It's been a while since the last post, and I wish I had more positive news. In spite of my best efforts Mumbai was not a huge success.

After numerous emails had been ignored over the past few months I decided to go to the Mumbai Directorate of Forensic Science to see if I could try and meet with its Director, Dr. M V Garad. Dr. Garad was last author on a 2009 paper 'Brain signature profiling in India: It’s status as an aid in investigation and as corroborative evidence - as seen from judgements' (don't blame me for the apostrophe.)

Parts of the above paper are cause for concern. In the case of a man accused of murdering an employee and who had taken the Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature (BEOS) profiling test (which had indicated that he was guilty) the court observed that

‘Since the tests are scientific tests, are conducted in scientific manners and with latest scientific machines and therefore, these examinations and its results cannot be discarded in this case as it corroborates with other evidence brought on record by the prosecution including oral as well as documentary and therefore, the results of the said examinations are acceptable in this case.’

Just because the test is based on science and uses technology surely the basis for whether it should be admissible should be that it has been demonstrated to be accurate and reliable, not that it uses the latest machines!

Later in the paper it is stated that

'Being used on approximately 300 subjects suspected to be involved in criminal activities, and the increase in demand for the conduction of this test, is an indication of the usefulness of this particular test in a Forensic Set-up as an aid to investigation.'

This is a circular argument. It is used therefore it is useful and because it is useful it is used... That fact that it is used does not mean that it provides relevant information for an investigation or criminal trial. It could instead be due to the lack of other corroborative evidence due to crimes being minimally investigated with a lack of more tried and tested forensic methods being used.

In conclusion the paper states that:

'Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature Profiling (BEOS) is certainly a useful test as an aid to investigation provided it has been conducted in a scientific manner.'

and

'If the tests of the results are negative, and if they are not supportive of prosecution, the courts may consider that, the purpose for which the test was taken has not been served.'

What is worrying about these conclusions is that the definition of 'a scientific manner' seems to be one in which technology is involved rather than that the test has been rigorously scientifically tested to determine whether it can do what it claims to be able to do and to what degree of accuracy and reliability. The second conclusion is particularly worrying as it shows that test results suggesting that the suspect does not have experiential knowledge of a crime are not considered exonerating evidence. Instead it shows that the reason for using the test in the first place is to provide evidence of guilt in order to convict a suspect.

I had hoped to discuss all this with Dr. Garad, but it seems that showing up on his doorstep was not to bring me any closer to a meeting with him. I did manage to get a brief interview with Dr. Daundkar, the Deputy Director, but he refused to answer most of my questions. When I asked him about the reliabilty of the tests and the chances of false positives he did say that it is not possible to get false positive readings with BEOS and that if a positive result suggesting that you had experiential knowledge of a crime was obtained, but that you were not the one responsible for the crime then perhaps the result was due to knowledge as an accessory to the crime. Chilling. Not to mention utterly baseless. A validation of study funded by TIFAC (the Technology Informtion Forecasting and Assessment Council) "Normative data for brain electrical activation profile" and conducted by the Directorate of Forensic Sciences in Gandhinagar apparently showed a rate of 95% accuracy, though I have yet to see this report. I had been told by Dr. Vaya that it was available on the TIFAC website, but it is not and requests to TIFAC and Dr. Vaya for a copy of it have so far been ignored.

I took a photo of the building on departure. Not quite the documentation I had hoped for.



I still had a few other meetings scheduled and possible leads whilst in Mumbai. I met with Dr Amar Jesani, one of the founders of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, and member of its editorial board. Vickram Crishna from Privacy International, also kindly met me and pointed out that another question about the use of these technologies is how the 'experts' are trained and how we can ensure that they are as objective and able as possible. I also met Nandkumar Saravade, a former Indian law enforcement officer, now working in cyber secerity. He informed me that when it comes to technology used in investigations or presented as evidence in trials in India there is "No formal standardisation process to test whether a technology works". He was also of the opinion that there was has not been much science coming into criminal investigations for a long time in India due to the lack of infrastructure and the amount of time it can take to get samples from crime scenes analysed by forensic science laboratories. He stated that labs can take months to analyse samples and so scientific methods of solving crimes can slow down the process, whilst techniques such as BEOS and narcoanalysis can be used as a shortcut by police to get lots of information and quickly.

Leaving Mumbai I had high hopes that I would achieve more in Bangalore. Bangalore is after all home to the inventor of the BEOS system, the National Institute for Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) where he worked for 20 years as a clinical psychologist, Axxonet, the company that markets his BEOS profiling system and the place where the technique was born. My hopes were to be dashed.

Dr. C. R. Mukundan, the inventor of BEOS had agreed to meet me in Bangalore back in August, so I was a little surprised that once in India (and after meeting Dr. Vaya) that I received a message from him asking for my credentials to support that I am a forensic psychologist or forensic neuroscientist, working in cognitive electrophsyiology/psychophysiology and stating that he would decide on meeting only once I had supplied this. Having been very clear about the project and my position this came from left field, but I emailed him to explain my background and interest and in response I received this

'I wish I had known these details early enough; I would not have asked you to meet me. There is no chance of you understanding either the electrophysiology or the cognitive neuroscience of BEOS with your back ground, which is quite obvious with the account and the questions that you have in mind.'

And also

'Anyway BEOS was never to be used as evidence in the Court of Law and to the best of knowledge it was never advocated so by me or presented in the courts. I know from publications of the two laboratories engaged in the use of this technique, that its findings have been cited as corroborative evidence when primary evidences were present and accepted so by the court. I understand the test findings have helped as leads in many cases for solving them. However, you must collect these pieces of information from the concerned forensic scientists or laboratories. I do not have any authentic information which I can share with you.

