Using Science to Catch Terrorists

By measuring a subject’s brain waves, researchers at Northwestern University can detect the presence of ‘concealed information’. The technique could be used to uncover terrorist plots. “According to a Northwestern University announcement on July 30, J. Peter Rosenfeld, professor of psychology in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, explained, ‘without any prior knowledge of the planned crime in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime- related details. ‘The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity.'”