DSM & Botanical Psychology

Ian Hacking, Lost in the Forest London Review of Books (August 8 [sic], 2013) (on the DSM as a sad exemplar of botanical psychology).
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Why DNA Is Not an Infallible Indicator of Guilt or Innocence

Obasogie, High-Tech, High-Risk Forensics (Op-Ed), NYTimes (July 24, 2013):

SAN FRANCISCO — WHEN the police arrived last November at the ransacked mansion of the millionaire investor Raveesh Kumra, outside of San Jose, Calif., they found Mr. Kumra had been blindfolded, tied and gagged. The robbers took cash, rare coins and ultimately Mr. Kumra’s life; he died at the scene, suffocated by the packaging tape used to stifle his screams. A forensics team found DNA on his fingernails that belonged to an unknown person, presumably one of the assailants. The sample was put into a DNA database and turned up a “hit” — a local man by the name of Lukis Anderson.

Bingo. Mr. Anderson was arrested and charged with murder.

There was one small problem: the 26-year-old Mr. Anderson couldn’t have been the culprit. During the night in question, he was at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, suffering from severe intoxication.

...

In one famous case of crime scene contamination, German police searched for around 15 years for a serial killer they called the “Phantom of Heilbronn” — an unknown female linked by traces of DNA to six murders across Germany and Austria. In 2009, the police found their “suspect”: a worker at a factory that produced the cotton swabs police used in their investigations had been accidentally contaminating them with her own DNA.

Contamination is not the only way DNA forensics can lead to injustice. Consider the frequent claim that it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for two DNA profiles to match by coincidence. A 2005 audit of Arizona’s DNA database showed that, out of some 65,000 profiles, nearly 150 pairs matched at a level typically considered high enough to identify and prosecute suspects. Yet these profiles were clearly from different people.

There are also problems with the way DNA evidence is interpreted and presented to juries. In 2008, John Puckett — a California man in his 70s with a sexual assault record — was accused of a 1972 killing, after a trawl of the state database partially linked his DNA to crime scene evidence. As in the Anderson case, Mr. Puckett was identified and implicated primarily by this evidence. Jurors — told that there was only a one-in-1.1 million chance that this DNA match was pure coincidence — convicted him. He is now serving a life sentence.

But that one-in-1.1 million figure is misleading, according to two different expert committees, one convened by the F.B.I., the other by the National Research Council. It reflects the chance of a coincidental match in relation to the size of the general population (assuming that the suspect is the only one examined and is not related to the real culprit). Instead of the general population, we should be looking at only the number of profiles in the DNA database. Taking the size of the database into account in Mr. Puckett’s case (and, again, assuming the real culprit’s profile is not in the database) would have led to a dramatic change in the estimate, to one in three.

...

DNA forensics is an invaluable tool for law enforcement. But it is most useful when it corroborates other evidence pointing to a suspect, or when used to determine whether any two individual samples match, like in the exonerations pursued by the Innocence Project.

But when the government gets into the business of warehousing millions of DNA profiles to seek “cold hits” as the primary basis for prosecutions, much more oversight by and accountability to the public is warranted. For far too long, we have allowed the myth of DNA infallibility to chip away at our skepticism of government’s prosecutorial power, undoubtedly leading to untold injustices.

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N.B. The thesis of the above article cuts two ways: The discovery of non-matching DNA is also not always powerful evidence of innocence.

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Was Trayvon Martin an "Innocent Child"?

This conservative commentator - Shelby Steele - thinks not:

"Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch."
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New Jersey Decision on Cell Phone Location Tracking

State v. Thomas W. Earls (A-53-11) (068765) (July 18, 2013) (7-0):

In this appeal, we consider whether people have a constitutional right of privacy in cell-phone location information. Cell phones register or identify themselves with nearby cell towers every seven seconds. Cell providers collect data from those contacts, which allows carriers to locate cell phones on a real-time basis and to reconstruct a phone’s movement from recorded data. Those developments, in turn, raise questions about the right to privacy in the location of one’s cell phone.

