-Caveat Lector- Just posted 2 very interesting articles to my webpage http://leviathan.weblogs.com http://www.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=45546 Revolt in Nepal - report and pics. (english) by Anon. from NZ National 8:28pm Thu Jun 7 '01 (Modified on 2:57pm Fri Jun 8 '01) I received this from an email list. The email is (I think) written by a Kiwi who is in Nepal. There is apparently an uprising in process-- the Crown Prince was shot in the back (but supposedly shot himself). No one is buying it and the people are revolting. (article 1) FUCK the last two days have been some of the most amazing in my life. The news you are getting in NZ is probably CNN bullshit. The late King and family in Nepal have been a symbol for the people of being independent from imperalist rule for a start so thatis partly why the grief is so immense. The kings brother has just now been crowned king and the people are uprising. The kings brother is much hated by nepalese people and activists alike. He was cast out from Nepal for corruption and went to live in India. The campaign agaisnt coprruption is huge and the pruime minister is also a target. So when the whole family (actually 13 people) were massacred the govt blamed the crown prince saying he shot everyone and then himself. Noone believed this. Now the govt says it was an accident. Fuck sorry if this is crazy but I am typing hard out we are under threat from the army who are everywhrere. So essentially the kings brother arranged for his son to kill everyone so he could be king. The pepole are not accepting him and there are riots everywhere. Martial law has been impose and the conference is cancelled pretty much.A few of us are staying though and networking and supporting. The radical organisations that organised it have been outlawed under martial law and they fear arrest. A few of us have been caught up in demos on the street I think I have some good photos of the cops beating people with sticks but I was running as fast as I could at the time. 10 people have also been shot dead by the army.Ths is verty important to get out as they are refusing to let people report it. Also the only witness alive to the massacre has just been poisoned by the govt so there is no witness apart from the new kings son who people believe did it. The investigation commitee comprises of the ruling party only and is afarce. People are amazing here they have nothing but their bare hands and they are standing up to guns sticks knives I hope my photos are good. About 10 of us are keen to support the nepaese people and try and get the word back to our countries. We trekked into the peasant communites yesterday to share resources and food and they welcomed us like heros it was fucking incredible. But then we got trapped because the army said they would shoot us if we came back to our base. Crazy. We are reasonably safe becase we are forigners and we feel strongly about being part of making history. Nepal amy face civil war and the end of monarchy at this rate and it is a privilege beyond belief to be here. we are a tight knit group and hope to make some difference. I have to run again they are imposing curfew in half an hour and if you are outside you are get shot. --------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.newscientist.com/newsletter/features.jsp?id=ns229411 Nowhere to hide We can tell you if you're guilty or innocent. You can't fool the lie detector that knows what you are thinking. John McCrone investigates YOU have just been arrested on suspicion of murder. You're sweating it out in the interrogation room with a pair of beefy detectives. But your lips are sealed--you know your rights. Then with a smirk they slip a thing like a hairnet covered in dozens of tiny electrodes over your head and sit you down in front of a computer. Pictures of the crime scene begin to flash up on the screen interspersed with multiple-choice questions. Flash! A photo of a brick wall. Flash! "What lies behind this wall?" Flash! "Cement and blacktop?" Flash! "Sand and gravel?" Flash! "Weeds and grass?" You said nothing. You were even trying not to think. But sorry buddy, your brain just gave you away. It couldn't help but show an electrical start of recognition at the image matching the memory of hurdling a wall and wading through a backyard of weeds as you fled. An Orwellian fantasy? No, this technique was actually used in a recent test case at a County Court in Iowa. The brain reading technology was developed in university labs with CIA money. And it's not the only way that researchers are searching for new ways to probe a lying mind. The US Department of Defense is funding research into the use of multimillion dollar brain scanners. Other labs are looking at more low-tech methods, such as a simple reaction time test that can be an astonishingly reliable way of discovering "guilty knowledge" you might rather conceal. The field of lie detecting is long overdue for a shake-up. The polygraph is still hugely controversial, based as it is on emotional responses such as sweaty palms and changes in blood pressure or breathing patterns. Polygraph results can be offered as evidence for the defence in US courts, and the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that more than a million tests are performed each year. But many people believe the polygraph is unreliable--the Internet will tell you how to fool the machine by clenching your buttocks or biting your tongue. However, the test is still widely used by security forces in the US, Israel and Japan. In the US, the FBI and CIA screen potential employees, and the US government is even pushing through the