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FBI File of Lie Detector's Creator
George Maschke writes, "It appears that the FBI considered William Moulton Marston (1893-1947), who invented the lie detector and created the comic book character Wonder Woman under the pseudonym Charles Moulton, to be a 'phony' and a 'crackpot.' He is alleged to have misrepresented the result of a study he conducted for the Gillette razor company in 1938, for which he reportedly received some $30,000, a handsome sum in those days. Despite these misgivings, the FBI today uses Marston's creation (the polygraph, not the Lasso of Truth) to guide investigations as well as to screen applicants and employees. You can download Marston's FBI file here (736 KB PDF)."
That's ok with me, as I happen to consider the FBI to be a bunch of phonies and crackpots themselves.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Is there any chance that this could be used in court cases to challenge polygraph test results? After all, if the FBI believes that the machine's inventer was a lunatic, couldn't it be argued that perhaps his so-called "lie detector" is inaccurate and inadmissable as evidence?
That's pretty interesting that the basic blood pressure based lie detector that William Marston created formed the basis behind the Wonder Woman comics (e.g. he "proved" in his tests that women are more honest than men).
Strange that the FBI now relies so heavily on polygraph's when their initial assessment of the device was so negative, and most current research shows them to be relatively inaccurate.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Now with lie detection !!!
You mean to tell me that between a machine that does scribble scratch and a hot babe with rope, they couldn't see the obviously correct choice?
I guess the FBI has had problems long before anyone suspected...
What does this article have to do with our rights online?
Is the FBI going to jump out of my cable modem and polygraph me?
He wasn't so interested in lie detection, he just liked tying people up. A lie detector that didn't require strapping things on people wouldn't interest him. Look at what happened to so many women in the WW comics.
That's not an investigative file. That's just his correspondence with Hoover's office. There's not even anything from Hoover himself in there. Nor anything from Tolson. It's staff people in Hoover's office. Helen Gandy was Hoover's secretary.
According to the studies linked from the Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph) it seems that while the test has a high false positive rate, the false negative rate is lower than one would expect of random chance. Does anyone read it otherwise?
While I think it would be abhorrent to allow such a device to be used against a defendant in our criminal justice system, it the above is true it doesn't seem to me so unreasonable at all that it be used in the hiring of FBI and CIA agents and the like.
A better chance of keeping Russian and Chinese spies out of our security forces may very well outweigh turning away candidates incorrectly classified as deceitful.
Whereas in matters of criminal justice most seem to agree it is better that 10 guilty men should go free than that 1 innocent man should be condemned.
Also, I've always wondered whether this isn't really more of a "nervousness test" than anything else.
I thought it was pretty much a consensus among psychologists that lie detectors don't work all that well.
The polygraph is useless. It's not a "lie detector". At best, it's a "nervousness" detector. It's utterly useless against anyone who can lie without exhibiting any physiological symptoms - sociopaths, for instance.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Dave Chapelle: Look at Wonder Woman! Look at the weapons they give her! She has a golden lasso that makes you tell the truth. What's she gonna do with that?
Wonder Woman: "Pow! Gotcha!"
Guy: "Damn you got some big breasts. I wasn't gonna say anything before but this golden lasso just squeezed the truth right outta me!"
Hmmmmm, being that the linked article is to www.antipolygraph.org, there might, just maybe, be a chance that they're all over that very possibility... :-)
There's no way Wonder Woman's breasts could be that perky. It defies physics! And who but a crackpot would create an invisible aircraft that left the pilot perfectly visible?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Because no one who invented anything, let alone a tool that the FBI uses, could ever be dishonest. Not even one time.
