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a reminder of a good article on POLYGRAPH: DOE DECIDES TO SIMPLY REISSUE ITS OLDPOLICY.
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 18:36:50 -0400
------ Forwarded Message From: Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli <mo () mo md> Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 17:12:13 -0400 To: dave () farber net Subject: RE: [IP] POLYGRAPH: DOE DECIDES TO SIMPLY REISSUE ITS OLDPOLICY. Dear Dave, There was an article about this last year in Mother Jones. It mentions some of the ways that employees use to fool the polygraph test (and why it's the honest ones that get caught). http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2002/43/ma_148_01.html Bill Roche was so close to his dream job. An overachieving police officer in a Bay Area suburb, Roche had made detective while still in his 20s. Confident that his law-enforcement résumé was sufficiently impressive after seven years on the force, he applied to become a U.S. Secret Service agent in 1997. Throughout the yearlong selection process, his interviewers lauded him as an excellent candidate. But before he could earn his earpiece and Ray-Bans, there was one last detail to take care of: Roche had to submit to a lie detector test. No problem, he shrugged. After all, Roche had already passed three polygraphs over his police career. But not long after he arrived at the Secret Service's field office in San Francisco, things started to go awry. Roche was hooked up to a computer set to monitor his breathing and perspiration, and says he answered each question as truthfully as possible. But as the seven-hour session wore on, the polygrapher grew increasingly angry with Roche's responses, insisting that his physiological reactions "were not in the acceptable range." He accused the veteran cop of withholding information about his drug use, his criminal history, and his honesty on the job. The more strenuously Roche protested his innocence, the more confrontational the examiner became. "At one point, he's sticking his finger right in my face," recalls Roche, "and he's yelling stuff like 'Have you ever stolen a car? You better not have!'" His pulse racing and his sweat glands in overdrive due to the bullying, Roche didn't have a prayer. His polygraph results were labeled "deceptive," he says, and he was abruptly bounced from the applicant pool. If he ever wants to apply for another government job, he'll have to admit to failing the Secret Service's polygraph -- a black mark that will likely disqualify him from federal employment for life. "I was washed up at that point," he says, fighting back tears. "To lose your career over a polygraph -- my God, it's devastating." Puzzled as to why he failed, Roche began to investigate the history and validity of lie detector technology. He soon discovered an enormous community of people like himself who blame flawed polygraph results for derailing their careers -- as well as a host of reputable scientists, like John Fuerdy of the University of Toronto, who dismiss lie detectors as no more valuable than "the reading of entrails" by ancient Roman priests. Studies have long shown that polygraphs are remarkably unreliable, particularly for screening job applicants. As early as 1965, a congressional committee concluded that there was no evidence to support the polygraph's validity; a 1997 survey in the Journal of Applied Psychology put the test's accuracy rate at only 61 percent. Polygraph evidence is generally inadmissible in court because, as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his majority opinion in the 1998 case U.S. v. Scheffer, "there is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable." Indeed, the lie detector is so untrustworthy that Congress passed the Employee Polygraph Protection Act in 1988, making it illegal for private-sector employers to compel workers to take polygraph exams. Prior to the law's passage, according to Senate testimony, an estimated 400,000 workers suffered adverse consequences each year after they were wrongly flunked on polygraphs. [snip] http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2002/43/ma_148_01.html Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli e mo () mo md w www.mo.md -----Original Message----- From: owner-ip () v2 listbox com [mailto:owner-ip () v2 listbox com] On Behalf Of Dave Farber Sent: Friday, April 18, 2003 4:20 PM To: ip Subject: [IP] POLYGRAPH: DOE DECIDES TO SIMPLY REISSUE ITS OLDPOLICY. ------ Forwarded Message From: "What's New" <opa () aps org> Reply-To: opa () aps org Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 15:44:34 -0400 To: "What's New" <whatsnew () lists apsmsgs org> Subject: WHAT'S NEW Friday, 18 Apr 03 1. POLYGRAPH: DOE DECIDES TO SIMPLY REISSUE ITS OLD POLICY. The National Academy of Sciences completed its review of scientific evidence on the polygraph (WN 15 Dec 00). The NAS report, "The Polygraph and Lie Detection" (NAS Press, 2003), found polygraph tests to be unacceptable for DOE employee security screening because of the high rate of false positives and susceptibility to countermeasures. Congress instructed the Department of Energy to reevaluate its policies on the use of the polygraph in light of the NAS report. DOE carefully reevaluated its policies and reissued them without change, arguing that a high rate of false positives must mean the threshold for detecting lies is very low. Therefore, the test must also nab a lot of true positives. Since that's the goal, the DOE position seems to be that the polygraph tests are working fine and false positives are just unavoidable collateral damage. But there is still a countermeasures problem: anyone can be trained to fool the polygraph in just five minutes. WN therefore recommends replacing the polygraph with a coin toss. If a little collateral damage is not a problem, coins will catch fully half of all spies, a vast improvement over the polygraph, which has never caught even one. Moreover, coins are notoriously difficult to train, making them impervious to countermeasures. ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as mo () mo md To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- a reminder of a good article on POLYGRAPH: DOE DECIDES TO SIMPLY REISSUE ITS OLDPOLICY. Dave Farber (Apr 18)