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Comment by anonymousisme | Hacker News Reader

During my last polygraph (I've had a lot over the years), I was accused by the FBI examiner of being a terrorist. Although we are not supposed to discuss these things, my boss told me later that they had done the same thing to him. The accusations rose to the level of abuse and the examiner was yelling at me and threatening my livelihood and future for several hours. Apparently, once he was satisfied that I had done nothing wrong, we were done. He offered his handshake to me as I left the room. I shook his hand, but I felt soiled afterward.

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how accurate are polygraphs? they seem to be uniquely American (though i can't pretend i know that as a fact). I always thought they are really just worthless window-dressing on par with the tsa.I.e it's a lot of bluff and only a bit of substance. Can your experiences substantiate what i'm saying or am i being biased?

>how accurate are polygraphs?

Somewhere between zero and very depending on how good the person doing the interrogating is and how much the person being questioned knows about the techniques being used against them.

It's basically a good cop bad cop routine without the expense of the good cop and half as many human factors to screw it up.

>Somewhere between zero and very depending on how good the person doing the interrogating is and how much the person being questioned knows about the techniques being used against them

With your "very effective" conditions, I'd argue that an innocent person would quite often respond the same as a guilty person, making the process unreliable in a different way.

Hopefully to clear some things up about polygraphs in America:

1. You almost never go through them unless you're in the process of obtaining a security clearance (I'd be quite surprised if the UK didn't do something similar for their clearance process). In fact, I have never heard of any other instance where someone was required to have one, as they are generally not admissible evidence in courts.

2. It is my understanding that the accuracy of polygraphs is mostly down to the skill of the person reading the device and giving the test (hence why they aren't usable as evidence).

The UK doesn't its regarded as ineffectual if not an outright carny show fraud.

To point number 1: Depending on what sort of work the subject is doing with the clearance, he/she may never get a poly, or he/she may get one every time the clearance is updated (usually 5 years). If the subject happens to be living with a foreign national, and somebody writes a "letter of compelling need" for the subject (meaning the subject will retain the clearance in spite of the risk), then the subject will get a poly every year.

The poly is not limited to one session. The examiner will keep asking the subject to come back until they are satisfied with the results, or until the subject quits their job. Depending on the personality type of the subject, it can be extremely stressful, or just routine. Many engineers are "Type A" and that is the type most susceptible to stress.

Polygraphs are intimidation devices with no scientific merit. They don't work. By making people believe that they do work, sometimes interrogators are able to get people to admit things they otherwise wouldn't.

Polygraphs are not admissible as evidence in court and civilian employers are not allowed to administer them to employees. Regardless, the US Government still uses them for security clearance.

More information: https://antipolygraph.org/

your answers and the fact that no one is defending polygraphs indicates to me that i'm not far off the mark. In which case, why on earth is the FBI messing around with it? My conclusion, corroborated by this story is that they are not so professional as they would like you to think. This is compensated, probably with interest, by being very heavy handed. But surely that is no way to run a large agency.

The FBI is nowhere near as professional as people are led to believe. The lie detector test isn't even unique, we are not even a decade removed from evidence showing nearly all their forensic techniques were utter shams.

do you have some resources on this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Laboratory#21st_century_co...

The 2009 NAS report is particularly damming, but I can't find a free copy and I guess that's over a decade now, my mistake.

As much as I hate queues at the airport, I believe that TSA and Co. are effective. Sure, they cannot catch anyone but people demonstrating that in tests tend to be much more knowledgeable than would-be attackers. Just knowing that you could get caught is enough to put off many. There's a reason why the terrorist attacks we've seen in recent years (especially in Europe) have been largely focused on vehicles , trying to blow up a plane has become much more risky with TSA.

So I don't think it's mainly window-dressing. It's not perfect but enough to scare off most bad guys.

we all have to play along with this dumb charade that we know is inherently useless. It's insanity

I think you misunderstood my comment? I don't think it's useless. It's annoying and not perfect but airport security has improved safety of aviation by a lot in my opinion. The lack of any successful onboard attacks on aircrafts in the past decade (when other terror attacks happened frequently in Europe) are a good indicator for that.

ben gurion is widely acknowledged as being one of the most secure airports in the world. And they get by without all these stupid rules about shoes and liquids etc.

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