   Historically, the State Constitution has offered greater protection to New Jersey residents than the Fourth Amendment. 3Under settled New Jersey law, individuals do not lose their right to privacy simply because they have to give information to a third-party provider, like a phone company or bank, to get service. See State v. Reid, 194 N.J. 386, 399 (2008). In addition, New Jersey case law continues to be guided by whether the government has violated an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

...

Because we find that cell-phone users have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell-phone location information, and that police must obtain a search warrant before accessing that information, we reverse the judgment of the Appellate Division. To determine whether the emergency aid doctrine or some other exception to the warrant requirement applies to the facts of this case, we remand the matter to the Appellate Division for further proceedings.

... We granted defendant’s petition for certification “limited to the issues of the validity of defendant’s arrest based on law enforcement’s use of information from defendant’s cell phone provider about the general location of the cell phone and the application of the plain view exception to the warrant requirement.” 209 N.J. 97 (2011). 
... Article I, Paragraph 7 of the New Jersey Constitution is nearly identical to the Fourth Amendment. Despite the similarity in language, the protections against unreasonable searches and seizures “are not always coterminous.” State v. Hunt, 91 N.J. 338, 344 (1982). ...
...

For the reasons discussed, we conclude that Article I, Paragraph 7 of the New Jersey Constitution protects an individual’s privacy interest in the location of his or her cell phone. Users are reasonably entitled to expect confidentiality in the ever-increasing level of detail that cell phones can reveal about their lives. Because of the nature of the intrusion, and the corresponding, legitimate privacy interest at stake, we hold today that police must obtain a warrant based on a showing of probable cause, or qualify for an exception to the warrant requirement, to obtain tracking information through the use of a cell phone.

...

Our ruling today is based solely on the State Constitution. We recognize that Jones and Smith [U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution], to the extent they apply,would not require a warrant in this case.

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Professor Jonathan Turley on the George Zimmerman Trial

In Why was Zimmerman overcharged? USA Today (July 14, 2013), Jonathan Turley writes:

"With the verdict, the Zimmerman case entered the realm of legal mythology -- a tale told by different groups in radically different ways for different meanings. Fax machines were activated with solicitations and sound bites long ago programmed for this moment. The legal standards long ago seemed to be lost to the social symbolism of the case.

"Criminal cases make for perfect and often dangerous vehicles for social expression. They allow longstanding social and racial issues to be personified in villains and victims. We simplify facts and characters -- discarding those facts that do not fit our narrative. We pile meanings on the outcome that soon make the actual murder secondary to the message. Zimmerman and Martin became proxies in our national debate over race. There was little patience or need for the niceties of rules of proof and adjudication."

Turley then recounts a variety of blunders by the prosecution but concludes:

"Ultimately, it was the case and not the prosecutors that were weak."

Turley then explains why he thinks the evidence did not support guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But he ends with this observation:

"Of course, little of this matters in the wake of a high-profile case. The case and its characters long ago took on the qualities of legend. People will make what they will of the murder trial of Zimmerman. However, this jury proved that the justice system remains a matter not of legend but law."

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Professor Randy Barnett on NSA Surveillance

Randy Barnett, The NSA's Surveillance Is Unconstitutional (Op.-Ed.), Wall Street Journal (July 11, 2013):

Due largely to unauthorized leaks, we now know that the National Security Agency has seized from private companies voluminous data on the phone and Internet usage of all U.S. citizens. We've also learned that the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved the constitutionality of these seizures in secret proceedings in which only the government appears, and in opinions kept secret even from the private companies from whom the data are seized.

If this weren't disturbing enough, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform, is compiling a massive database of citizens' personal information—including monthly credit-card, mortgage, car and other payments—ostensibly to protect consumers from abuses by financial institutions.

