The polygraph is pseudoscience. Of course it can be beaten, it doesn't work to begin with.
Why the US still puts so much weight on them when they know they don't work is a mystery to me. Just get rid of the damn things and do your homework better.
Why the US still puts so much weight on them when they know they don't work is a mystery to me. Just get rid of the damn things and do your homework better.
The trouble comes from the fact that in order for all of this to work, you need to say the polygraph works. If you admit it's fake, or even if your procedures imply it's fake, it loses its magic. And so you naturally develop procedures that put a lot of stock in the polygraph. People start to believe in it. You build up a culture that relies on the magic of the polygraph. And then things like this happen.
1. there is a lot of stress around the fact that if you don't pass the poly, you don't have a clearance and so you don't have a career
2. you will "fail" at least one poly in each cycle so the stakes are raised in subsequent interviews RE: #1
I bet a lot of people also crack and admit to things they never did. You're essentially using the stress associated with the "magic" of the polygraph to coerce a confession.
Flash forward to three police statements and one polygraph later.
My experience with polygraph tests is they are a way for police to coerce a confession. I "failed" the polygraph test, and "should come clean now so they would go easy on me." The problem is, I didn't do it, I didn't know who did it, and I didn't want to know who did it. I was 17, and they had no leads. Just an absolute joke.
This is the standard way human discourse happens when talking about something for which there is no evidence of efficacy. You back up and try to rationalize some other reason for it's use, even when it makes no sense. Like in this case, using it to get people to admit things, can lead to false confessions or false convictions, especially when some of the people you threaten to use it on know it doesn't work! Do you think the agent who knows it doesn't work, and just uses it as a threat, is going to drop the case when you take the polygraph and fail? Nope!
It remind me very much of when people discuss some supplement that doesn't have evidence: "Oh well those studies didn't use enough/too much/wrong schedule" or acupuncture : "oh well even if it doesn't work the placebo effect is valuable"
you just can't get through to people
I'm not saying that makes for an actually effective system. I think it probably does more harm than good in that it leads to people thinking "well this guy passed the polygraph, so I can definitely trust him".
And of course, the calculus is totally different in criminal proceedings, where we absolutely should not be willing to make that recall-precision trade. I can at least understand why someone would think they're a helpful tool for counterintelligence screening, but any use in criminal investigations just strikes me as ludicrous.
I think the parent poster is 100% right. The whole conceit of an intelligence agency is deceit. The placebo effect is probably responsible for a big portion of their overall power, in a lot of different ways, and it makes sense they'd utilize it when hiring people. The only danger is using it in any other setting, or if the examiners or people who rely on it somehow start believing the placebo isn't actually a placebo.
Polygraphs are used for two investigative purposes:
1. To attain leads for investigation. This is basically tool-assisted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading. You take a person, add some probative questions, see what makes them nervous, and then dig in further on those topics. Nothing they say can be used as proof of anything, but it can sure guide you to go have a closer look in their bag/at their ID documents (TSA); or to ask the friend they mentioned to come in as a witness; or to try to get a warrant to search their vacation home. (The statements made under polygraph aren't admissible to get you the warrant, either, so you'd need to find some other probative evidence before doing that last one. Usually this is when police would start stalking someone to obtain a DNA sample from a gum wrapper.)
2. To eliminate potential suspects (or potential witnesses!) when your pool of People of Interest is huge (e.g. when a murder occurred in public in Times Square.) A polygraph is a very weak form of exculpatory evidence: it allows you to say that some people are just less suspicious than others, without letting stereotypes guide you in that judgement. If you have 400 PoI and you need to decide who to look into first, batching them through a five-minute polygraph session is an easy heuristic for ranking them (especially when combined with other ranking factors, e.g. a criminal-record check.) It's also pretty good at weeding out "witnesses" who didn't really see anything but just like attention.
Polygraph findings can't really be "wrong" in the #1 use-case. At worst, a polygraph-obtained lead will be zero-information noise, and you'll waste time investigating it. But a polygraph used this way will never cause the wrong person to be arrested/convicted.
Polygraphs can be wrong in the #2 use-case, but only in the sense that they might cause an investigation to be derailed for months/years because someone was eliminated early when they shouldn't have been. (This is why it's important to enforce the idea that it's weakly exculpatory: i.e. polygraph findings can be used to rank the "interest" of your Persons of Interest, but not to entirely eliminate them from the PoI pool.)