polygraph for scientists working at national research labs. But what if you could get inside someone's head? Forget about easy-to-fake emotional responses. Just look for the differences in brain signals that reveal when someone is lying, or even probe directly for the information they're trying to conceal. Believe it or not, brain researchers can already do this with startling accuracy. It all began in the early 1990s when the CIA gave a little money to Emanuel Donchin, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and his student, Lawrence Farwell, to see what they could do with an EEG test. The EEG, or electroencephalograph, uses super-sensitive electrodes to measure fluctuations in electrical potential caused by patterns of brain activity. Donchin is an expert on a particular characteristic bump in the EEG trace called the P300, which happens about a third of a second after you notice something significant. It's like a mental click of recognition. Crucially, it's automatic and utterly predictable. How would the P300 expose a lie? There are two ways of using a polygraph. The standard way is to first ask a stressful, but general, question like "Have you ever driven while slightly over the limit?" This creates a baseline reading before you jump in with the serious questions such as "Have you had unauthorised contact with a foreign national?" The rationale is that only guilty people will react strongly to actual accusations. It is of course the ease with which the knowledgeable can pump up their arousal during the baseline readings, disguising any later lies, which has brought the polygraph into such disrepute. But there is an alternative, little-used form of testing, known as the "guilty knowledge test". Subjects are probed with pictures or phrases significant only to them. A suspected KGB agent might have been tested for an emotional reaction--such as a skip of the heart or ragged breathing--to KGB code words. A suspected criminal would be tested for knowledge of a particular crime. Donchin and Farwell realised that the guilty knowledge test dovetailed neatly with P300 recording. People with secret knowledge should show a P300 to otherwise innocent-looking pictures or phrases. They set up a lab test in which subjects had to play-act spy scenarios--fictitious missions like delivering the "owl file" to a contact in a blue coat in a particular street. Then they recorded brain responses to lists of words which included innocuous alternatives like the "fog file" and a contact in a red scarf. Analysis of P300 responses picked out nearly 90 per cent of the "spies". More importantly, there were no false positives where "guilty" brain waves betrayed innocent people. Although the researchers published their findings in 1991 in the journal Psychophysiology, nothing much more happened until this year when a hearing at Pottawattamie County Court in the backwoods of Iowa suddenly grabbed international headlines. Someone was trying to use P300 evidence to get a convicted murderer released. Terry Harrington was jailed for life in 1978 for shooting a security guard in the street. Harrington was just 17 at the time and claimed he'd been miles away at a pop concert. But he was convicted on the testimony of several witnesses, some allegedly his accomplices, and forensic evidence including gunpowder traces found on his jacket. In a bid to win the right to appeal, Harrington came to court to show that his brain did not react to any memories of the crime scene but responded strongly to phrases connected with events at the concert. The scientist running the EEG tests was Farwell, who'd set up shop in Iowa in the hope of turning the P300 research into a business. Farwell had quietly spent the 1990s working with the CIA and the FBI trying to prove his technology in the field. If Pottawattamie County Court could be persuaded to accept his methods in this test case, he expected to revolutionise the whole field of crime fighting. "In a criminal act, there may or may not be many kinds of peripheral evidence, but the brain is always there, planning, executing, and recording the crime," says Farwell. "The fundamental difference between a perpetrator and a falsely accused, innocent person is that the perpetrator, having committed the crime, has the details of the crime stored in his brain, and the innocent suspect does not." Farwell's dream is that EEG testing, which he has dubbed Brain Fingerprinting, will become a painless way of eliminating innocent people as well as fingering crooks in any investigation. He says if every police station had the right gear, suspects could volunteer to take the guilty knowledge test and perhaps clear their name. He claims his Brain Fingerprinting is foolproof if performed right. People can disrupt the recording by blinking or refusing to look at the words. But they cannot cheat to produce a false reading. Farwell says that he tried it out on a psychopathic serial killer, whose lack of emotions would have been a disaster for any polygraph test. "This guy never showed much of any kind of emotion. He certainly wasn't normal. But I got a big Brain Fingerprint response to facts about a murder," he says. "This method taps straight into the cognitive processes of the brain and doesn't rely on an emotional reaction." When it came to the Harrington case, there were immense difficulties because the murder happened more than 20 years ago, so Harrington's memories were hardly fresh. Farwell also had to find details related to the murder which a court could believe that Harrington had not learned during the original trial or in the many years since. Poring over old court transcripts