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Feds Seek Prison For Man Who Taught How To Beat a Polygraph
George Maschke writes "In a case with serious First Amendment implications, McClatchy reports that federal prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence for Chad Dixon of Indiana, who committed the crime of teaching people how to pass or beat a lie detector test. Some of his students passed polygraphs and went on to be hired by federal agencies. A pleading filed by prosecutors all but admits that polygraph tests can be beaten. The feds have also raided and seized business records from Doug Williams, who has taught many more people how to pass or beat a polygraph over the past 30 years. Williams has not been criminally charged. I'm a co-founder of AntiPolygraph.org (we suggest using Tor to access the site) a non-profit, public interest website dedicated to exposing and ending waste, fraud, and abuse associated with the use of lie detectors. We offer a free e-book, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF) that explains how to pass a polygraph (whether or not one is telling the truth). We make this information available not to help liars beat the system, but to provide truthful people with a means of protecting themselves against the high risk of a false positive outcome. As McClatchy reported last week, I received suspicious e-mails earlier this year that seemed like an attempted entrapment. Rather than trying to criminalize teaching people how to pass a polygraph, isn't it time our government re-evaluated its reliance on the pseudoscience of polygraphy?"
The purpose of the First Amendment is to give people the freedom to say as many things as they want as long as nobody listens.
Or for helping people spot the patterns needed to pass an IQ test, &c. &c.
Psychology is a very young science that nevertheless has ended up managing to dominate way too much human activity. It is embarrassing that over two millennia after the birth of Western civilisation ,we have degenerated to a point where we still believe that simple indicators can determine whether someone will steal, lie, or be just wonderful.
If it is illegal to teach people to avoid a polygraph, what about teaching other skills that can evade police detection. Is teaching encryption illegal? Is discussing mobile phone tracking illegal? Costuming and disguise?
I think that it only makes sense to criminalize aiding a SPECIFIC crime, not providing tools that could be used to commit a crime
This is really surprising and depressing to me. I don't even see the crime. Since when is it generally illegal to lie, or to lie well? What's next - imprison people who teach martial arts? Or shooting? Or driving (think getaway cars)? Or better, people who teach writing (which can be used for teaching nearly anything)! Down with knowledge! Bring back trial by fire!
Stephan
"Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft." --Senator Sam Ervin
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
Is this the same guy that was on /. a few weeks ago because he taught undercover agents who *told* him they were planning to commit a crime with the information he gave them? A /. lawyer indicated that helping someone who told you they were going to commit a crime, is a crime. That makes sense to me. If I'm driving my taxi and some pleasant old lady gets in and asks to be driven to the bank so she can rob it, I'm going to get out of the car and call the police, not drive her to the bank. Does that count as a car analogy?
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
It is as if our government has thrown all logic by the wayside and has become a religion unto itself.
To me it seems he's being charged with heresy. The fist such charge in over 200 years.
No sig today...
What is the point?
Number 1 is fear. Stopping people form putting anti-polygraph information out on the street because of the risk of being detained or harassed by the government.
Number 2 is also fear. Polygraphs aren't a lie detector, they are a psychological operation against the person taking the test, if you know the test is bullshit it's magic fails to work as good.
Study the history on the FBI with polygraphs, they worship them.
As has been discussed earlier, a polygraph test is a tool in the same toolkit as the War o(n|f) Terror and the TSA security theatre. Its effectiveness comes from nothing but the intimidation factor - if the belief that your lies will be "scientifically" detected persists, you can get the victim to blurt out all his secrets by simply telling them that you "know" they're lying. They will feel like they've lost even the privacy of their own thoughts, and with that predicament it can seem pretty futile to resist giving in.
That psychological end state is pretty much what torturing during interrogations used to accomplish, until they realized that people will say anything they think their captors want to hear. With this technique that issue is solved, since the victim believes their captors will know whether he's telling the truth.
Obviously, this means that the actual effectiveness of lie detectors must be made, and kept, a widely-believed "fact", and people who express doubts (or provide proof) must be discredited. After all, they were trying to cheat the Establishment, so they must be evil, immoral, scheming criminals who just lie for personal gain.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
They appear to have thrown the first amendment out with the trash as well.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
That's what this really is.
Before the Internet, information was whatever was decided the they'd would give to the public to appease us. It was all carefully planned, controlled and manipulated to advance their agenda. Now, we're able to seek out and share information for ourselves at speeds never before possible.
The will of the people is quite demonstrably dissemination. It's not that they ever gave two shits about the will of the public, but they're no longer able to manipulate the flow of information to make it look like they do.
The scientific community needs to rally to his cause. Polygraphs are junk science and haven't been admissible to a court of law in many years. Teaching someone how to beat a Polygraph is no more morally wrong than teaching someone how to beat any other form of junk science. Science should be revered for what it is, and attempts to pass junk off should be demonized. What's next, jailing someone for teaching you how to fool an Astrologist?
I have no problem with the government conducting proper background checks (ala Snowden etc), but relying on junk science like the polygraph hasn't helped them on actual real spies like Ames etc..
I don't remember which program PRISM is, specifically, but Tor is very weak against an attacker that can watch all network traffic over time. Or even very much of the traffic. This is what the specialists call a "global passive attack", and it's very hard to beat.
Think of the whole Tor network as a single entity, ignoring what goes on inside. Imagine you can watch its inputs and outputs. If every time Jane Smith connects to Tor, an outgoing connection is made to Joe Jones, then it becomes pretty obvious who Jane talks to. The network could make it a little harder by mixing up the order of Jane's traffic with other people's traffic, but to get any real gain out of that the relays to wait so long and mix so much traffic that the network is unusable for Jane. Even then, the gain is basically only linear in the amount of delay the network adds.
