There’s been lots written about how to protect the country against the next terrorist attack.
I just learned that one of my Northwestern University colleagues, J. Peter Rosenfeld, has completed research that offers a possible way to use technology to get inside the minds of terrorists to confirm details about an impending attack that emerges from intercepted chatter.
In the Northwestern study, researchers used P300 brain wave testing in a mock terrorism scenario. When the researchers “knew in advance specifics of the planned attacked by the make-believe ‘terrorists,’ they were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy in the lab.”
Rosenfeld told me via e-mail that that the online chatter gives preliminary information on what items to start with, then law enforcement officers could check the P300 brain activity of suspects against those details to determine the location and other details of a planned attack.
In his study, participants planned a mock attack; then, with electrodes attached to their heads, they looked at computer monitors displaying information such as names of cities. The city that the participants had selected for their attack evoked the largest P300 brainwave responses.
P300 testing involves attached electrodes to a person’s head to record brain activity that occurs when meaningful information is shown to someone with “guilty knowledge.”
“Since 9/11 preventing terrorism is a priority,” Rosenfeld said in an article on the NU website . “Sometimes you catch suspicious people entering a building. You suspect that they’re terrorists, and you have some leads from the chatter. You’ve heard they’re going to attack one city or another in one fashion or another on one date or another. Our hope is that our new complex protocol – different from the first P300 technology developed in the 1980s – will one day confirm such chatter in the real world.”