and visiting the crime scene, Farwell felt that they could use the route the guard's killer must have taken as he ran away which involved jumping a ditch and crossing a weedy plot. When Farwell ran the tests, Harrington indeed showed no P300 to these details, and a clear response to details about the concert which was his alibi. A cut and dried case? Unfortunately for Farwell and Harrington, it does not seem so. In court, expert witnesses, including Farwell's old professor Donchin, said the procedure was still too much of an unknown art, even though the science was certainly sound. District attorney Rick Crowl scoffed at Farwell's claims that there was a deep ditch at the time or that weeds would have been that memorable in the rush to escape. Harrington's positive response to the alibi details would simply have come from rehearsing his story for so many years. Farwell himself came under attack. Fun was made of the fact that he taught Kung Fu and had said he was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School (Farwell admitted this consisted of some brief consultancy work). In March, the judge eventually refused Harrington leave to appeal. Farwell says he is saddened, but at least he presented his Brain Fingerprinting evidence before a judge, which sets a precedent for its use in future hearings. Are we going to see a Brain Fingerprinting technician in every police station? That's not likely to happen any time soon according to other people at the trial, including district attorney Crowl. The difficulty isn't the equipment, which is no more technically demanding than the polygraph. Instead, it has more to do with the culture of interrogation which prefers to see someone sweat. Cynics say the polygraph is used purely to intimidate suspects. The aim is to prove the machine cannot be fooled, making people think they have no hope of escape and so confess. Any approach that would extract answers from a subject's mind in a detached and clinical way wouldn't have the same effect. But this isn't slowing the researchers down. Studies of what characterises a lying brain are suddenly abundant. At the high-tech end of the market, the US Department of Defense is funding Stephen Kosslyn, a psychologist at Harvard University, to do magnetic resonance brain imaging studies. Kosslyn says his first results are not that encouraging. People's brain activity seems to be far from consistent when they are lying--but it is early days. At least half a dozen other US labs are working on EEG measures. Perhaps the most successful is Peter Rosenfeld from Northwestern University in Illinois. Whereas Farwell's technique depends on a guilty knowledge test that shows whether a person has a memory for a particular fact, Rosenfeld has recently discovered a detectable distortion in the P300 signal just because you need to concentrate when telling a lie. In Rosenfeld's experiment a subject's own year of birth slipped into a random series of four figure numbers was enough to produce a bump of recognition in the P300. Some volunteers were instructed to answer "no" when asked if they had seen it. When they lied there was a distinctive pattern in the way the strength of P300 signal was distributed across the scalp. Rosenfeld says he hopes EEG tests will both reveal guilty knowledge and whether people are trying to lie during an interrogation. And then taking everyone by surprise was the publication in February of a low-tech version of the guilty knowledge test which needs no scanner or electrodes, but just measures reaction times. Travis Seymour and Colleen Seifert from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, repeated exactly the same spy scenario as Donchin and Farwell, but they simply looked for hesitations in the subjects' answers. Seymour says they found that those who were telling the truth about a phrase being unfamiliar could hit the "no" button in half a second. But people telling a lie took more like a second. Even if they knew what was giving them away and given a chance to practise, they could not react any faster. "This seems a super-cheap and easy way of doing the guilty knowledge test," says Seymour. "All you need is an ordinary PC and a keyboard. No electrodes." However, he adds that it would require much more work to take such lab demonstrations further. Rosenfeld agrees, saying researchers have been surprised at what you can do in the lab but no one is doing the extra work to prove the techniques would be safe for the interrogation room. Even if the scientists do a good job on the test protocols, he feels that won't stop brain wave and reaction time technology being abused just like the polygraph. He says the FBI knows that the polygraph is unreliable. But they still value it as a prop because people can easily be frightened into confessing if they believe the machine is reading their every emotion. How much better a prop would a set of electrodes and a box of expensive electronics make? The scientific validity of brain measures would be almost beside the point. And yet there seems real potential in the recent EEG work. Civil rights activists take note. Tomorrow we may still enjoy the right to remain silent. But that might be pointless if the investigator can read your mind. More information at www.brainwavescience.com _________________________________________________________ Get your own FREE allofyourgodsaredead.com Email account at... http://www.evilemail.com http://allofyourgodsaredead.com - Someone had to tell you. _________________________________________________________ <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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