Pentagon Seeks Funding for New and Improved Polygraph

The Pentagon is seeking funding for a new and improved polygraph that it alternatively calls “Polygraph+,” “Polygraph Next,” or “Next Gen Polygraph.” The five-year plan calls for spending $30,342,000. No end cost is stated, however, with the total cost simply described as “Continuing.”

In 2003, the National Research Council published a landmark report on the polygraph, The Polygraph and Lie Detection (19 mb PDF). It advised that “[polygraph testing’s] accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies.”

Moreover, the report was highly pessimistic about the prospects for significantly improving the polygraph, advising at p. 213:

Future Potential The inherent ambiguity of the physiological measures used in the polygraph suggest that further investments in improving polygraph technique and interpretation will bring only modest improvements in accuracy.

Rather than accepting that its reliance on the pseudoscience of polygraphy has been a colossal mistake, the Pentagon actually increased its reliance on polygraphy over the years and is now intent on attempting to “polish the turd.”

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), parent agency of the federal polygraph school, formally known as the National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA), describes the Polygraph+/Polygraph Next initiative in a FY 2027 budgetary document.

DCSA’s description is a masterpiece of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo that exemplifies the old saying, “If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullshit”:

Polygraph+/ (Next Gen Polygraph)

The Polygraph+/Next Gen Polygraph program is a transformative effort to modernize federal polygraph and credibility assessment technologies, enhancing accuracy, reliability, usability, and traceability. Current polygraph technology is aging, susceptible to countermeasures, and lacks the sophisticated data analytics necessary for today’s complex security environment. Polygraph+/Next Gen Polygraph will revolutionize credibility assessment through incorporating non-invasive advancements in medical-grade sensing with on prem and cloud-based advanced data analytics, bundled together in the first purpose-built credibility assessment system designed specifically for US Government applications. This program will significantly enhance national security by providing more accurate and reliable credibility assessments, enabling faster and better-informed decisions in support of an enterprise of federal government stakeholders and partners.

Notably, the foregoing includes a rare official acknowledgement that the polygraph is susceptible to countermeasures, a fact with which the U.S. government has yet to come to terms.

Some thirty years ago, a Department of Defense study showed that 80% of “test” subjects were able to beat DoD’s standard polygraph screening technique after receiving no more than an hour of training. DoD classified the study and hid it from the National Research Council.

In the 2010s, in an effort dubbed Operation Lie Busters, the U.S. government attempted to address the problem of countermeasures by targeting for criminal prosecution those who provided information and training to the public. While this effort resulted in the conviction and incarceration of two persons, it didn’t address the root of the problem: the polygraph’s inherent susceptibility to simple and effective countermeasure that anyone can learn and that polygraph operators cannot detect.

DoD’s hope seems to be that new sensors and artificial intelligence will somehow solve the problem of polygraph countermeasures. But just as computerization did nothing to improve the accuracy or robustness against countermeasures of polygraphic lie detection, there is little cause for hope that improved sensors or artificial intelligence will help.

The principle of garbage in, garbage out continues to apply. As Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff remarked at the first public meeting of the National Research Council’s Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph in 2001, “From a medical and scientific standpoint, it is not sufficient to measure well that which should not be measured in the first place.”