All of this dangerously violates the most fundamental principles of our republican form of government. The Fourth Amendment has two parts: First, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." Second, that "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

By banning unreasonable "seizures" of a person's "papers," the Fourth Amendment clearly protects what we today call "informational privacy." Rather than seizing the private papers of individual citizens, the NSA and CFPB programs instead seize the records of the private communications companies with which citizens do business under contractual "terms of service." These contracts do not authorize data-sharing with the government. Indeed, these private companies have insisted that they be compelled by statute and warrant to produce their records so as not to be accused of breaching their contracts and willingly betraying their customers' trust.

[snip, snip]

Still worse, the way these programs have been approved violates the Fifth Amendment, which stipulates that no one may be deprived of property "without due process of law." Secret judicial proceedings adjudicating the rights of private parties, without any ability to participate or even read the legal opinions of the judges, is the antithesis of the due process of law.

In a republican government based on popular sovereignty, the people are the principals or masters and those in government are merely their agents or servants. For the people to control their servants, however, they must know what their servants are doing.

[snip, snip]

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The Role of "Relevance" for the Scope of Government Surveillance

Federal Rule of Evidence 401 provides:

Evidence is relevant if:

(a) it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence; and

(b) the fact is of consequence in determining the action.

I pointed out in 1983 (I was not alone) that the test of whether evidence makes a fact in issue more or less probable to any degree is extremely liberal and that this liberal test, if taken literally, renders little if any evidence "irrelevant." I have also pointed out at various times (see, e.g., Sections 9 & 10, WIGMORE ON EVIDENCE (Tillers rev. 1983); again, I was certainly not alone in doing so) that elimination or dilution of the equivalent of a materiality requirement - the requirement that only evidence that bears on an issue that matters in the eyes of the substantive law - either eliminates or further dilutes the exclusionary force of the relevance requirement.
If the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, the FISA court opened the door to broad data collection by the federal government - almost unconstrained domestic data collection - by taking two steps:
adopting the equivalent of a literal interpretation Federal Evidence Rule 401's codification of the so-called logical relevance principle - the principle that evidence is relevant if it has any tendency to affect the probability of a fact in issue;
and
adopting (to boot) extremely broad characterizations of the factual questions (e.g., "terrorism") to which any sought-for evidence must be relevant.
See Valentino-DeVries & Gorman, Secret Court's Redefinition of 'Relevant' Empowered Vast NSA Data-Gathering (July 8, 2013):

Snippets:

"The National Security Agency's ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on a secret court ruling that redefined a single word: 'relevant.'

"This change—which specifically enabled the surveillance recently revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—was made by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a group of judges responsible for making decisions about government surveillance in national-security cases. In classified orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that "relevant" could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would likely be allowed, according to people familiar with the ruling.

...

"'Relevant' has long been a broad standard, but the way the court is interpreting it, to mean, in effect, "everything," is new, says Mark Eckenwiler, a senior counsel at Perkins Coie LLP who, until December, was the Justice Department's primary authority on federal criminal surveillance law.

...

"Under the Patriot Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigation can require businesses to hand over 'tangible things,' including 'records,' as long as the FBI shows it is reasonable to believe the things are 'relevant to an authorized investigation' into international terrorism or foreign intelligence activities.

"The history of the word 'relevant' is key to understanding that passage. The Supreme Court in 1991 said things are "relevant" if there is a 'reasonable possibility' that they will produce information related to the subject of the investigation. In criminal cases, courts previously have found that very large sets of information didn't meet the relevance standard because significant portions—innocent people's information—wouldn't be pertinent.

"But the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, FISC, has developed separate precedents, centered on the idea that investigations to prevent national-security threats are different from ordinary criminal cases. The court's rulings on such matters are classified and almost impossible to challenge because of the secret nature of the proceedings. According to the court, the special nature of national-security and terrorism-prevention cases means 'relevant' can have a broader meaning for those investigations, say people familiar with the rulings.

...

