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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."
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I have no special expertise, but this seems a little ham fisted to be agents of the state, don't you think? Seems more likely they'd go with tried and true techniques of human intelligence. I'd beware of any attractive women suddenly taking an interest, or people who appear to have money who want to support the cause, etc. And if you don't already, get a good lawyer and vet everything through him/her. Also, if the authorities do come knocking, make sure you know how to handle the situation so you don't incriminate yourself or make the situation worse (talk to your lawyer, but it amounts to keep your cool and your mouth shut).
1) there is no such thing as a "lie detector". Polygraphs are voodoo.
2) NEVER talk to the police.
HTH,
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
either Polygraphs are bullshit or these charges should be dropped...
by setting up the sting and charging the guys for what they did, they government is admitting that it is possible to fool the polygraph
if it is possible to fool the polygraph it leaves no doubt that the polygraph is not scientific or useful
by proving these men guilty, the prosecution simultaneously proves that the lie detector is a farce and negates the logical need for the entire charade in the first place
a good lawyer could get a not guilty verdict IMHO
Thank you Dave Raggett
are turning into a police state, or at least into the velvet-gloved version of it: a surveillance state. So are certain western European states. What are we going to do about it ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Some fraudster in the UK went down recently for selling dousing rods as bomb detectors to the Iraqis. There were quite a few people credulous twits in the media who went after skeptics who were against this transparent ripoff, but it took a good ten years for enough momentum to build, to get this investigated, and for the criminal who ran this, to get charged with anything.
As far as I can tell, polygraphy is just as full of woo as phrenology, and it was invented roughly around the same time. I do wonder how long it'll take for the stupidity to be debunked sufficiently hard, for the public outcry to overcome the True Believers and have this snake oil abolished?
http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/138896/liar-liar.jhtml
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.
You would think that General Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, would have something better to do than troll a Slashdot comments section. Aren't there illegal wiretaps to order or surveillance records to be shredded?
You are welcome on my lawn.
What makes you think you're in any way relevant just because you amass money?
If you're looking for someone with a misplaced feeling of entitlement, look for a mirror.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
An Attempted Entrapment
Posted by George Maschke on 3 November 2013, 1:34 pm
In May 2013, I was the target of an attempted entrapment.1 Whether it was a federal agent attempting to entrap me on a contrived material support for terrorism charge or simply an individual’s attempt to embarrass me and discredit AntiPolygraph.org remains unclear. In this post, I will provide a full public accounting of the attempt, including the raw source of communications received and the IP addresses involved.
As background, it should be borne in mind that a federal criminal investigation into providers of information on polygraph countermeasures, dubbed “Operation Lie Busters,” has been underway since at least November 2011, when an undercover U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent, posing as a job applicant, contacted Chad Dixon of Marion, Indiana for help on passing the polygraph. In December, 2012, Dixon pleaded guilty to federal charges of wire fraud and obstruction of an agency proceeding, for which he has been sentenced to 8 months in federal prison.
Doug Williams of Norman, Oklahoma, a former police polygrapher who has been teaching people how to pass polygraph examinations for some three decades and operates the website Polygraph.com, was also the target of a sting operation and in February 2013, U.S. Customs and Border Protection executed search warrants on his home and office, seizing business records. He has been threatened with prosecution but to date has not been charged with any crime.
With this in mind, I received a most curious unsolicited communication on Saturday, 18 May 2013 from <mohammadali201333@yahoo.com>. The message was sent to my AntiPolygraph.org e-mail address <lt;maschke@antipolygraph.org> and was titled “help help help please” (155 kb EML file.) The message body was blank, but there was a PDF attachment with a short message written in Persian, the language of Iran:
I know Persian, a fact of which the writer was evidently cognizant. Here is a translation:
Greetings and respect to you, Mr. George Maschke,
I am Mohammad Aghazadeh and have been living in Iraq for five years. I am a member of an Islamic group that seeks to restore freedom to Iraq. Because the federal police are suspicious of me, they want to do a lie detector test on me. I ask that you send me a copy of your book about the lie behind the lie so that I can use it, or that you help me in any other way. I am very grateful to you.
