Big Brother is Listening To You?

A new patent has been awarded to Charles Humble of the National Institute for Truth Verification (NITV) that establishes numerical values to stress levels experienced when lying, even using recorded speech. Read the entire article here.

The NITV markets the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer (CVSA I and CVSA II) , which purports to be 96%-98% accurate at discerning truth from fiction. It has been marketed primarily to law enforcement and military intelligence agencies, thus far. It uses an algorithm to analyze and graph frequency modulations in unstructured speech. These graphs then display “positively” whether the person has lied in response to a question.
“Micro tremors are tiny frequency modulations in the human voice. When a test subject is lying, the automatic, or involuntary nervous system, causes an inaudible increase in the Micro tremor’s frequency. The CVSA® detects, measures, and displays changes in the voice frequency.” From the web site: (http://www.cvsa1.com/CVSA.htm)

I remember when my apparently prescient mother used vibrations to test my own veracity. She would have me put my index finger in a bowl of water and answer her questions. If the water vibrated, I was lying. She swore by it, but my independent observations were that it was about 50/50—and easily manipulated. Ahem.

Other interesting ways of teasing out the truth include one near and dear to my heart—the magic donkey. (Why? See my portrait on the first blog–Jan 2008.)

…circa 500 B.C. in India. A priest put lampblack on the tail of a donkey in a dark room and all suspects were to pull the magic donkey’s tail. They were told that when the one who was the thief pulled the magic donkey’s tail, he would speak and be heard throughout the temple. The person who did not pull the tail had clean hands and was pronounced the thief and punished.

As if all of this weren’t frightening enough to the average “little white liar”, a South Korean company claims to be able to identify real vs. fake emotion. An article in Cellular News, dated 09/26/2006 says “Nemesysco’s leading technology is also powering KTF’s new ‘Love Detector’ service, which tells the caller the “love level” of the person on the other end of the line every 10 seconds - so that subscribers can tell whether their loved ones share their feelings all through the conversation. Once the call is completed, the subscriber also receives a message ranking the overall level of affection, plus graphs that measure various attributes such as level of interest, attention, expectation, and embarrassment.”

Gives a whole new sensation of terror to the question “Does this dress make me look fat?”, doesn’t it? I wonder if they caught the irony in their company name…Nemesys aka Nemesis. I did!

Supposedly, there are no known countermeasures to the CVSA truth verification methodology. I’d be interested in knowing whether a skilled character actor could deliver lines convincingly enough to fool the system. I hope so. As much I want the truth to win out over lies, there are situations where a half truth, a kind fiction, is a far, far better response than the cold, clinical, absolute truth. And I am sure that the marketing groups, political organizations and pundits of all flavors would agree wholeheartedly, eh?

The power of speech is unmistakable, inescapable. Its power for good and harm is real. Have we reached a place where we are orchestrating a version of Brave New World in which the privacy of our own mind and our heartfelt intentions are lost? What do you think? Speak up. And remember…Big Brother is listening…

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