Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to The Rest of Science. I'm Hannah Frey. And I'm Michael Stevens. Right now, I'm thinking an illegal thought.
Chapter 2: What are the implications of police using face ID to unlock phones?
Uh-oh. Or am I? I can't tell. You can't tell. I could be committing all kinds of crimes up here right now. But is it to think it to commit the crime? That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the power of thoughts, the responsibilities you have as a thinker, and whether you have any. Can you own a thought? Can you be punished for it even? Should you be?
I want to talk about this today because I read a few weeks ago like a startling fact, which is that the police are allowed to collect evidence from you by unlocking your phone if it has face ID or fingerprint recognition encrypting it. But however, if you lock up your phone with a passcode, they can't get into it legally.
What? So wait, hang on. I need to understand this. So if you've got Face ID on it, they can like hold the phone up and basically take the image of your face, as it were. That sort of belongs to them, you know, in some sense. They have an ability to take that from you. Likewise, your fingerprint, they can take your fingerprint from you.
But they can't take the thing that's in your mind, which is exactly that's what I thought was so exciting that we are treating legally what's in your mind with more priority and privilege than your body. So if the cops arrest you. And they tell you, hey, you got to tell me your passcode. You do.
They get into your phone with that passcode and they find text messages where you admit to this crime. This statement, I read it on the Internet, was that they cannot actually charge you or bring that as evidence in court.
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Chapter 3: Can thoughts be considered evidence in a court of law?
However, if they found the texts because they just pointed your phone at your face and it unlocked, that's allowed. As it turns out, that is correct. Kind of.
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Well, it's really close. I looked into it. And as it turns out, we don't really know yet. Different courts in the United States have ruled differently on this. The Oregon Supreme Court tried a case where this woman, last name Pittman, had been pulled over and police found a whole lot of meth in her car. And they also found a whole lot of little baggies. And they were like, she's selling meth.
We just want to unlock your phone to see. And they used her fingerprint there at the scene to unlock the phone. And they were able to read messages showing that she was definitely selling drugs to people. In court, her lawyers said, hey, this violates her Fifth Amendment right to not have to incriminate herself.
Because you should be able to say, no comment, you know, I take the Fifth Amendment, whatever.
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Chapter 4: How does the P300 signal relate to criminal justice?
Like what really would happen. is that someone who was guilty would just refuse to do it and they would settle and they would accept a punishment. If someone really said, I will walk across the hot coals because surely God will save me and everyone believed that he would, then an innocent person would decide to do it? And often there was a lot of leeway over how terrible the ordeal was.
And so it would kind of like be orchestrated such that, all right, none of us believe they did it if they're willing to go through with it. So we won't make it too hard and then we'll demonstrate to the public that they're innocent.
Oh, nice.
OK. So another problem with early justice was coerced confessions. This was a much more common practice of like, well, if we torture the person enough, they'll eventually tell us that they did it or they'll tell us the truth. As it turns out, no, coerced confessions tend to be very unreliable.
I mean, I would say that that remains a relatively modern problem there, Michael, I think. Coerced confessions.
I think that one hasn't really gone away. Well, I know the problem is like people still call confessed confessions like a war crime. They'll call it out. But whether or not it gets justice ever served is a different question. These rights to not be compelled to confess. incriminate yourself grew out of that historical context.
A lot of the original people who came up with the importance of not being forced or compelled to witness against yourself were also people motivated by freedom of expression. where they just didn't believe what they were supposed to believe according to the church or the political powers that be.
And they thought, I shouldn't be compelled to admit my beliefs because I believe them strongly and I don't think that thoughts should be criminalized.
Here's the thing, though, OK, because I think you could argue that in a lot of ways, if they take your blood or your hair samples or your saliva, you're sort of incriminating yourself there as well, though, right? Like, why didn't they come under the Fifth Amendment? That's the exception.
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Chapter 5: What historical practices influenced modern legal systems?
