It is nice to talk about 1/100,000 odds from this technique, but that isn't realistic. About 1% of the population has schizophrenia, about 1/3 of those do not respond to treatment. Schizophrenia is far from the only disorder striking people that renders people's understanding of reality suspect at best. Go on a fishing expedition and you'll get some..interesting..accusations backed up by your lie detector.

I already mentioned false memory syndrome. There are about 300 million people in the USA. If we estimate that about a million people "recovered" memories of abuse, that is about the same order of magnitude as untreatable schizophrenia. But this time you have normal people with no discernable disorder (other than exposure to bad therapists) who will sincerely say that what didn't happen, did. They'll say that they remember it - and they do! Furthermore there is nothing vague or wishy-washy about the memories. They are perfectly vivid.

Furthermore if you go through the traditional problems with eyewitness reports, most of them show up with this technique. Lying is only one of many serious problems with eyewitness reports. Most of the issues have to do with how memory is laid down, resulting in people being honestly convinced of an incorrect version of events.

This has already put an upper limit on the reliability of this technique which is orders of magnitude away from what you were hoping for.

And finally the original motivation for the 5'th amendment is not eliminated by tools like this. There are many laws on the books which lots of people are not in compliance with. Take something as minor as traffic tickets. "What was your drive yesterday, how many streets did you go above the speed limit on? What would those tickets total? Shall we retroactively ticket you for the day before yesterday as well?" When it comes to something like illegal drugs, well I'd wager that most of us either have violated those laws or could name someone else who has.

The ability to intimidate virtually anyone you want with selective enforcement of existing laws is more than bad enough to justify the existence of the fifth in my books. And I think that most here and in the general public would agree. In the end it really doesn't matter whether you are threatening someone with trumped up charges or with a whole series of real charges. Either way you're handing the government a potent threat that can be used to intimidate whoever they want.

If this technology works fairly well and becomes a substitute for our court system, as far as I'm concerned we'll have just taken a big step towards totalitarianism. Furthermore I have serious doubts about how well this technology can work.

Cheers,
Ben