It only gets worse if you can watch the traffic between individual Tor relays (which you can in reality). And it gets even worse if you can mess with the traffic in any way. Just by using the network yourself, for example, you can load up the path you think Jane is using and look at the results, or you can even play games to cause Jane to use a path you can observe.
You don't need to be completely global to do any of this stuff, especially because Jane chooses new paths from time to time. If she uses the network very much, she's eventually going to choose a path you can observe. And generally you only have to see the input and output points to do timing correlation; the middle isn't so important.
The only countermeasure to a lot of this is to send dummy traffic all the time. But for real resistance over the long term, the traffic has to never vary, which means that the amount of dummy data you need to send goes as the square of the number of possible real sources/destinations (times the maximum bandwidth of any connection). If you send less dummy data than that, you'll end up having to adjust what you send in response to the real traffic. If the enemy can watch you for long enough, they can use statistics to figure out which traffic is real. You might get away with doing something once, but not with doing it very many times.
AND if the attacker actually puts up her own Tor node, she can mostly detect dummy data.
having 'flunked' a lie detector test many years ago for a stupid shit job at radio shack, where i was 100% truthful, i know from my personal experience they are shit...
on top of that, a couple of guys who I KNOW were lying, scamming, stealing, doping, snorting, salesdroid types, PASSED their lie detector tests from the same operator, in the same timeframe, for the same shit radio shack job...
they went on to become managers...
Given what I know about modern American corporate management, I think it was working just fine.
... or because they don't think those targets have enough value to make it worth bringing what they can do with traffic analysis out in open court. They give some things to LE. That doesn't mean they give LE everything they have.
But it's true that Tor is the best available for a lot of applications. And I do personally doubt that the NSA can reliably deanonymize Tor for low volumes of non-repeating traffic. I wouldn't bet on it, though. And I wouldn't bet on it lasting if it's true today.
One sure fire way to fail a federal polygraph is to admit up front that you've researched polygraphy, you know that it has no scientific basis, and that it's vulnerable to simple countermeasures that you have read about and understood (but promise not to use them). When the "test" is done, you'll be accused of deception, attempted countermeasures, or both.
George W. Maschke
AntiPolygraph.org
Maybe you didn't flunk the lie detector, they just wanted to hire people that could lie convincingly.
"That's like going to jail for teaching people where to hit their head to pass a phrenology test..."
Not really. It would only be like that if phrenology were a tool Government used to coerce and intimidate people.
OP did not explain an important point that a lot of people here don't get: government knows that polygraphs don't work. But they myth that they DO work is used as a tool to coerce and intimidate people into confessing things they otherwise would not.
The problem here is that polygraphs many not WORK the way government agencies claim they do. But they are still useful TOOLS to get people to 'fess up. As long as the myth that they actually work is maintained.
This is just another government attempt to maintain that myth. But it looks like it's being done in a rather criminal fashion.
He's not going to jail for teaching people how to beat polygraph; he's going to jail for conspiring to defraud. There are any number of entirely legal actions you can take that become illegal when you use them to commit crimes. Want to do sleight of hand? Lovely. Want to use sleight of hand to defraud someone? A crime. And yes, teaching someone sleight of hand for the _specific purpose of defrauding people_ becomes conspiracy to commit fraud.
Not a religion at all. We need to start calling it what it is, a Police State.
This appears to be the direction that several of the world's biggest and/or most powerful countries are going. The UK is well along the road. The Russians and China never really left.
The moral differentiation we once had with places like North Korea is quickly being dissolved by a government that is now indistinguishable from the private military/intelligence contractors that do the spying on citizens.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, we are less retarded because I can't think of anything we are doing today that beats the stupidity level of executing people for witchcraft.
How about creating weapons that can remove all life from this planet? How about creating an economy so dependent on fossil fuels that we destroy our children's ability to live on Earth?
And for what it's worth, "we" are still on that level. Many people get executed for witchcraft each year around the world. Source.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
It can't be a very young science, since it isn't a science.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
IQ tests correlate very well with a variety of indicators of success in life
Of course they do. Colleges and businesses filter on IQ test performance. So in fact IQ test performance isn't merely correlative, but causative!
There is no way to "beat" an IQ test other than by having someone else take the test.
Or, you know, doing what you do with every other test: maintain a healthy body and clear mind; motivate yourself; learn what the test is going to look like; and practice.
The problem is that LEOs are always looking for "magic bullets" that will make it as easy as "its that guy" but the simple fact is none exist or are likely to ever be found. Look at how many did serious time over "bullet matching" when it turned out that...and the obviousness of this is just insane...that because large scale manufacturing is so standardized that thousands of bullets could have the exact same proportions of ingredients thus making the whole thing a bad joke.
Sadly even once everybody sees its total bullshit it'll probably take years, maybe decades to get rid of it because its gotten entrenched, just as we are seeing that tasers are anything BUT non lethal but since an entire industry has been built around the taser it'll be hell to get rid of, same here.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Your ad-hoc definition of science invented to exclude psychology fails due to the fact that you evidently know nothing about psychology, dictionaries, English majors and pretty much everything else you wrote about.
Indeed. The proper purpose of an IQ test is in a medical setting to assist people with particular learning needs.
It is impractical and inappropriate to use it as a cookie cutter admissions test for anything.