Where you see polygraphs really "go wrong" is not per se a failing of the polygraph itself at all, but rather it's the common failing of all police investigation: the wrong-headed thinking that you can convict someone by playing Guess Who, i.e. that if you eliminate all but one person, then that person has to be guilty (and then doing a bunch of motivated reasoning to build weak circumstantial evidence into a case against them.) Polygraphs are often used as one of the tools of this wrong-headed pursuit, allowing a biased investigator to justify a winnowing-down of a PoI pool to just the person or set of persons they personally believe are guilty.
But you don't fix that by taking the polygraph away. You fix that by firing those people.
This is a bug not a feature, if everyone strapped to it are stressed out there's nothing for even a trained interrogator to read. Everyone is going to look like they're lying.
But in terms of the base "object level" of the actual graphing of multiple biometrics, the theoretical idea is to construct a baseline within the confines of the test, not between you inside and outside of the test. They let you settle in, ask you questions they know the answer to, and compare measurements during known truthful responses to measurements during or near other responses. So they're (theoretically) accounting for the added stress in the baseline.
Obviously this object-level portion of detecting honesty vs. deceit via comparison with a baseline of physiological characteristics is pseudoscientific and extremely unreliable, but it's part of the overall mind game. And even though it's pseudoscientific, it's also not like it's palm reading or something. This sounds a bit ridiculous to say, but pseudoscience is a spectrum. (For example, astrology is more pseudoscientific than MBTI.) If someone has totally normal responses to every question but a bizarrely elevated response to one single seemingly harmless question which no one else has an unusual response to, then that's something to look into and prod. So the object level of it can offer some utility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
Sold to law enforcement in military around the world for a while.
Perhaps a similar logic is at work for the military, but one would think they'd be more concerned with actual efficacy of such a device so it seems more likely it was just collusion between purchasers and sellers to siphon tax money.
I'm reminded of the chick sexing story from a while back. About how no one can tell you what to look for to separate male from female chicks. But you can still learn how to do it through trial and error.
A device that basically tells your conscious mind to pause requires that you believe the device is working.
Even better would be training people to deliberately allow their subconscious to make certain decisions.
https://psmag.com/magazine/the-lucrative-art-of-chicken-sexi...
Yeah, subconscious decision making is probably the wrong term. "Instinctual" decision making?
Since you don't have much in terms of rights when crossing a border I wondered why they even bother with the pretext. I'm about as anti-drugs as you'll find and if those dogs are responding to my car then they'll respond to any car.
Coworker of mine was a sheriff deputy in Indiana and he confirmed this was a common practice.
To find other "bycatch" - cash to confiscate, for example, or the gun that might be forgotten after the last hunting ride, or a pack of medicine without a prescription.
In the end it's a game of probability - assume that out of 1000 cars 1% (10 cars) have something that's not an illegal drug, but still illegal. Now, police are usually banned from warrant-less searches of vehicles for a good reason, so assuming they would follow their own rules, they would possibly only search the one car of the dude with red eyes, and the other potential hits would be missed.
Now, with a "trained dog", they have the legal authority to conduct a warrant-less search - which in turn enables more insidious stuff such as racial profiling the drivers, or simply do a rough check of all cars.
"Drug dogs" are nothing more than an instrument of abuse.
Also, it’s the same with letting an officer into your dwelling: Without a warrant, probable cause, or permission, they cannot legally enter.
It might be psychological warfare.
I would wager that a surprisingly large number of people think that polygraphs detect lies. An even larger number are probably open to the possibility.
If you hook up somebody in that group to a polygraph, you probably rocket their stress levels through the ceiling, which might push them to crack. Behavior under stress is a fascinating thing.
Honestly, I had a snarky comment ready for a comment lower-down about the rationale for polygraphs, but I thought about it a bit, and can't, off the top of my head, come up with a faster, cheaper, and safer way to put that kind of stress on a person.
Useless against somebody trained -- like, say, an intelligence operative -- but it might not be as stupid as it appears on the surface.
And David Simon says it's a true story: https://newrepublic.com/article/38982/wire-ripped-real-life
I was once told that I was too calm for my poly and then asked why. My response was I didn't trust the science, or the fact that it was a couple week course. That didn't go over well, I ended up taking two more after that and they gave up.
I've seen the other-side of it though where good people failed their poly because they had too low a baseline like I did, caused by medications.
