How to Spot a Liar

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Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006
How to Spot a Liar
THE U.S. IS POURING MILLIONS INTO NEW LIE-DETECTION TECHNOLOGIES, PEERING INTO MINDS IN WAYS THAT COULD MAKE ANYBODY NERVOUS
By JEFFREY KLUGER, COCO MASTERS

Few things are easier than telling a lie, and few things are harder than spotting one when it's told to us. We've been trying to suss out liars ever since Cain fibbed to God about murdering Abel. While God was not fooled--hearing the blood of Abel crying out from the land--the rest of us do not have such divine lie-detection gifts.

But that doesn't mean we're not trying. In the post-9/11 world, where anyone with a boarding pass and a piece of carry-on is a potential menace, the need is greater than ever for law enforcement's most elusive dream: a simple technique that can expose a liar as dependably as a blood test can identify DNA or a Breathalyzer can nail a drunk. Quietly over the past five years, Department of Defense agencies and the Department of Homeland Security have dramatically stepped up the hunt. Though the exact figures are concealed in the classified "black budget," tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars are believed to have been poured into lie-detection techniques as diverse as infrared imagers to study the eyes, scanners to peer into the brain, sensors to spot liars from a distance, and analysts trained to scrutinize the unconscious facial flutters that often accompany a falsehood.

At last they may be getting somewhere. Next month No Lie MRI of San Diego, a beneficiary of some of that federal largesse, will roll out a brain-scan lie-detection service it is marketing to government and industry. Another company, Cephos of Pepperell, Mass., hopes to follow within a few years.

Even as those outfits ramp up, however, civil libertarians are sounding warnings. It's one thing for airport screeners to peek inside your shoes or squeeze your toothpaste tube. It's another when they pull you aside for questioning because you set off alarms on some scanning device whose reliability could be shaky. And who knows what techniques are already . . .