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The Truth About the Polygraph, According To the NSA
An anonymous reader writes "The NSA (the secretive intelligence agency that brought you wholesale warrantless wiretapping) has produced a public relations video about its polygraph screening program titled 'The Truth About the Polygraph.' But is the NSA telling the truth? AntiPolygraph.org provides a critique (video)."
Polygraphs aren't lie detectors. They are used to assess truthfulness. Much of the magic is not in the machinery itself but in subjecting the person under assessment to unfamiliar, semi-stressful conditions while asking probing questions. It's basically a game of manipulation for the polygrapher.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
It's easy to fake a polygraph test when the stakes are low. Its much more difficult when your job or freedom are on the line. Not impossible, but certainly much more difficult than what Penn and Teller did.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
So its just like a Scientology body thetan test machine?
It's the same situation down here, too. Police forces and various government offices use polygraphs while hiring. It makes sense, really. They want to make sure that you can lie convincingly. I'm not really sure the purpose of putting sociopaths in power, though.
Except it's actually so bad for their intended use that it's a hindrance to their job, not a help.
Let's say you have a test for a virus that is 99% accurate, but 1% of the time, it gives a false positive (says someone has the virus, but doesn't). Let's also say that there are 1000 people that might be infected, but nobody is sure. All of them are tested, and on average, 10 of them will show up as false positives. That number can probably be delt with, perhaps with a more expensive (but more accurate) test, or maybe the treatment is no big deal (so they can just get an injection and go on).
OTOH, let's say that 1 million people might be infected. Test all of them and there ends up being 10,000 false positives. Now the costs of the more accurate test start rising. Perhaps the treatment is more dangerous or expensive (rabies shots used to be pretty nasty, for example), so you really don't want to use it on people who aren't really sick.
So your accuracy rates need to be in line with how many people are going to be screened. If its use is highly targeted, then a test that's 90% accurate might be OK. If it's more of a general screening, then it needs to go into the five-9's kind of accuracy, perhaps more.
Polygraphs are nowhere near 90% accurate. It's maybe 70% accurate, and has both false positives and false negatives. For general job screening, like the NSA is using it for here, that's nowhere near good enough. It might be good enough for police investigations as a way of seeing if they're on the right track, but there's a reason it's not considered admissible court evidence in the US.
Of course, all this is only focusing on the basic statistical issues. There's a whole other set of arguments surrounding privacy, which matter even if a future technology is 99.999% accurate.
Not a typewriter
I would refuse to take a polygraph test under any circumstances. Therefore, my cooperation has no correlation with my guilt or innocence.
By the way, why would I refuse to take such a test? Simple. It cannot help you in any way. They can take the things you say in the test and use them against you in court, but no matter how flawlessly you pass the test, as a defendant you cannot call on any of that testimony in the court room. Only the prosecution can call testimony from police interviews. So basically, it can hurt you, but it legally cannot help you at all.
Not really. I'm neither guilty nor innocent, I'm not even connected to a crime and I will refuse to take a polygraph test if ever asked- for any reason.
It's the same when a cop pulls you over and asks to search the car or something. I always default to no you may not. They usually reply with something about something to hide and I reply that if they knew that, they wouldn't need my permission to nibshit through my stuff. I then ask if I'm free to go. Of course they will not find anything if they look, but I'm more worried about them finding something that wasn't there before they looked. If they are honest, then it won't be a problem. If they are not honest, then it's a door to escape the issues at their hand.
It might be a different story is there was some trust surrounding the officers enforcing the laws, but a fe bad apples spoiled that a long time ago and continue to keep it rancid today. The problem is that you cannot tell which are the good cops and which are the bad cops and it's best to just not take chances. Especially when they want to search you or pin something on you that you had nothing to do with.