Voice Stress Analysis and Witch Hunts

July 7th, 2005 at 19:22 Björn Hallberg

Just a quick note from Defense Tech. It seems the US military has put out a new sort of “lie detector” that allegedly is used at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq. Marketed by a private company with the ominous name “National Institute For Truth Verification.” Voice stress analysis is essentially letting computer algorithms process speech and look for “fibbing.”

According to the company, its military involvement began in September, 2003, when it was invited to Guantanamo Bay, to help with “acquiring and validating much needed information from the foreign detainees… Success was immediate, when less than a week after the training a terror suspect who had alluded his interrogators for months admitted to terrorist links after being administered a CVSA [computer voice stress analysis] examination.”

All this military interest comes a bit of a surprise. Because a 2002 study, funded by the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute, found “dismal results” for voice stress analysis, “both in the system’s ability to detect people actually engaged in deception and in its ability to exclude those not attempting to be deceptive,” according to the lead researcher, Washington University psychology Mitchell Sommers. “In our evaluation, voice-stress analysis detected some instances of deception, but its ability to do so was consistently less than chance — you could have gotten better results by flipping a coin.”

Another Defense Department study, from 2001, added, “no effect was seen in the CVSA data.” A third, from 1996, agreed with Sommers that the device’s results were “not significantly different from chance.”

The point here is obviously the kind of fusing of myth and reality that we see ever so often in the US. Anyone with basic understanding of psychology can vouch for the uselessness of traditional polygraphs and CVSA promises little more. One can’t help but get flashes of dark age witch hunts. Think about it. The US disregards laws or bends them, plays on popular fear, inventing demons where there are none, attacks innocent people and then makes them confess using less than regular methods. What is next, a “terrorist water test?”

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