"Former Sen. Jon Kyl spoke on the floor of the Senate in favor of the 'relevance' standard. 'We all know the term "relevance." It is a term that every court uses,' he said in 2006. 'The relevance standard is exactly the standard employed for the issuance of discovery orders in civil litigation, grand jury subpoenas in a criminal investigation,' he said.

"But a few people cautioned that 'relevant' could be defined to the point of irrelevance. 'Relevance is a very broad standard that could arguably justify the collection of all kinds of information about law-abiding Americans,' former Sen. Russ Feingold said on the Senate floor in February 2006. He argued for stricter wording, and failed."

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Mass Surveillance of Internet Traffic & Activity: A Disaster Foretold by Eben Moglen

N.S.A.'s mass surveillance of internet traffic is a disaster effectively foretold by Eben Moglen. The same Eben Moglen prescribed a solution. The solution he prescribes is a reconfiguration of the net. The prescribed reconfiguration involves decentralization of the net, one in which, for example, each "user" will have a server and will use software apps that reside exclusively on each user's server.

It is important that you (the public at large, I mean) watch and listen to Eben Moglen's lecture.

N.B. My earlier (brief) blog post on Eben Moglen is here.

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Osaka Prosecutors Demand Punishment of Defense Lawyer for Releasing Videotape of Confession to Media

Media info collecting at stake? / Case raises questions over laws on evidence use, The Japan News (June 23, 2013):

A demand by Osaka [Japan] prosecutors that a lawyer be punished for providing a copy of a DVD of video records of questioning by investigators to NHK has sent shock waves through the legal profession and the media.
...

The trial was for a case involving inflicting injury resulting in death. One point of dispute was whether an investigation report by prosecutors was trustworthy. The report said the defendant confessed to strangling the victim.

The prosecutors office submitted the DVD as evidence. However, in July 2011, the Osaka District Court denied the credibility of the prosecutors’ report based on the defendant’s responses in the DVD, and ruled he was not guilty.

After the ruling was finalized, NHK received a copy of the DVD from Sadamoto and aired part of the video while concealing the man’s face in the “Kansai Netsu Shisen” news program on April 5.

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Is N.S.A. Domestic Surveillance Criminal as well as Illegal?

Jennifer Stisa Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society & Christopher Jon Sprigman, professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, The Criminal N.S.A. (Op-Ed), NYTimes (June 28, 2013):

... Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House — and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.

...

We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.

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So you have nothing to hide?

So you wouldn't mind if the local housing inspector listened to all of your telephone calls and read all of your email? So you wouldn't mind if the local health inspector listened to all of your telephone calls and read all of your email? So you wouldn't mind if the local tax assessor listened to all of your telephone calls and read all of your email? So you wouldn't mind if the Internal Revenue Service listened to all of your telephone calls and read all of your email? So you wouldn't mind if Senator Charles Schumer had access to all of your telephone calls and all of your email? So you wouldn't mind if Governor Andrew Cuomo had access to all of your telephone calls and all of your email? So you wouldn't mind if Senator Ted Cruz or Frank Ryan or John McCain had access to all of your telephone calls and all of your email? So you wouldn't mind if your friendly local police officer listened to all of your telephone calls and read all of your email? So you wouldn't mind if your child's school teacher could listen to all of your telephone calls and read all of your email? So you wouldn't mind if your children could listen to all of your telephone calls and read all of your email? So you wouldn't mind if your employer had access to all of your telephone calls and read all of your email? (Caution: This may already be happening to a large extent.) So you wouldn't mind if President Nixon's men had access to all of your telephone calls and all of your mail? So you wouldn't mind if your life were an open book and anyone who might wish to do you harm (or who might merely be inclined to do so) were able to listen to all of your telephone calls and read all of your email? &&& The dynamic evidence page

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NSA Collects Billions of Communications Every Day

Glenn Greenwald, Fisa court oversight: a look inside a secret and empty process, Obama and other NSA defenders insist there are robust limitations on surveillance but the documents show otherwise guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 June 2013 19.36 EDT:

What is vital to recognize is that the NSA is collecting and storing staggering sums of communications every day. Back in 2010, the Washington Post reported that "every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." Documents published by the Guardian last week detail that, in March 2013, the NSA collected three billions of pieces of intelligence just from US communications networks alone.