It's really a bunk science. I can get it as a scare tactic, but the fact the the Govt. still relies on it at a higher level is ridiculous.
Maybe that's true in Canada (don't know) but it doesn't matter because psychologists are no better at detecting lies than a typical person of similar education, intelligence and age.
Being pseudoscience or not is not quite the same question. People claim acupuncture works for them (California is now forcing insurance to pay for it), but it is clearly based on pseudoscience.
I'd put those at about 100%. So you will end up with nervous people who will increase the size of the haystack with zero chance of identifying the needles, which is a net negative.
I'd say not even remotely close to 100%. What is an "actual spy"? Those people are often regular employees with zero relevant training, that are simply recruited by a foreign intelligence agency via pressure, money, or manipulation, and are targeted based on their access to information. I'd say that a huge percentage of them won't be able to beat a lie detector.
Secondly, polygraph tests are used for a lot more than weeding out actual spies.
Fun fact, lie detectors are completely ineffective on compulsive liars.
In the context of this thread, Alexander Yuk Chung is definitely not what you are calling "a trained spy", but an asset that was recruited by Chinese intelligence almost 20 years after joining the CIA. Like I said - there is no reason to believe that most of those would be have any sort of training relevant to passing polygraph tests.
> A case office is not an handler, a field officer is, a case office is an analyst.
This is incorrect, as is evident by a basic google search. An analyst is -- surprise -- called an analyst.
> There is no such thing as a paramilitary officer, their are field officers
This is also completely incorrect. CIA SAC/SAD operatives are called paramilitary officers. The official CIA designation is Paramilitary Operations Officer.
You might have encountered different definitions in your work or private life, but they are not representative of how those terms are commonly used, both colloquially and in common professional contexts.
Beyond that - your replies add nothing to the discussion. The precise definitions and terms change from agency to agency, and from country to country, and are irrelevant to the original point being made.
You can't really use them for anything. A polygraph machine might have an application though: doorstop.
http://skepdic.com/coldread.html
It works as long as the "mark" is naive. As James Randi explained many times.
Which is why intelligence communities want to suppress information about polygraphs that would make people less naive.
Makes perfect sense.
And frankly I think the "pseudoscience" label for lie detectors is a stretch. It measures a genuine signal. The issue is the relation of this signal with lying. They do a lot of strategy in their question selection to try and make this relation hold. And to me (trained in actual science) it makes a decent degree of sense. If it fails to deliver due to there being way too many variables and noise, so be it. But it's not magic or something like psychics. There is legitimate research related to determining emotion with various types of sensors. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=review+wearables+emotio...
Even if everyone knows it's crap, it can persist because of institutional inertia and because no one has come up with anything better. That's what happened to us, so we shouldn't be surprised to see it elsewhere.
It's a psychological tactic, and is all about pressure. It serves as a potential deterrent and mind game that works on multiple levels. Consider it like a scarecrow in a field. Yeah, some of the smart crows will figure out it's just some clothes on a pole, but it still deters and confuses the rest. The only silly thing would be calling a scarecrow a security guard or a polygraph a lie detector test. It doesn't mean it's silly to put a scarecrow in your field.
Obviously it's 99.9% pseudoscience, and obviously it's beatable and unreliable, but I don't think that's the point. I'm sure they're very much aware of that, and still use it because they see the value of it as a psychological tactic. It's one of many lines of defense: if you pass that line of defense, it definitely doesn't at all imply you're not a spy, but if you don't pass it (in any way), the security requirements dictate that the safest option is for them to not hire you.
Absolutely no positive value should be attributed to a passing result. The idea is exclusively to attribute negative value to a failing result. And then, not value in terms of some actual empirical finding ("was this person really being deceitful?"), but just value in terms of whether or not to hire them to handle the most sensitive of secrets.
The only abomination is using it as a consequential determination of truth or lie, or innocence or guilt, like in a police investigation or trial. It should never be permitted in such a circumstance for any reason.
If you want to work in intelligence or national security, I think that's just one of the things you have to accept, along with being investigated and monitored and surveilled and all that. You know what you're getting into when you apply for such a job. I similarly wouldn't apply for any job that requires my employer to ask all my friends and family about my character and habits.
Because for a lot this lets you continue whatever spectre of activism they are pursuing. Remember the Justice Kavannaugh sage and his accusers taking polygraph tests?