The book to which the message refers is The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF), AntiPolygraph.org’s free e-book that, among other things, explains how to pass (or beat) a polygraph “test.” Factors that made me highly suspicious about this message include:
Why would someone who supposedly fears the police send an unencrypted e-mail acknowledging that he’s a member of an Islamic group that is trying to change the government of Iraq?
Why would such a person also provide his full name and how long he’s been in the country?
To my knowledge, there aren’t any Iranian-backed Islamic groups seeking to “restore freedom to Iraq.” In fact, Iran and Iraq have good diplomatic relations.
Why did this person ask me to send a book that is freely available on-line? Note that this message didn’t ask for a “Persian edition” of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.
I suspected the message was a likely attempt to set me up for prosecution on charges of material support for terrorism (or something similar).2 It seemed highly unlikely that the message could be genuine. Nonetheless, about half an hour after receiving the message, I provided “Mohammad Aghazadeh” the same advice I would give to anyone accused of a crime who has been asked to take a polygraph test:
Dear Mr. Mohammad Aghazadeh,
Our advice to everyone under such circumstances is not to submit to the so-called
davecb@spamcop.net
Not law enforcement or tax men but Hair dressers, middle managers, business men who spout nothing but buzz words in other words idiots.
Idiots who adopted the leaf as a form of currency and then set about preventing inflation by burning down the forests around them.
The only group that was exiled inappropriately were the janitors, Telephone sanitizers to be specific..
Also the leftovers did not form a civilization they went feral breeding with the native cavemen and leaving no trace in the fossil record of their base civilization and ultimately corrupting the program of the biocomputer Earth.
Go through the source material more than once before you make claims about the political meanings of science fiction.
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"
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
My reply to both you and the parent is that IMHO most people (including Greenspan, and all of Wall Street) misinterpret Rand. If you recall, the protagonists in each of her books is a builder, not a financier. They were virulently opposed to those who used manipulation of the economic and political system for their own gains. Her books were really about the importance of the creative and technical versus the political.
I think it was Nietzche ("Man and Superman"?) who proposed the dichotomy between masters and slaves. I have always felt that he was wrong, that while those two groups may exist, there is a third group, the technical/creative, who does not want to be master and refuses to be slave.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
My standard answer on Atlas Shrugged is the end of Douglas Adams' second Hitchhiker novel (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe), where Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect meet the people from Golgafrincham. Those people are the leftovers when the elite on Golgafrincham turned their planet into an Randian paradise, with the econonomical elite ruling without bounds, and an army of slave like serfs are working for them.
In the end, only the leftovers, the seemingly superfluous, tedious people, involved in regulations, law enforcement and taxing, the people Dent and Prefect met, survive, and are able to found a new civilisation on Earth, while the Randian Golgafrincham dies out due to an infection.
Just remember one thing about Atlas Shrugged: As mentioned in the preface, it's not about men as they are, it's men as they should be. We don't have any morality and ethics in business or government: In other words, instead of a Midas Mulligan we have a Jamie Dimon, instead of a John Galt we have John Boehner, instead of a Hugh Akston we have Twitter....
And the big railroad barons of the second half of the 19th century never would have been that big without the U.S. government financing and pre-planning the big railroad tracks and protecting the building sites with the cavalry. So much for Ayn Rand's preposition of Atlas Shrugged. The archetypes of Dagny Taggart were free-riding on government subsidaries.
No. Capitalism has a host of feedback mechanisms - supply and demand being the archetypical one. Like any good complex adaptive system, when a new 'species' (for example a new technology and resulting new market) appears, the other entities in the system dynamically adapt. This is very similar to the evolutionary ecosystems model. Political feedback, to my mind, should mainly be of the sort that prevents fish that are too big from swimming up small creeks and blocking water flow. (I know that's a really obscure analogy, but I like it.