In sum, the NSA is vacuuming up enormous amounts of communications involving ordinary Americans and people around the world who are guilty of nothing. There are some legal constraints governing their power to examine the content of those communications, but there are no technical limits on the ability either of the agency or its analysts to do so. The fact that there is so little external oversight is what makes this sweeping, suspicion-less surveillance system so dangerous. It's also what makes the assurances from government officials and their media allies so dubious.

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Edward Snowden

I would not have done what Edward Snowden did. But I find it odd that almost all of our political leaders – Dianne Feinstein, Charles Schumer, Lindsey Graham, etc., etc. – condemn Edward Snowden without even considering the question of whether the government surveillance he revealed is legal or illegal. I wonder: Would they condemn him if they believed the government surveillance he revealed violates the Fourth Amendment?

Another point: Why do so many apparently intelligent people take the position that if the Executive Branch and Congress (or some part of Congress) "approve" of government surveillance (often by inaction, it is supposed), that such approval legitimates otherwise unconstitutional surveillance? Have they forgotten that it is black-letter law that ordinarily neither executive nor congressional approval transforms unconstitutional government action - state action that violates a Bill of Rights guarantee - into constitutional government action? The default rule is that neither the Executive Branch, nor Congress, nor the Executive Branch and Congress acting together, have the authority to approve government action that violates the Fourth Amendment.
Expedient legal thinking rules in the halls of our government.
Postscript: it is hard to say – it is impossible to say – whether there has been judicial review of the constitutionality of this or that type of covert surveillance by the NSA. That's because the opinions of the FISA court are secret!
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American War Policy in 2013 & Shortly Thereafter

This is a perceptive essay about why America should have a less active (a/k/a less belligerent) foreign military policy, but it is odd that Haass makes no mention of the moral considerations for reduced resort to wars and foreign military operations:

Richard N. Haass, America Can Take a Breather. And It Should. (Op-Ed.) NYTimes (June 22, 2013)

A snippet:

The United States is currently enjoying an unprecedented respite in the foreign policy arena — a temporary relief from the normal rigors of history that allows us to take stock at home and abroad.

It may seem outlandish to claim that we’re in the midst of a lull, given that America faces a civil war in Syria, an Iran that seems to be seeking nuclear weapons, an irresponsible North Korea that already possesses them, continuing threats from terrorists, a rising China and rapid climate change.

Yet the United States enjoys a respite all the same. For the three and a half centuries of the modern international era, great powers have almost always confronted rivals determined to defeat them and replace the global order they worked to bring about. In the last century, this process unfolded three times. The results were violent, costly and dangerous, and included two world wars and a cold war.

Today, there are threats, but they tend to be regional, years away or limited in scale. None rises to the level of being global, immediate and existential. The United States faces no great-power rival. And this is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

The biggest strategic question facing America is how to extend this respite rather than squander it. This will require restraining foreign involvement and restoring domestic strength. We can no longer seek to remake countries in the Middle East and South Asia, as was tried at great cost and with little success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Instead, we must revive the American economy, something that will not only improve the living standards of our citizens but also generate the resources to discourage would-be competitors from choosing the path of confrontation and to deal with them if they opt for confrontation all the same.

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Blog Visitors from Latvia

Latvia now has a population of ca. 2.2 million. In the last week this blog had the following number of visitors from the following countries:

 

 

Hmm....

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(Big) Exceptions to Restrictions on Domestic Surveillance

Scott Shane, Documents Detail [Exceptions to]  Restrictions on N.S.A. Surveillance, NYTimes (June 20, 2013):

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” Mr. Obama said when the news broke.

But as experts on American intelligence knew, that was not the whole story. It left out what N.S.A. officials have long called “incidental” collection of Americans’ calls and e-mails — the routine capture of Americans’ communications in the process of targeting foreign communications.

