New Weapon: Hand Held Lie-Detectors
Whoa…
FORT JACKSON, S.C. - The Pentagon will issue hand-held lie detectors this month to U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan, pushing to the battlefront a century-old debate over the accuracy of the polygraph.
The Defense Department says the portable device isn’t perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well. “We’re not promising perfection — we’ve been very careful in that,” said Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the midwife for the new device. “What we are promising is that, if it’s properly used, it will improve over what they are currently doing.”
The new device, known by the acronym PCASS, for Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, uses a commercial TDS Ranger hand-held personal digital assistant with three wires connected to sensors attached to the hand. An interpreter will ask a series of 20 or so questions in Persian, Arabic or Pashto: “Do you intend to answer my questions truthfully?” “Are the lights on in this room” “Are you a member of the Taliban?” The operator will punch in each answer and, after a delay of a minute or so for processing, the screen will display the results: “Green,” if it thinks the person has told the truth, “Red” for deception, and “Yellow” if it can’t decide.
The PCASS cannot be used on U.S. personnel, according to a memo authorizing its use, signed in October by the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.
The Army has bought 94 of the $7,500 PCASS machines, which are sold by Lafayette Instrument Co. of Lafayette, Ind. The algorithm, or computer program that makes the decisions, was written by the Advanced Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Besides the Army, other branches of the U.S. military have seen the device and may order their own. The total cost of the project so far is about $2.5 million.
Read full MSNBC article here.
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With all they lying scum in the middle east they’ll be burning those out in a week.
April 9th, 2008 at 5:38 pmIt’ll go haywire if brought in the close proximity of a Clinton.
April 9th, 2008 at 6:23 pmI wish i had one of these. I would hold it up when asking my girlfriend questions
so where were you last night again?
April 9th, 2008 at 8:31 pmArticle
“The PCASS cannot be used on U.S. personnel”
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LOL, Yeah right, the troops will have more fun with these devices than they do with tipping over an oppupied porta-potty, stun gun or a camel spider
Never seen a camel spider…here ya go
http://www.scaryanimalz.com/images/camel_spider.jpg
April 9th, 2008 at 10:19 pmand
http://my.break.com/content/view.aspx?ContentID=341498
These devices should be combined with Tazers that go off automatically when deception is detected.
April 10th, 2008 at 5:06 amI don’t care if one of these costs 4 grand. I want one.
April 10th, 2008 at 5:52 am