I've long been under the impression that it was commonly understood that the polygraph was fallible. Has this changed?
By doing that, they also perpetuate the idea that it does work somewhat reliably and to beat it, you need special training.
As for the press, they only play along if it fits their narrative. During that hearing Fox News framed polygraphs as pseudoscience while CNN was promoting it as evidence. Both sides will just as easily do the opposite the next time depending on what their audience wants to hear.
Example in fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgrO_rAaiq0
LDs don't catch spies. They catch novices. Aldrich Ames beat the test repeatedly. But he would, since his job was counterespionage.
The real problem is when this hocus pocus enters the legal system and people get convicted based on examiner testimony or face the presumed guilt applied to anyone who refuses a polygraph.
But the polygraph can only have such utility so long as the general public believes that it can detect lies. We're at the point now that applicants for public jobs who face polygraph screening are often being specifically instructed not to research polygraphy.
Either way, it's inadmissible in court. It's a technique for aiding in interrogation (like torture would be, if it worked), not a forensic technique for producing evidence.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-kn...
Torture is morally abhorrent, but it's not necessarily ineffective.
"I don't know."
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/people-think-stormy-weather-...
Same goes for cell service: a lot of people tend to believe that, while your phone just talks to a cell tower, the cell tower is talking to a satellite (rather than to wired backhaul or a microwave link.) A satellite is depicted in all those diagrams of "how cellular networking works", so I don't blame them for this at all!
I think most people, if you asked them to describe how weather affects a cell tower, would describe them as working in basically the same way that Iridium handsets do: "clouds in the sky, signal goes bye." I.e., the signal would be "choppy" on the interval of milliseconds, with packet retransmissions covering it up up to some tolerance level, but failing entirely and instantaneously if the weather was bad enough.
I imagine they would think this, even though they know intuitively that cell signals are more robust than that in practice. They don't know why they know that, and they've also been taught something that conflicts with that knowledge, so depending on which order their jumble of thoughts comes to mind, it might go either way.
(Also, something I'm curious about, as a tangent: now that atomic clocks are getting cheaper, are cell towers using them to add fault-tolerance to their precise timekeeping requirements, in the way that e.g. undersea-cable head-end switches do?)
When there's bad weather in a data center, you sometimes just have to wait it out and run your jobs another day.
To your observation: Amazon had a major outage due to hurricane related flooding and a lightning strike back in the mid 2000s.
I am also dismayed, but not surprised.
Keep in mind that it was being used here by Ford, not by the FBI or Congress. I think the people who mattered are well aware they don't really work, but is also aware of their potent PR value (thanks to years of bad Hollywood science and cliches police procedurals).
Especially since they are required for some government jobs.