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The Reliability or Unreliability of Our Always-Constructed Memories

It is generally believed -- and I believe -- that the mind does not work like a tape recorder and that memories are "constructed."
Does it follow that all memories -- which are constructed, or assembled, by the mind -- are unreliable?
No: that proposition does not logically follow. It is possible that some constructed memories -- i.e., some mental or neural inferential processes -- are reliable.

• Anecdote: I am quite sure I correctly remember what my sister looks like. The same holds true for my memory of upstairs neighbors, my daughter, etc.

If our memories were systematically "unreliable," most people would get lost on their way to work, on their way home, etc. We generally remember many things correctly.
Of course, some memories -- e.g., very old ones, our memories of people seen only once, etc. -- are very probably substantially less trustworthy than many other memories.

• Even here, caution must be exercised. For example, unconscious recall may (sometimes) be more reliable than conscious recall.

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Conscious Memories Are Constructed

Christopher D. Frith, "Disorders of Conscious and Unconscious Mental Processes," in Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessel, Steven A. Siegelbaum & A. J. Hudspeth, eds., Principles of Neural Science 1373, 1383 (5^th ed., 2013):

[M]emory is a creative process. Our conscious memories are constructed from both conscious recall and unconscious knowledge.

Therefore?

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Vision and Inference

Charles D. Gilbert, "The Constructive Nature of Visual Processing," in Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessel, Steven A. Siegelbaum & A. J. Hudspeth, eds., Principles of Neural Science 556, 556-557 (5^th ed., 2013):

Vision is often incorrectly compared to the operations of a camera. Unlike a camera, however, the visual system is able to create a three-dimensional representation of the world from the two-dimensional images on the retina. In addition, an object is perceived as the same under strikingly different visual conditions.

A camera reproduces point-by-point the light intensities in one plane of the visual field. The brain, in contrast, parses scenes into distinct components, separating foreground from background, to determine which light stimuli belong to one object and which to others. In doing so it uses previously learned rules about the structure of the world. In analyzing the incoming scream of visual signals the brain guesses at the scene presented to the eyes based on past experience.

This constructive nature of visual perception has only recently been fully appreciated. Earlier thinking about sensory perception was greatly influenced by the British empiricism philosophers, notably John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley, who thought of perception as an atomistic process in which simple sensory elements, such as color, shape, and brightness, were assembled in an additive way, component by component. The modern view that perception is an active and creative process that involves more than just the information provided by the retina has its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kent and was developed in detail in the early 20th century by the German psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Koehler, who founded the school of Gestalt psychology.

The German term Gestalt means configuration or form. The central idea of the Gestalt psychologists is that what we see about a stimulus--the perceptual interpretation we make of any visual object--depends not just on the properties of the stimulus but also on its context, on other features in the visual field. The Gestalt psychologists argued that the visual system processes sensory information about the shape, color, distance, and movement of objects according to computational rules inherent in the system. The brain has a way of looking at the world, a set of expectations that the rides in part from experience and in part from built-in neural wiring.

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The Scientific Origins of the Polygraph Test

Sally Satel & Scott O. Lillienfeld, BRAINWASHED: THE SEDUCTIVE APPEAL OF MINDLESS NEUROSCIENCE 78 (Basic Books, 2013) (footnotes omitted):

In the early 1900s, William Moulton Marston, an undergraduate at Harvard, invented the precursor of the modern polygraph. The device recorded breathing rate by means of a pneumatic rubber hose wrapped around the subject's chest and a blood-pressure cuff encircling the upper arm. In a charming footnote to polygraph history, Marston later became a comic-book writer and, under the pen name of Charles Moulton, created Wonder Woman, an action heroine who wore a a "Golden Lasso of Truth" around her waist. When villains were lassoed with her magical version of the pneumatic hose, they were forced to tell the truth.

This history (or "prehistory") makes me Wonder how the polygraph test ever escaped universal ridicule.


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