Monthly Archives: November 2005

There is a new, non-invasive technology being developed which is able to peer into your brain to discover whether you are familiar with a given phrase, sound, or photo. It is being funded by the CIA, and its proponents claim that it offers 99.9% accuracy. The technique is intended to be used in criminal investigations to discover whether a suspect is familiar with a particular person, such as the face of a murder victim; or a location, such as a photo of a crime scene. It could also be used to detect whether a subject recognized specific names, phrases, etc.

Advocates of brain fingerprinting have struggled to prove its value, and since 9/11 it has had some renewed popularity among researchers, politicians and the media as a potential anti-terrorist screening measure. A suspected terrorist could be shown captured terrorist documents, photos of other terrorists, and other materials in order to gauge recognition. With so much at stake for the suspect, one would hope that the machine’s accuracy is as high as its proponents claim.

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One of my favorite films is ‘The Great Escape” with its spectacular cast and haunting conclusion. If you are unfamiliar with the film, it is based upon a true account concerning a POW camp especially built for Allied officers who were “problematic”; that is, always escaping. The audacity of their escape had wide effects, and is said to have helped with the D-Day landing, considering the escapees tied up a whole lot of soldiers trying to round them up. Tragically, the majority of the escapees were executed upon capture in retaliation.

A largely unknown story is about to be told. It is well chronicled in the book “Colditz” by Henry Chancellor (among other books). The town of Colditz is located approximately 150 km southwest of Berlin. Prisoners, upon arrival, found it confusing. Disembarking from the train, there was no camp. They were marched from the station, through the village, up a hill and right into the courtyard of a large, gloomy castle. They half expected to be executed.

Colditz Castle was built in 1014 and steadily enlarged until about 1694 when it comprised of about 700 rooms. It was used as a hunting lodge at times until 1824 when it was converted to an asylum. In 1933, it was converted into a labor camp for Hitler’s communist enemies.

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During the 1950s and 1960s, some otherwise freedom-loving governments waged secret wars against suspected homosexuals within their borders. During those years, Canada’s campaign to eliminate all homosexuals from the military, police, and the civil service was particularly broad and unforgiving, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) compiling files on over 9,000 suspected homosexuals. Reports indicate that the RCMP created Security Service subsection A-3 in the 1950s, whose sole purpose was the identification and dismissal of every gay person in public service.

Perhaps the most disturbing element of their campaign was a government-owned device known only as the “Fruit Machine.” It resembled a dentist’s chair, but it also had various sensors, a camera to monitor the pupils, and a black box situated in front of the subject to display pictures. Subjects were told that the machine was used for measuring stress, yet its purpose was something else entirely; it was intended to identify whether the subject was gay.

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The US Navy has a nifty oceangoing research ship which performs a controlled capsize in order to perform scientific tests. It’s called the FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP), and it was conceived and developed by the Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.

FLIP is 355 feet long, and is technically not a ship, but rather a specialized, manned buoy with a 300 foot draft. When in horizontal traveling mode, the long, hollow ballast area trails behind. When it reaches the desired location, the “tail” is flooded until the nose sticks straight up into the air, taking about twenty-eight minutes to reach vertical position. Even in stormy conditions, it is as stable as a fencepost, because most of its length lies in the untroubled waters beneath the waves.

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Law enforcement officers, secret agents, and counter-espionage personnel have most interesting toolboxes. Their occupations center around discovering “the truth” (or a convincing substitute) in environments where truth is scarce, and consequently they make use of methods which attempt to coerce, deceive, or scare the truth out of those who may possess it.

One of the most common interrogation tools in the history of the trade has been the lie detector. Over the years, these machines have helped put people in prison, destroy careers, and possibly even end lives. The Cold War was the heyday of these paranoia-driven truth-hunting techniques, and since the 1980s their popularity in the U.S. has declined. But they’re certainly not gone… if you ever apply for a job with the federal government, particularly a three-letter agency (FBI, CIA, etc), you’re likely to be subjected to a lie detector test, known in the industry as a “polygraph test.” But can these machines actually do what they claim?

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