I'd never even been there before where the murder happened. And Lawrence Farwell went there. and tested the guy's brain. And sure enough, all the locations and information that only the murderer would have known didn't cause any recognition signal in the guy's brain. Here's the problem, though. They didn't bring it to court because all they did is they confronted the witness who had fingered him.
It was this guy, Hughes, who said, oh, yeah, Harrington did it. They came to the guy and they said, you know, we just did this brain scan and like he passed. He wasn't there that night. And the guy went, oh, well, I can I recant because I actually lied. Wow. So the witness recanted. Wow. 30 years later. Wow. And the guy was released.
That's incredible.
So it wasn't because of the P300 brain scan. Sure. But this was in Iowa, by the way. The Iowa courts said that they would consider that evidence admissible. However, it wasn't necessary for them to reverse his conviction.
But then in a lot of ways, this is going back to your trial by ordeal thing, right? Which is that the P300 test, if it's so good at detecting whether you recognize a piece of evidence, an individual, whatever it might be, only innocent people would ever want to go through that.
Yeah, right. Surely the neuroscience machine will vindicate me. Now, ever since that Iowa case, a lot of other courts have said that P300 scans are inadmissible. But if the defendant really wants to do it, then that's their right. I see. They can divulge whatever they can say, whatever they want, but they cannot be compelled to say or be scanned in the brain against their will.
But there isn't a constitutional amendment about this. It comes down to what different courts have decided in different contexts.
Did you see the paper 2023, I think it was, where admittedly with willing volunteers, there was a group of scientists who managed to reconstruct images that participants were looking at while they were in an fMRI scanner. I hope we'll be able to put a few of these pictures up on the screen. But it's phenomenal how close these images were.
So people were given certain images to look at and just purely based on the readout from the fMRI. Having been trained on, you know, tens of thousands of images in the past, these algorithms were able to reconstruct what they were looking at with really, really incredible accuracy.
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Chapter 6: Are coerced confessions still a problem in today’s justice system?
That you didn't know. But if you don't ask because you kind of suspect, then you've committed a crime, even though you don't know for sure. So now we're going to talk about an emerging huge question in neuroethics, which is. Okay, I'm a police officer. I can search someone's home if I get a warrant from a judge. What about a warrant for someone's brain?
That would certainly help us solve a lot of crimes, right? Yeah. If I could go, look, I can't compel you to say your password, but I can take this little scanner out and go and find your password. For example, I was reading about a school, like an elementary school in China where the children wear these headbands that vaguely measure brain activity.
It's definitely not recording exactly what they're thinking, but it can give us information about how focused they are. And I think these began as a biofeedback kind of thing where the kids can become more focused. They can get feedback on how focused their thoughts are. And it's very meditative. But then you can also start using it to catch the kids that aren't focused during class.
And it doesn't take much to imagine a world where we can collect more specific data from their brains and go, hey, you were thinking about cheating on this test. And so therefore, I'm going to treat you differently. And what do we do about that? We're not there yet. The technology hasn't yet forced us to bring this in front of a judge or a court. But I think we'll be there pretty soon.
I think we'll be there pretty soon. There's a company who I went to go and meet in Brooklyn where they are creating a set of headphones that around the padding of the earpiece is essentially the same technology, which is measuring the brainwaves as you can through the skull. And the idea was using a very similar technology to your Chinese school example.
They can tell essentially how concentrated you are. And the main hope for this is that it's a little bit like a Fitbit for your brain. So you want to concentrate more. It says you've concentrated for this many hours a day. It's like for your own information, your own personal information. And I tried it and it was pretty good, actually.
And it was good that there was a learning element to the algorithm, right? So it would tell that you could feed in your other data, like how well you'd slept and stuff and, you know, how much hydration you'd had and what kind of music made you concentrate more. I can see where that's going.
But I also think that while this technology might have a really beneficial side that people and consumers want to get, as soon as that data is out there... Right. It's like there's a very dodgy. The Chinese school thing could easily happen within a corporate environment where they want to ensure that people are focusing. And if they're not focusing, they get fired.
There is a very dark, slippery slope. Even before you get to let's reconstruct people's thoughts.
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