Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) provides real-time images of brain activity, and has the potential to be a “super lie detector”, but is at a very early stage of development and it is quite premature to use it for that purpose.
The ACLU has filed a FOIA request to find out whether and how FMRI is being used by the government on suspected terrorists.
In my opinion, the government should not be allowed under any circumstances to use fMRI or other techniques to probe the contents of a person’s brain. The right to privacy of one’s thoughts and memories should be absolute. I think this is defensible as a right guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment as well as being an unenumerated right to privacy which should be covered by the Ninth Amendment. Furthermore, nothing in the Constitution grants the goverment the power to monitor people’s thoughts or memories directly.
Better than the scan they are using in Pakistan:
MULTAN, Pakistan (Reuters) – Fateh Mohammad, a prison inmate in Pakistan, says he woke up last weekend with a glass lightbulb in his anus.
“I don’t know who did this to me. Police or other prisoners.”
The doctor treating Mohammad said he’d never encountered anything like it before, and doubted the felon’s story that someone had drugged him and inserted the bulb while he was comatose.