A major distortion that exists presently is what I would consider incorrect government policies that encourage near-monopolies and effective monopolies. In the US, anti-trust laws are directed primarily at maintaining two things: preventing unfair advantage of a company's monopoly position, and maintaining a fiction of competition among two to four dominant players.
If I had my druthers, I would prevent any company with more than 10% of a market to buy or take control of any other market participant for any reason.
From my own studies of free enterprise as a CAS, it appears to me that if any company controls more than perhaps 20% of a market, or if fewer than 10 or so companies constitute a large percentage of a market, they have effectively too much monopoly power. I have not done the research in detail - I was prepared to work on the PhD in Economics and this was going to be my area of research, but I did not pursue it at that time, so these are 'back of the envelope' numbers.
Nevertheless, it's instructive to use ecosystems as an analogy. A climax forest may have only a dozen or so tree species but it is very rare for it to have as few as four or five. Aspen trees are interesting - a particular aspen grove may in fact be a single genetic individual. But the environment varies enough that this grove can not take over 100 square miles. This is because the local environment changes constantly, so the area next to the Aspen grove may be better for maple, or fir, or scrub grassland.
So to maintain the maximum diversity, and dynamic adaptability and efficiency, the role of government regulation is absolutely _not_ to provide a single market. (I.e., do _not_ normalize the laws across all jurisdictions.) That made sense when the economies of scale truly applied - it took a lot of money to build a steel mill. But economies of scale now are primarily tools of capitalist domination. If a large company is truly more competive than small companies, then this should be the case across many jurisdictions with differing local rules. Normalizing the rules across jurisdictions is unfairly (IMHO) handicapping smaller businesses, which as it happens often have lower unit costs these days than large companies. Case in point - labor productivity at a MacDonald's franchise is substantially _lower_ than at the old mom and pop hamburger joint - this is due to two things - MacDonald's already made your burger so it's faster, and every MacDonald's burger is the same - no guessing. But both of those are obsolete criteria in today's world of freely available information.
At one time, the number of jurisdictions was large, and the information flow between them was relatively slow, so this was not such a large problem. But now we are close to having a single global economic model. This puts the entire economic system at constant risk - e.g. "Too big to fail". This idea is in itself a condemnation of the legal structure we have allowed to develop. And now with the availability of incredibly fast means to rationalize markets, that legal structure is, oddly enough, a bad idea. Today we need more diverse markets, not more similar markets. And that is where the political factor comes in. Or, as I've said to many of my friends, "All decisions should be made as locally as feasible," - whether economic or political.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The romance of the creator having to deal with the political realities. In our own minds, we are all Mozart, Tesla, and John Galt. :)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Thank you! Yes, I did look at the metadata associated with the PDF file, but haven't been able successful in deducing anything more from it. My replies were in Persian.
George W. Maschke
AntiPolygraph.org
You make a useful point - through most of US, if not global, history, there has been the thread of the creative, explorer, or pioneer who probably has support from investors, governments, other parties, etc. Columbus is perhaps an archetypical example - he spent something like 10 years trying to get various monarchs (Portugal, Spain, England, maybe even Italy) to fund his expedition to go West to find the East. (He was rejected several times by Isabella and Ferdinand because their advisers pointed out that his estimate of the diameter of the Earth was about 1/2 what the experts thought - they were in fact correct!) More recently, the American pioneers, and the American railroads, depended on government land grants.
Nevertheless there is a difference. All of your examples fit the mold of people who, given or finding an advantage, ran with it and created something new, or had a dream and put together the resources to make it happen. Without Columbus, Spain would not have become such a major economic and political power - it had just essentially given up rights to most of Africa and the South Atlantic to the Portuguese after a military defeat. In fact, Ferdinand and Isabella were acting as VCs, with the expectation that they would never see Columbus again, but their situation was bad enough that it was worth trying this low-cost fling. It worked out pretty well (except arguably for the folks who lived here already...)
