Find out how to Catch a Terrorist: Read His Brainwaves [Security]

It’s been a dream of scientists, interrogators and law enforcement professionals for years: Strap a terrorist suspect to a few of electrodes, start asking him questions, and watch his brainwaves rat him out.

In a contemporary paper, a Northwestern University professor uses some of his recent fieldwork to urge the intelligence community to provide the science another shot. Only 1 problem: His self-described ” Oddball Approach” to exposing terrorists probably won’t work within the real world.

Psychologist J. Peter Rosenfeld writes inside the journal Psychophysiology that he can predict and stop terrorist attacks, all after running a clinical trial wherein his students had to plot a mock assault. The assumption was to create a test that might allow interrogators a foolproof way of extracting information about planned attacks from resistant suspects using just two wires connected to the forehead. ” They may either send him to Egypt for the waterboard,” Rosenfeld tells Danger Room, ” or give him a scientifically based test.”

Rosenfeld’s students received a briefing on a chain of options that they may employ: four potential locations in Houston, four forms of bombs, and four dates in July. Individually, they wrote letters to their ” superiors” in their imaginary terror cells outlining their intended acts.

Enter the probe. Psychologists established decades ago that folks will involuntarily activate a undeniable brainwave after they encounter a well-recognized stimulus, is known as a P300. In theory, it’s better than a lie detector: you don’t must worry in regards to the brain letting out a P300 out of nervousness, the best way a panicked heart can create false positives for polygraphs. As Wired.com reported shortly after the September 11 attacks , that’s why every couple of years someone proposes using electroencephalography – EEG, to you and me – as a reliable (and, potentially, legally admissible) alternative to the old lie detector .

During a 25-minute test, Rosenfeld’s students were shown a screen that flashed hundreds of names of random cities, dates and bomb methods. Sure enough, the students’ P300s told Rosenfeld when and where the hypothetical attacks would happen. Even though someone tries hard not to bear in mind his intended terrorist act, ” we still catch them eight out of nine or 10 times,” Rosenfeld says. ” It’s pretty damn good.”

Now to convince someone within the intelligence community. And which might be tougher than the respected psychologist figures. Anyone accustomed to interrogations of real-life terrorist suspects will immediately spot a difficulty with Rosenfeld’s test: it presumes way too much knowledge on the section of both the interrogator and the interrogated.

The typical terrorist who finds himself in front of FBI or CIA agents won’t necessarily know everything about a selected plot. The 9/11 hijackers, for example, were kept deliberately in the dead of night about everything besides their specific piece of the operation. And that’s on the off chance that someone that spies or G-men round up have even made it into the active stage of terror-plotting, a good looking elite group.

Alternatively, someone who finds himself in an interrogation chair may have been caught red-handed – think underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – rendering Rosenfeld’s test moot. It then falls to interrogators to decide a suspect’s place within the conspiracy, something that’s plenty harder to make your mind up than with an easy synaptic firing. Anyone might recognize Osama bin Laden and set free some P300s, but that doesn’t mean that he’s collaborated with him.

Most often, interrogators don’t have any idea whether the fellow within the chair opposite them is a chunk player or a fear master. That’s why real-life interrogator tools for unraveling terror webs are way more simplistic, as a way to draw out broad information and then whittle it down.

Ali Soufan, for example, a retired FBI counterterrorist, got the first-ever al-Qaeda confirmation of the terrorist group’s culpability for 9/11. His secret weapon? Sugarless cookies , fed to a hungry al-Qaeda affiliate named Abu Jandal.

Rosenfeld concedes that his test depends upon both terrorist and interrogator having a substantial amount of knowledge about a given plot. (Self-deprecatingly, he refers to his P300 test as his ” Oddball Approach.” )

He says he’s had only one interaction with an American spook since his paper came out earlier this summer, a Defense Intelligence Agency official named Donald Krapohl, who was skeptical that the P300 test can be useful to interrogators for precisely that reason. (In an email, Krapohl confirmed corresponding with Rosenfeld, but failed to receive permission from his bosses to chat with me for this story.)

Aside from a guy who works with the Transportation Security Administration at Midway Airport in Chicago, Rosenfeld says, ” We haven’t had any [other] bites inside the counterterrorism community.”

That points to a fundamental clinical disconnect. Rosenfeld wants to aid U.S. counterterrorists. But he doesn’t know any. So it’s hard for him to design a test that’s relevant to actual interrogators.

” It’s like I tell everybody,” he says. ” We’ve done plenty of work inside the lab now for ages, and we’d really prefer to see it out inside the real world.” Anyone from Langley wants to present Rosenfeld a shout, he’s able to put some electrodes together within the hope that he should help stop a higher attack.

Photo: Brown University

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This post is tagged: clinical trial, false positives, intelligence community, law enforcement professionals, northwestern university professor, peter rosenfeld, september 11 attacks