I wonder if the FBI uses ReiserFS on any of their computers?
just look at Emacs.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
The FBI file actually says that the deal fell through, and that he stood to make 30k if he could make the study appear favorable to Gilette. Apparently he couldn't do this because he couldn't get the guy who was helping him with the study to help with the lie. Since it turned out that the study showed half preferred the gilette blade and half the generic. This doesn't prove that the lie detector doesn't work, but it might prove that gilette blades of that time period were no better than generic blades. Some FBI person wrote on the bottom of the page, "I always thought this fellow Marston was a phony, and this proves it". He obviously already didn't like the guy when he wrote this. So yes, he did try to lie about some test results to make some money off of gilette, but overall, the file seems like pretty good stuff. Included are letters and memos that talk about how the FBI was excited about the publication of Marston's book, and also Marston's letter to the President offering his services and expertise when the US joined WW2. Gotta love how /. submitters try to swing the story their way.
StickMan
www.rageagainst.net
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Think about it, which individuals thrive in the world of counter-intelligence and crime, a world of duplicity and backstabbing? Sociopaths. Individuals who can lie better than others and outlie the liars they have to go up against. Perhaps the longtime managers know this and keep the lie detectors there for a reason.
Without a true scientific study the false postive rate and the false negative rate measured are meaningless anyway.
A valid study would require at a minimum that the examiner and the interpreter of the polygraphic measurement be seperate and blind to each other with neither knowing the truthfulness of each statement made by the subject. A third blind party would score the results by comparing the known truth to the interpreters determination.
That's probably not sufficient, but it would be a start.
I doubt that such a study would be conducted however, because scientists already know the polygraph is bunk and the polygraph industry has everything to lose and nothing to gain by conducting such a study.
...there's a lot of interest in work being done to use fMRI for lie detection. There are specific areas of the brain that light up when you lie, even if you aren't conciously aware that it is a lie, from what I understand. However, nobody has the foggiest what the accuracy level is (it's too new of an approach), fMRI is vastly more expensive than a polygraph system, only those who did the one study are even remotely qualified to conduct such a test, the psychological aspect is completely unknown (as opposed to a polygraph test where it's all there is), switching to it would essentially admit that every polygraph test they've ever performed is 100% bogus, and it simply doesn't have nearly the same BDSM coolness to it as a chair with straps.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There's certainly a case for performing the test for hiring security related positions. Considering that the CIA (not sure about the FBI) uses the polygraph simply as one of their many 'weed out' tools, the test is certainly not going to contribute to hiring deceitful spies (although it likely turns away potentially good ones).
The illegitimacy of the test is most apparent in the private sector, where companies used it decades ago (up until 1988 when congress basically banned it) as part of the standard hiring practice. Some corporations still require this for top executives, although they try to keep the practice quiet and make sure execs sign waivers stating the test is voluntary and does not influence the hiring decision (yeah right).
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
"It appears that the FBI considered William Moulton Marston (1893-1947), who invented the lie detector and created the comic book character Wonder Woman under the pseudonym Charles Moulton, to be a 'phony' and a 'crackpot."
Am I the only one who got a mental image of Marston excitedly waving around a piece of yellow rope, trying to convince the FBI agents that it was the Lasso of Truth?
The polygraph doesn't pass any scientific validity tests. It is an interrogation device, that's all. See The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.
Of course, as I have not read any of the studies, they may well have tried this.
The unspoken implication being that anyone who is considered a crackpot, liar, or cheat by a government's law enforcement could not be a legitimate inventor? Or that their inventions are faulty? The device should be judged on its own merits.
workplace drug testing. Most drugs are either not detectable unless you did them a few hours before hand (or in the case of LSD, less than an hour) and the deadliest in sheer body count, alchohol, usually isn't tested for at all.
Worthless. The only function it seems to serve is to remind people who are the serfs and who are the masters.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Kpyf47RRPC4
Gotta love Family Guy
Hee Hee The drinking bird does all the work!
Again, not a black and white matter. Most would agree that it is better to incriminate one innocent man with a parking ticket, than to let ten guilty, unrepentant serial murderers go free.
