Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy comments in his Secrecy News e-mail publication:
THE POLYGRAPH VS. NATIONAL SECURITY
As a technology for counterintelligence security screening, the polygraph has been a spectacular failure. It is hard to recall the last time that polygraph screening uncovered an actual spy, and easy to think of spies who had no difficulty escaping its clutches.
But U.S. government polygraph policy continues to penalize innocent individuals, and those who presume to challenge that policy.
Alan P. Zelicoff, a distinguished physician and expert on biological weapons arms control, was driven to resign his position as Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories last year as a consequence of his outspoken criticism of polygraph testing.
For his diverse technical contributions, Zelicoff had been awarded Sandia’s Meritorious Achievement Award on several occasions as recently as 2002.
But after publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post last year criticizing the Lab’s polygraph policy, he was suspended and accused of “insubordination.”
Zelicoff was banned from working on a counterterrorism software tool he had invented to facilitate rapid reporting of disease outbreaks. When he continued to speak out on the polygraph, he was suspended a second time. Finally, he quit.
The polygraph won, but the Lab, and the nation that turns to it for scientific expertise, lost.
“As the only senior [Sandia] scientist who had also practiced medicine, I knew that continuation of polygraphs was going to be a disaster for individuals at Sandia and elsewhere in the DOE complex,” Dr. Zelicoff wrote recently. “And indeed it was.”
See his account of the episode in “The Polygraph Vs. National Security,” March 11, here:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/zelicoff.pdf
Convicted spy Aldrich Ames offered an impudent but rather perceptive commentary on the polygraph in this 2000 letter he wrote to FAS from Allenwood federal penitentiary, where he is incarcerated:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/polygraph/ames.html
In recent years, CIA polygraph examiners have added a new question to their standard exam, which is also asked in some official background investigations: Do you have friends in the media?