Big Brother Is Listening

It could change forever the relationships between husbands and wives, witnesses and juries, political leaders and voters, businessmen and customers. It could sharply reduce the output of talk all over by making everyone think twice before speaking. It could also bring closer the Orwellian society of 1984. The remarkable but ominous device that might cause these changes is the P.S.E. (for Psychological Stress Evaluator) which, its inventors believe, can use voice recordings to detect lies without the cooperation or even the presence of the speaker.

The new lie detector is a creation of Dektor Counterintelligence and Security, Inc. of Springfield, Va. It uses an ordinary tape recording of a voice on radio or TV or in any of the numerous settings where lies may be told: in a police station, perhaps, at a press conference, on the speaker's platform at a political meeting, or in the bedroom of a married--or unmarried couple. The tape is fed into a machine that measures muscular micro-tremors in the voice, faint quivers that come from the muscles in the voice box and cause slight changes in pitch. Changes are not detectable by ear, but they can be traced on a chart by a pen linked to the machine. It is the capacity to detect and reproduce these tremors--apparently produced by the freely undulating throat muscles of a relaxed speaker--that gives the P.S.E. its awesome powers. For the throat muscles of a person under stress are so tense that they produce practically no microtremors.

Government intelligence agencies have already bought four of the machines (at $3,200 each), allegedly for testing purposes only. Also, by agreement of prosecution and defense, the P.S.E. has been used in four Maryland court cases. In three, negative findings by the device led to dropping one murder and two bad-check charges; in the fourth case, a positive report ensured conviction in a shoplifting incident. In addition, Dektor reports that it has monitored the TV program To Tell the Truth and been 94.7% successful in finding out who the truth tellers really were.

P.S.E.'s reliability still has not been proved. No independent agency has double checked the company's TV experiment. Moreover, some lie detector experts caution that the weakness of the stress evaluator may lie in its dependence on a single measure of bodily function (the polygraph, or conventional lie detector, records several: pulse rate, blood pressure, respiration and sweat-gland activity). Besides, experts agree that although both the old and new devices can spot stress, neither can prove absolutely that the stress results from lying. The most serious objection to the P.S.E. is ethical. As the company itself suggests, the machine can be used covertly, thus invading the privacy to which, presumably, even liars are entitled.

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