Return of the ducking stool

摘要

In july this year, The Times of India triumphantly announced that two people had been found guilty of murder, based largely on evidence provided by a brain-scanning technique known as brain electrical oscillations signature (BEOS) profiling. According to the report, the state police of Maharashtra "can now bank on a forensic tool to achieve speedy convictions".rnI choose the following words carefully: the utter irresponsibility involved here, and its attendant outrage of justice, is staggering. It is yet another example of how technology is increasingly misapplied and abused, andrnrepresents a major threat to civil liberties.rnBEOS profiling is a hopelessly crude procedure piggy-backing on sophisticated brain scanning techniques which reveal the involvement of regions of the brain in emotion, movement, memory and other functions. It involves an electroencephalogram combined with a word association test. EEG electrodes are placed on a subject's head, and a text is read out.