a reminder of a good article on POLYGRAPH: DOE DECIDES TO SIMPLY REISSUE ITS OLDPOLICY.

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ 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.

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