I am told by Axxonet that they will not be in a position to meet you or discuss with you BEOS.'

Interesting. BEOS never intended to be used in a Court of Law? The first line of Dr. Mukundan's patent application for BEOS reads 'The present invention provides a novel electronic investigative device for identification of truth from individuals who have committed an act of offence.' so the technology is meant to decide whether people were involved in crimes, but this information was not to be used by the courts? If the information is accurate and valid then surely it would be useful to the courts. If it is not then what use is it to the criminal investigation? Also why are Axxonet no longer able to meet me or discuss the technology? In an email from Dr. Mukundan in August I was told 'Anyway the engineering team [ie. Axxonet] in is Bangalore and you have to come here for meeting them.'

Further appeals to Dr. Mukundan resulted in his agreeing to meet me again 'I have no problem in meeting you and talking about the scientific aspects of BEOS.', however they now stated that he would not be in Bangalore until 24th November. Not the most helpful offer considering that he knew I was leaving Bangalore on the 19th. Oh well. Can't be helped and he has agreed to answer any scientific questions I have by email. It is probably not worth me being in Bangalore to meet him though if all I can get is email correspondence. That I could have done from London.

I decided to see if Axxonet were indeed unwilling to meet me. I tried calling them, but did not get a response, so decided to turn up and try and arrange a meeting. It took me a few hours to find their offices as addresses in India are not always what they seem. The address for NIMHANS for example is given as Hosur Road on their website - it is about 1.5km from that road - so the Axxonet address, also given as Hosur Road was not the easiest of places to find. But I did and here it is:

Similarly to the DFS, Mumbai this is about all I got from the visit. For every question I asked I was told that 'only Dr. Mukundan can answer that.' I marvel that they manage to get any work done there when he is out of town.

I also visited the State Forensic Laboratory here, and have been told to come back on Thursday. Fingers crossed that they will agree to speak with me.

I have also been to NIMHANS and got a bit more background on Dr. Mukundan and how the BEOS system came into being. More on that another time.

Technology is against me

It's been a hectic and tiring few days and I have decided that the machines are out to get me.

Everyone thought that Sarah Connor was delusional in Terminator I and II. I am not claiming to being chased by homicidal cyborgs from the future or predicting the attempted annihilation of the human race by Skynet. I only mention it as a word of caution about the reliance we place on computers (he says relying on the computer to write this blog and the internet to publish it, bemoaning the slow internet speed, but grateful to at least have some access after days without!)

Yesterday I was labelled a 'suspect' by the 'Suspect Detection System, SDS'. This is a portable piece of kit apparently used at border controls, in intelligence gathering and pre-employment screening. According to the SDS website it can, in a 5 minute test, 'identify terrorists, employees who has hostile intents, criminals, smugglers or collaborators and direct further interrogation'.

According to SDS I fall into one of these categories, a ruling I would like to protest! I am at least very grateful that I encountered this evil little finger-pointing machine as part of my tour of the Gujarat State Forensic Science Laboratories and not whilst crossing a border into Israel (one of the countries where it is apparently routinely used) where I would have likely been taken for further questioning and screening to find out more about my evil intentions.

The test consisted of a placing two fingers of my hand on some electrodes (presumably to detect galvanic skin response (or amount of sweat present) - one of the indicators of lying used in polygraphs) and answering a series of questions posed by the computer. All the questions it asked me were related to whether I had knowledge, or involvement in starting fires at the 'police station', 'the post office', 'the cinema', 'the mall' and (my favourite) 'the carvery emporium'. If the system had decided I was clean I would have had four rounds of tests and been sent on my way. As it was the system was a little suspicious of me after the questioning, so decided to automatically issue two more rounds of questions to be sure. After these it declared that it was now sure I was a suspect.

On coming back into the room my hosts commented that this wasn't supposed to happen, but most worryingly, instead of declaring a known error rate or other such excuse one said that 'I must be guilty of something'. It is this unquestioning belief that the machine must be right and that I must therefore be hiding something, when there was no reason to suspect my intentions other than that they had the computers word for it.

If the test has shown me not to be a suspect I would still have required far more evidence to convince me that this was a valid screening test. I would have first wanted to know what this was based on, how many 'innocent' and 'guilty' people the system had been tested on to calibrate it, how these 'innocent' and 'guilty' subjects were picked in the first place to be sure that they were worthy of their appointed status and many other things. As it is my experience of a 100% error rate, means that I will require a hell of a lot of evidence to convince me that this isn't a dangerous tool to be used to hassle and interrogate innocent people (even if it does also pick up the occasional terrorist).

Anyway, I didn't go to Gujarat to find out about Suspect Detection Systems. I went there primarily to check out the work they are doing on lie detection using their Brain Electrical Oscillations System (BEOS) which they claim detects experiential knowledge (or lack of knowledge) about details of a crime in a suspect to help provide evidence for their guilt (or innocence).

Over the last two days Dr. Vaya and her staff were very generous with their time in showing me the different techniques they use there and giving me a chance to experience them for myself. I experienced the probes used with BEOS to test a suspect in a real serial killing case a few years ago and also experienced the control test used in a study testing the ability of the system to distinguish between experiential and non-experiential knowledge.

I still have many more questions, which I hope to be able to bring up with the inventor of BEOS, Dr. Mukundan, in Bangalore but from what I have seen and been told so far there seems to be some reasonable evidence that this system can detect experiential knowledge. I want to see far more data and to understand how the system comes up with its 'verdict', as well as talking to some more skeptical scientists about what the technology is revealing before I am prepared to say what I think of the potential for BEOS to be used in real world lie-detection situations.