Old screening technique allows probing terrorists' unconscious

Groucho Marx was pulled over by a policeman who suspected Groucho of driving under the influence. These were the days before breathalyzer, so the policeman made Groucho get out of his car and told him to walk in straight line. The inebriated Groucho could not, and the policeman reached for his book to give him a ticket. Groucho, still proclaiming his sobriety, protested: “Who do you believe?” he asked the policeman, “me or your own eyes?” Government interrogators also face difficulties judging the truthfulness of the people they interrogate. They often use lie detectors to evaluate the truthfulness of suspected terrorists, but these traditional means may soon be augmented by a technique called SSRM Tek, for “Semantic Stimuli Response Measurement Technology.” GSN’s Jacob Goodwin writes that using the technique may well allow interrogators to probe the terrorist’s unconscious thoughts. SSRM Tek is a psychological screening tool that has been around the intelligence community for a while, but might now be coming into fashion as a more accurate way to identify which suspects have truly been engaged in terrorist training, planning, or operations.

SSRM TEk interrogation uses words which are semantically relevant to a crime, terrorist act, or terrorist training, and these words are presented to a suspect on a computer screen masked by a row of numbers or scrambled images. The terror suspect, who is told he is simply undergoing a computer game to test his reactions, consciously sees only the numbers or scrambled images. The computer, in fact, analyzes the suspect’s unconscious brain responses to the selected words — based on how quickly and firmly he pushes a button — and determines whether these associations are relevant or not to terrorist activities.

Goodwin writes that it is not clear whether federal interrogators are already employing SSRM Tek in their questioning of terror suspects, but that it is clear that DHS has begun to take a genuine interest in this technique. The department’s science and technology directorate announced on 15 May that it plans to award a sole-source contract to a unit of Woodland Park, Colorado-based SRS Technologies “to develop a scientifically-based test protocol for human subject testing, data collection, data analysis, and reporting of false-positive rates using the Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology.” (Fairfax, Virginia-basedManTech International last April acquired SRS Technologies)

· An expert must administer a lie detector test while no special expertise is required to administer SSRM Tek testing.

· A typical lie detector test needs about two hours preparation, while SSRM Tek needs only 15 minutes preparation.

· Each lie detector test for one topic takes about two hours, while SSRM Tek can test for 20 topics in about 30 minutes.

· Examinees understand the nature of the questioning during lie detector tests, but do not understand the true nature of the SSRM Tek testing.

Note that Ottawa, Canada-based Northam Pyrotechnologies claims that it holds the North American rights to SSRM Tek and about half the U.S. and Canadian patents in this arena. The company is owned by Semyon Ioffe, a brain researcher with several patents in this area to his name.