Well, I wouldn't panic just yet. Cognitive neuroscientists have a way of overreaching when they estimate the implications of what they've discovered. A few points:
1. The test was done on mathematical operations. It's at least theoretically possible that mathematical operations are brain-region specific, but that other operations activate multiple complex brain regions.
2. Knowing what "region" of the brain a specific operation is done means very little--brain regions do all kinds of different things. As an example, you'll see amygdala activation during very different emotional states, AFAIK.
3. Even this crude test was only accurate 70 percent of the time. Hardly a basis for an ethical debate, in my view. For one thing, it's an interestingly high level of error for such a simple operation. What causes that level of error? Individual brain differences? If so, that pretty much makes this a useless tool for "decoding" the intentions of strangers, even if (a big if) it's applicable to things more complex than addition and subtraction in the first place.
My wife is a neuroscientist, so I pick up a few things here and there by osmosis. The current level of understanding of the brain was aptly described by V.S. Ramachandran as "it's as though we knew that the bladder contained urine, but knew nothing else about it."
Having an ethical debate about mind reading would be like having an ethical debate about human cloning immediately after discovering DNA. Let's have that debate in 50 years.
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