This Government Reads Your Mind and Finds You Guilty

In a chilling combination reminicent of "Brave New World" and "1984", a local government in India, which likes to bill itself as the world's largest democracy, has taken steps that any totalitarian government would love.

Buried inside the New York Times of September 14th, was this item:

India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question.

...

But it was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect’s brain held “experiential knowledge” about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison.

Certainly, technology marches on, especially in the field of criminal justice and that system first admitted the use of fingerprints and then DNA evidence. But some technologies have not been proven as reliable, such as the so-called "lie detector" which measures stress rather than truth.

This Indian government's reliance on brain waves poses an interesting question: will that government move on to using brain waves to monitor someone who is contemplating a crime?

It seems that the NSA's reading of e-mail messages is but small potatoes compared to a government picking up your brain waves.

I wonder if they will develop this technology to the degree that brain waves will be read without the need to actually hook up someone to a machine?