Not meaning to troll or flamebait here, but it mildly irks me when people simplify this much.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Lie detectors are not a device that detects lies of the interrogated, its a device that enables the interrogator to lie. He tells you that he can detect when you are lying, and maybe you believe him so say thing you might normally censure. However he can also interpret your responses to meet his own agenda. If he has no legal basis to fire you, not hire you, or discredit you, he can use a lie detector as a way to implicate that you are a liar. Since the results of a polygraph are tantamount to biorhythms, there is no way to effectively dispute the results. If you get your own polygraph expert to interpret results to say that you werent lying, then the results are declared 'inconclusive' which still holds the implication. Even refusing to take a polygraph implicates you.
Remember Jerry, It isn't a lie if you believe it
Firstly, let me say, many people are afraid of polygraph machines, and rightly so. They represent a rather large invasion on someone's privacy. People always have something to hide, so I'm not surprised that such sites, like the one linked by the parent post, exist. I'm also not surprised that polygraphs are not popular here on /.
It's true, the polygraph is not a valid scientific procedure for detecting lies. That's because they don't detect the lies so much as the responses of people. And I would consider the procedure for detecting and analysing such responses scientifically valid. Sure it isn't 100% successful, but it is enough to be reasonably sure. Procedures don't have to be reliable in order to be valid. From what I understand of it, you can often tell if there is some doubt over the result anyway.
Certainly it's much more than just some simple interrogation device.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
In the 20th and 21st Centuries we should know better than to use lie detectors and pychos I mean psychics.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Christ, when are people going to quit using that stupid, wishful-thinking name for that pile of voodoo?
When lazy bureacrats in law enforcement convince themselves that they can just use a machine to save them the trouble of real detective work, we get results like Aldrich Ames getting nearly every CIA agent in Russia killed. We see cold-blooded killers able to convince the cops that they're clean, and any number of innocent people having their lives ruined because "the machine said so".
There's a REASON why polygraphs aren't admissibile in court, and the reason is that judges aren't quite as easily fooled as politicians (thank goodness for small favors.)
Marston was as much of a charlatan as L. Ron Hubbard. It disgusts me how much we taxpayers have paid, and continued to pay for a fucking E-meter.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There's nothing wrong with an interviewer watching you carefully to try and determine if you are telling the truth. This is the same kind of thing taken to another step. Remember with security clearance they are trying to make a value judgement. They are trying to determine if you are the kind of person that can be flipped to give away secret information. A lot of that just comes down to knowing if you have anything you want to hide. They don't care if you are gay, for example, they care if you are secretly gay and fear that being revealed because someone could use that on you.
I'd never support using a polygraph as evidence in a trial, and indeed in the US no person in a criminal case (defendant or witness) can be forced to take a polygraph. In many jurisdictions it wouldn't matter if they do as the results are inadmissible. However I don't think that means they are worthless for evaluating candidates for security clearance. Unlike a court security clearance is a thing where you want to take the attitude of "untrustworthy until proven trustworthy". You want to carefully vet the person through many different means. Numerous personal interviews would be one, interviews with family, friends, coworkers, etc would be another.
Basically the government wants to get a complete picture of someone and to see if there is anything that indicates they have ties to a foreign government, or that they could be flipped to that effect. After all, they are going to be entrusted with sensitive information. For example one friend I have who got a Top Secret clearance did so because he's an officer in the Army. This means he gets things like battle plans. Well you certainly wouldn't want him having access to that if he was likely to let the enemy know.
Do we believe this is really the FBI file? :)
The lie detector is a bunch of worthless nonsense. And as soon as you realize this, you will easily defeat it.
If you however believe it works accurately, and the result can result in severe punishment, it works great on you.
A sucessfull politician is a good example of how easy it is to defeat a lie detector. They can lie all day, and maybe even believe in the it themself.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
A better chance of keeping Russian and Chinese spies out of our security forces may very well outweigh turning away candidates incorrectly classified as deceitful.
The problem is that any professional spies are going to be good at lying. Perhaps if you know that the FBI uses this device as a standard employment screen, you might study and practice the simple techniques needed to decieve the device operator.
