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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?"
That's like going to jail for teaching people where to hit their head to pass a phrenology test...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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
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.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/polygraphs_and_the_national_labs_dangerous_ruse_undermines_national_securit/
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Polygraphs are one reason I left classified work for greener pastures. I believe they are nearly worthless, used just as much to harass as anything else.
In my last classified job, my employer hired a new security officer. After several months on the job she was sent for her polygraph. She returned the same day, the test unadministered because she had a heart problem. The problem was manageable, but it made it impossible for an "accurate" test. Despite this she remained in her job. With access to far more material than myself and others--sensitive material covering many programs--she was excused. Obviously the intelligence community doesn't believe in polygraphs either. I'm glad to be out of that world.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
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.
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.
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
Next time they will charge a swimming instructor for teaching women how to beat the "witch" test.
"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."
It' the Homeopathy of the Homeland Security.
I wish more people understood how deep this rabbit hole goes. They can see the entire net. If you use public infrastructure, they can see it.
Good-bye