Lots of other people had fathers who taught mathematics; lots of people have had all the right tools but never did anything with them. Heck, I'm a pretty good example - back in 1981 I came up with the idea of 3D printing (I worked in a group that built flatbed printers), and I even assembled some of the components I needed to build a prototype. But I never carried through with it. Maybe that was partly luck, and/or going a different direction, or whatever - but the fact remains that I could have created the 3D printing market 30 years ago.
IMHO Obama's assertion that "you didn't build that" was IMHO a combination of economic illiteracy, stupidity, socialist idealism, and political "big lie" technique. Sure, every "great man" has a variety of supports that made it possible. But that does not counter the principle. Taken to its extreme, you can say that Columbus was no more important than the guy who baked his breakfast the morning he left Palos de la Frontera.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The opening line of Karl Mark's book..."From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". A succinct, compassionate, and efficient "prime directive" for any "we the people" if you ask me. Yet most adults know the devil is always in the details, for example China has dragged more people above the poverty line than the rest of the world combined in the last 40yrs, (coincidently 14yrs less than my age). China did that with a centrally planned economy. Of course they also put themselves in that the position of wide spread famine in the first place, ironically using the very same "system" of a centrally planning following a series of 5yr plans.
Frankly a 14yo's opinions on comparative politics are about as insightful and original as a 14yo's opinions on birth control, it's mostly second hand knowledge that (like the Marxist slogan above) often bears little resemblance to the real world. However you do seem to have worked out that the "free market" is actually a set of rules that form a trading system for "we the people" (eg: property law), not some magical hand righting wrongs, just a different set of rules to what we use. The system we use says that the "free" in "free market" means anyone can participate in that market, what's not so clear is whether anyone is free NOT to participate. The alcohol market is a trivial example of a non-free market since some sections of the population are prohibited from buying it, and the rest are prohibited from selling it to them.
Don't believe everything people tell you about Marx, Rand, Orwell, et al, go and read what they have to say. There's also a metric shitload of stuff on youtube from modern writers such as Hitchens, Vidal, Pinker, Feynman, Sagan, et al. I particularly like Pinker's latest stuff about the decline of violence over the last 1000yrs and I personally think the "Stanford prison experiments" will be seen as one of (if not The) most important insight into human nature to come out of the 20th century.
Don't let "being wrong" stop you from thinking, the more angles you look at, the more picture's the kaleidoscope of the real world shows you. - refer to sig.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Just remember one thing about Atlas Shrugged: As mentioned in the preface, it's not about men as they are, it's men as they should be.
Interesting -- seems like under the premise "men as they should be", everything from pure socialism to pure laissez-faire, or from pure anarchy to pure autarchy, would work. Any system works if the actors are perfectly informed and benevolent.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
IMHO Obama's assertion that "you didn't build that" was IMHO a combination of economic illiteracy, stupidity, socialist idealism, and political "big lie" technique.
You make a rational, reasoned argument, then sign off with that straw man? I'm guessing you're not even taking it out of context like the GOP tried to.
The "you didn't build that" was *directly* related to the infrastructure of an entire society that enables advancement, and the idea that you contribute back to that society, in the form of jobs (like Apple doesn't), or taxes (like Apple doesn't).
I'm not saying Obama didn't fail miserably to express the sentiment clearly, but there's no "great man" that doesn't owe anything to anyone.
I did, in fact, first use a PDF reader other than Adobe's. The PDF is available as a MIME attachment to the e-mail I received, the raw source of which can be downloaded here: https://antipolygraph.org/documents/help%20help%20help%20please.eml . If any readers have the technical skills to analyze it for malware, I'd be grateful.
George W. Maschke
AntiPolygraph.org