Of course, and honest and patriotic minded indivdual wouldn't think to trying to 'beat' the machine, since they dont have any reason to decieve the operator. Thus it is foolish to employ it for even the purpose of sniffing out spies.
I believe this very thing happned a few years back. A mole worked his way up in the CIA(?), and did quite a bit of damage, despite being sceened many times on a polygraph. Using this peice of crap psudo-science gadget as anything but a doorstop is a detriment to the country's security. Period.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
A better chance of keeping Russian and Chinese spies out of our security forces may very well outweigh turning away candidates incorrectly classified as deceitful.
If a spy agency wants to infiltrate a country, the least they will make sure of is to get folks who can beat any lie detector test. They aren't going to hire Joe sixpack to take over the pentagon you know! The polygraph test can be beaten, and considering the ambiguity of its results and with enough training (as a spy would presumably get if on a mission), it can be easily beaten.
...reading TFA is cheating! :)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Indeed, simple and effective countermeasures to the polygraph have long been readily available (and nowadays, with the Internet, are even more so). See for example AntiPolygraph.org's free e-book, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF). Polygraph procedure is explained in detail in Chapter 3, and methods for passing are discussed in Chapter 4.
George W. Maschke
AntiPolygraph.org
Man, are you paying 200 per fuck? Maybe it's time I leave Brasil and go back to Europe....
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
the FBI today uses Marston's creation (the polygraph, not the Lasso of Truth)
Well, then the FBI was stupid; they should have bought the Lasso of Truth from Marston.
Who wins? Polygraph vs chicken bones -- let the battle begin!
It appears to me that this could catch people who aren't trained intelligence agents, but were blackmailed or bribed into spying.
Also, I've always wondered whether this isn't really more of a "nervousness test" than anything else.
Of course it is. Remember that 60-70 years ago people were far less informed about "how things work" than we are today. We live in a gadget-infested world, and most of us at least have some rudimentary knowledge of how to swap parts out of our computers, as well as what happens between our computers, routers, modems, and colo points. Our grandparents by and large seldom grasped how their own radios worked and only knew heavy machinery, so yes, strapping someone into a device with dials and graph paper and telling him that it's a machine designed to ferret out the truth was going to make some sort of impression back then.
On the other hand, what happens when you strap someone who tells lies for a living (character actor, politician, marketeer) into any lie detector device? If they truly believe, or convince themselves to believe, that what they are saying is true even if it's not, will their statement register as truthful? What happens when someone who is insane, imbalanced, or incapable of discerning the concept of truth is examined with a polygraph?
The whole concept is full of holes, because no device can get into the individual human mind...
you are probably more right than you meant to.
The lie detector is crackpot science. Apparently the idea of forcing people to tell the truth rings some arch-american instinct, so the attempts to abolish it on scientific grounds have been unsuccsessful so far (as with other highly questionable practices, like the death penalty, or the unlimited "adult" criminal responsibility of children, that also appeal to brutish instincts of the american populace).
Virtually nobody outside of the US uses it any more.
For the past few years, even fingerprints (the real ones on the end of our fingertips) have been analyzed to be much less reliable than the absolute standard they are often assumed.
The FBI is in the business of convincing judges, not necessarily rigorous scientific proof. Science and facts are props used in the "justice theater" that is the law, quite different from actual justice.
--
make install -not war
Depends on the degree of lie being told. As part of my drama class in high school, I was hooked up to a polygraph. I was able to convince it (or the person writing the test) that I'd been born in and grew up in a country that I'd never been to before, and that I was a member of the royal family. I was not, however, able to convince it that I was sent by the martians to learn to understand human society in preparation for an invasion. I don't think I could even have kept a straight face with that one....
All that you need to fool a polygraph is to remain calm. It really is quack science, and can easily be bypassed by anybody who understands what it's actually measuring. And yes... a character actor can most certainly fool a lie detector convincingly.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Living with 2 chics, drawing comics, creates Wonderwoman, Lie Detector, some SelfHelp Theory.
