

Near-future advances in functional brain imaging will make torture obsolete - hackuser
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/02/white-house-project-will-yield-brain-based-lie-detectors/105021/

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gus_massa
> _Still, it is imperative that we gather intelligence from captive terror
> suspects in order to prevent heinous crimes from taking innocent lives both
> at home and on the land of our allies abroad._

There are a lot of false implicit assumptions here:

1) The image system is good enough to get any information: It' a new
technology. I expect that it is overhyped usual and you will not get very much
information for a long time. Have you seen my flying car?

2) Torture methods produce accurate information: It's well known that people
make false confections and incrimination under torture. Just Google "witch
hunt" for an old enough case that is not currently politized.

3) The interrogators are reliable: It's easy to use low quality information
extracted from the suspect to incriminate whoever you want. Sometime it's not
evil, only that if the interrogator has some previous ideas they can cause a
big confirmation bias.

