Full Details of My Attempted Entrapment For Teaching Polygraph Countermeasures

George Maschke writes "In May of this year, I was the target of an attempted entrapment, evidently in connection with material support for terrorism. Marisa Taylor of McClatchy reported briefly on this in August. I've now published a full public accounting, including the raw source of the e-mails received and the IP addresses involved. Comments from Slashdot readers more technically savvy than I are welcome."

Comments

Re:Don't teach, and certainly don't learn ...

[Lisias]

We would never have had PGP or encryption research outside government labs if everyone followed such rules.

The way I see it, no one would be using encryption nowadays if Obama managed to be president in the nineties.

Two things to remember about polygraphs:

[jcr]

1) there is no such thing as a "lie detector". Polygraphs are voodoo.

2) NEVER talk to the police.

HTH,

-jcr

Re:Two things to remember about polygraphs:

[ledow]

So it's actually the WORST device in the world to use then.

Because the people who you don't want to get into the job, the ones who know that it's a load of baloney and any idiot can "pass" the test, will. And the people who are innocent but have that "guilty fear" that comes with natural innocence will "fail".

I'm sorry, but in my country, I'd laugh at you if you asked me to take one. And I'd probably be able to get you into the papers tomorrow in the funny section too, just to show you up. It's just that hilarious a concept. But then, to my knowledge, outside of very, very, very restricted professions we don't have work-prescribed drug testing or any of the other shit either (I don't do drugs, never have, but just the CONCEPT of someone demanding I take a drug test to work somewhere? Fuck off. And I work in education). When did your boss get to control your life?

And for a job in a BANK? FFS. The US must be much more stupid than I suspected.

Re:Two things to remember about polygraphs:

[Jane Q. Public]

"Despite the fact that most of the world knows this, there's still one country that thinks such things can be admissible in court."

You don't mean the U.S., do you? Because to the best of my knowledge no jurisdiction in the U.S. allows polygraphs to be used as evidence against a defendant, without their consent. And they'd be stupid to consent.

However, a positive polygraph result can be used in your favor, *IF* the judge will allow it.

Re:Two things to remember about polygraphs:

[Jane Q. Public]

"Can't have those guys doing mind-numbingly boring jobs blowing off a little stress when they get home you know..."

Here's an interesting point, though: drug screening for pot will likely become an illegal practice in Washington and Colorado. You can't fire or "not hire" somebody for doing something perfectly legal that has nothing to do with the job, if it isn't happening on the job.

That is to say: hiring criteria has to be job-related. Appearance (clothing) can be job-related. Things you cay in public can (in some circumstances) be deemed job-related. But smoking a joint on your day off is in no way job-related. If it's also legal, then it's probably ILlegal for somebody to make it a hiring criterion (or grounds for firing).

Re:Why do they go through all the trouble?

[jcochran]

The answer to that question is quite simple. Some years back, I had to take a polygraph and frankly, it felt as if a "game" was being played where I didn't know the rules. There were some issues with my test so they rescheduled me for a followup. Since I didn't like the feeling that there was a game being played, I spent the time before the follow up researching polygraphy. Turns out that there's a lot of information on the subject and I also found out that there was a classified government study on the effectiveness of polygraphs. I didn't see the contents of that study, but [i]if[/i] that study reflected the information available in the public literature and [i]if[/i] I were to be a classification authority, I too would have classified the study. The reason is because the public literature boils down to the following.

Polygraphy as a tool for distinguishing truth from lies is totally worthless. However, as a tool for eliciting voluntary confessions from naive subjects, it's quite effective.

So as long as it's kept mysterious and secret, it's quite useful. But once the pool of naive subjects is gone (and they would be gone if the reality of polygraphy were widespread), then that tool becomes worthless.

Re:Ha ha ha

[garyebickford]

Fah. I was only 14 when I did a comparative analysis of communism and capitalism. Having some background in electronics theory and associated systems approach, I was able to demonstrate that communism is always doomed, because it is not a stable economic system. All stable systems must have both positive and negative feedback loops. (The screech when you put a microphone too close to a speaker is one example of a runaway system, that finally blows something if not corrected.) The classic aphorism of communism is "too each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities". This is essentially two uncoupled, undamped systems with unlimited response - some people have "unlimited needs" and work the system; other people will be worked to death.

I later discovered that in the real world, this lack of feedback in the economic system is dealt with in two ways - feedback through the political system (corruption of various sorts, political appointments, etc.), and through the black market - a hidden ad hoc capitalist mechanism, often with a political component (bribing the officials).

So regardless of capitalism, communism is a dead end, and makes no mathematical, much less economic, sense. There is a kind of 'communism of the rich' which is analogous to what techies do with open source, and what Star Trek assumed due to the Replicator technology. It's basically, "to each according to his needs, there's plenty to go around."

While capitalism has its issues, it is a dynamic complex adaptive system where the excesses can be curbed by _reasonable_ regulation. The complaints that Marx had back in the 1800s were in response to the excesses of what was basically a post-feudal era where companies were generally owned by one, or a small set, of people with zero requirement to take into account any public opinion, and could act as feudal barons. The rise of incorporation has moved capitalism increasingly toward an economically democratic model, where every company must take into account the political and economic environment.

In practice, no communist government has resulted in 'free people', except in the sense (as an old Soviet joke goes), "we are free - to work ourselves to death"