Criminals are wicked and some even get away with the crime they have committed, but with this new upcoming technology those numbers will decrease rapidly. It will give detectives and the court systems another way to see if the suspect is or isn’t lying, instead of the polygraph test. This has been researched and tested in North Korea. On February 21st, 2010, the first information about it was released to the public. The new way to detect lies will be through infrared light to see the change in facial temperature. It has taken the old technology of how to determine someone is lying and has expanded so that the suspect does not need to be hooked up to a machine, instead the person will be seen through infrared light. It has also made the process faster.
This will retrieve the old polygraph machine, where the lie detector was connected to the suspect to see the change in his or her blood pressure, breath and sweat. The new lie detector can tell this by looking at the person through the infrared light to see how the colour changes when the sympathetic nervous system goes under sudden change. In this process there will be a rapid blood flow and an increase of temperature around the eyes and face. When someone isn’t telling a lie his or her face will stay its normal temperature colour, generally blue on the cheeks, green on the nose and chin and yellow on the forehead. Yet when the person is lying it’s nose, chin, forehead and right beside the nose will turn red.
This will obsolesce torture, which was used in all courts in the past, and is still used in some today. Hanging, beating, decapitating and many other tortures were used to make people tell the truth in the past. Now with the new lie detector, torture will not be needed in any forms to make people tell the truth. Instead the suspect will be questioned without being touched, rather they will be seen through infrared light.
If this technology is used or relied upon too much then it could be pushed to its outer limits. Let’s say a person who has PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) is questioned. They will automatically get nervous under questioning and the colour in their face could change, even if they are not guilty. Things like this or a problem in the technology could make the program have false results, therefore causing someone to go to jail or be fined when it is not needed. The technology is out there now, but there are still improvements to make it more accurate and tests on real criminals that need to be done. To make sure it is accurate the first tests could be done on criminals where they know the person is guilty from the evidence but he or she won’t admit it. A member in the prosecutor office in Korea has high hopes for this program saying, “We plan to investigate people suspected of fraud and so on, and the facial temperature detection system should have a higher degree of reliability.”