Seems like a geek god of some sort.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
He created one of the hottest pieces of superheroine ass in history. What else is needed? Props are due, dogs.
I'd venture to say that a good number of FBI suspects would tell the truth more with a busty woman in an american flag bikini and tiara tying them up with cliched requests for information than when hooked to a lie detector.
IronChefMorimoto
"There's nothing wrong with an interviewer watching you carefully to try and determine if you are telling the truth."
The polygraph is just like a magician's prop, it's really the interviewer who is guessing (or just making up) the results. Often times he also has an agenda which is why suspects are more likely to "fail" when the police perform the test than when it's paid for by the suspect.
The danger is that people can be fooled into thinking that the polygraph is actually determining the results. If some random guy just proclaimed that he determined that a suspect was lying, who would believe he had that ability? But when he claims that this "scientific" device determined the truth, people are more likely to believe it.
See wikipedia. Sure he was a crackpot.
http://www.blifaloo.com/info/lies.php
You know, you could use some pointers on debate.
That is all.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Yep, its theater. As long as people believe the machine they are tied to can magically read their minds they will act accordingly. This puts stress on the subject. Standard interrogation techniques plus the polygraph leads to some surprisngly good results, if not very ethical all around. Supposedly, all lawyers advise to never take a polygraph because youre pretty much handing yourself over to a very stressful situation where you have little to no control and believe those in change know every little thing about you. If it didnt work so well with dumb criminals (and dumb juries) it would probably be illegal to use.
Funnily this account of an FBI investigation in 1938 (linked from the antipolygraph forum) says women are so good at lying that they fool polygraphs.
Miss Moog is the Junoesque sweetheart of Dr. Griebl, whom the Nazi spy chiefs tried to get to play the role of a Mata Hari in this Nazi spy ring. Couldn't that be right out of Wonder Woman?
(insert overused trollish and yet in this case applicable off-topic wiki link here)
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
You mean to tell me that between a machine that does scribble scratch and a hot babe with rope, they couldn't see the obviously correct choice?
The FBI director at the time liked to dress up in women's clothing. It's obvious why J. Edgar Hoover didn't go with the latter.
Have you ever had a dream so profound, so intense that it stuck with you for days after - maybe even weeks? Or how about reccuring dreams?
I can fly in my dreams. I fly all the time. It's great, they are my favorite dreams. If I'm hooked up to a lie detector and asked if I can fly like Superman - and I answer yes - I'll bet that the registered response will be truthful. Because it is a real experience for me, in my dreams. What do you think this wizbang device and professional gumshoe will make of that?
I know that the operator is supposed to set the "stage", or tone of the interview by manipulating your thoughts away from things like this, and to direct your thinking into a more favorable outcome for them. Simply to place him/them/law enforcement on the moral high ground. Regardless of the results (they mean squat), it's the interview afterwards where they put the pressure on. The paper strip is only a prop that they can point to if they don't think they're getting the answer they want. Pseudoscience at its finest. Smoke and mirrors snake oil.
BTW, what exactly is a 'colo point'?
I imagine they ask them questions like "is one plus one equal to two" or "is the sky blue" and if they can't answer "no" without triggering the lie detector, then they're not suitable.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If high false positives don't matter, use a two headed coin (heads means you're a liar). My test would have a false negative rate of zero.
Coin flipping is not 50% 'reliable' whatever that means. Suppose that 1 in 1000 people is a terr-ist. You haul in a bunch of people at random and subject them all to the coin-flip test. About 50% of them come up positive and about 50% negative. So you label the 50% (including 50% of all terr-ists) innocent, and you label 50% terr-ists. Of the ones you labeled terr-ists, only 1/1000 really are. That's 99.9% false positives. Hardly "50% reliable".
If you would like to investigate the proper standards for evaluating diagnostic tests, Google for "positive predictive value" and "negative predictive value"