for everyone, worse for USA.
Sorry for any other language or expression error I did, english is NOT my main language (brazilian portuguese is, for reference).
Re:Best reply (Score:3, Interesting)
And that's one of the key reasons I don't fly (unless I'm going a long distance). It's too damned inconvenient. I'd rather just drive my own car, which gives me lots of legroom, lots of space for luggage, and my own personal stereo system for music or books-on-ipod listening.
I'm so glad I"m not the only one who does this - co-workers look at me like I'm crazy when I say I'm driving instead of flying (up to 12-14 hours is my 'reasonable limit').
Between the hassle of "security", the cramped seats designed for people 6 inches shorter than me, the noise, being treated like cattle and the hundred other little things that make flying absolutely detestable... it's worth an extra couple-few hours of my time to enjoy my travel in comfort. I do take a mid- to high-end rental though, instead of my car - that lets me justify it to the company as being cheaper than a plane ticket anyway.