Brain fingerprinting poses latest threat to civil liberties

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 11, 2002 | by Wrye Sententia

Brandon Spun's article ("Medical Detection of False Witness" Feb. 4) rightly shows how the threshing out of the guilty and the potentially guilty has been given every kind of high-tech (and, therefore, politically chic) schemes to ensure national safety in the wake of the tragic events of Sept. 11.

Of the panoply of proposed "guilty-knowledge tests" brain fingerprinting is perhaps the most harrowing for its menace to civil liberties. If, as Larry Farwell hopes, his profit-seeking invention becomes standard in law enforcement -- meaning that those merely suspected of a crime would be subjected to a brain-fingerprinting test -- what would be done with these compulsory "memories" of suspects?

Will "fingerprints" or our brains' contents, whether guilty or not, be kept on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles? Brain fingerprinting, much more so than biometrics based on eye or face scans, points toward a new potential threat on one of our most intimate personal freedoms -- cognitive liberty.

Wrye Sententia
Associate Director
Center for Cognitive Liberty
and Ethics