Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy discusses the National Academy of Science’s polygraph report in his Secrecy News e-mail publication:
DOE TO REISSUE UNALTERED POLYGRAPH REGS
In a remarkable testament to the stubbornness of the security bureaucracy and its resistance to external criticism, the Department of Energy is proposing to reissue the identical regulations governing polygraph testing that Congress told it to repeal two years ago, despite a withering independent critique from the National Academy of Sciences.
In a Federal Register notice today, DOE argued that although the congressional repeal “would eliminate the existing authority which underlies DOE’s counterintelligence polygraph regulations… [it] would not preclude the retention of some or all of those regulations through this rule-making….” So retaining “all of those regulations” is what DOE will do.
Congress had instructed DOE to reevaluate its polygraph policies based on the findings of a polygraph study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). That study, completed last year, was harshly critical of polygraph testing as a tool for screening of employees and found that it will generate “either a large number of false positives or a large number of false negatives.”
DOE did not dispute this, but observed in faint praise of the polygraph that it is not wrong 100% of the time. In some cases, it actually “will identify true positives who are being deceptive.”
“Accordingly, DOE does not believe that the issues that the NAS has raised about the polygraph’s accuracy are sufficient to warrant a decision by DOE to abandon it as a screening tool,” the Federal Register notice explained.
“While fully respecting the questions the NAS has raised about the use of polygraphs as a screening tool, DOE does not believe it can endorse the NAS’s conclusion that the tool should be laid down.”
DOE invited public comment on its proposal to retain its polygraph regulations in unaltered form. See this April 14 Federal Register notice:
To discuss this story, see the AntiPolygraph.org message board thread, DOE Rejects NAS Polygraph Report Findings!