Original reporting and commentary about polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, and other purported "lie detectors."
Brian Kalish reports for GovernmentExecutive.com on the House of Representatives’ unanimous passage of the Anti-Border Corruption Act of 2010 (PDF) mandating that within two years, “all applicants for law enforcement positions with U.S. Customs and Border Protection receive polygraph examinations before being hired for such a position.” Currently, only 15% of CBP applicants are polygraphed, …
Who’s afraid of a polygraph test? Not Afghanistan’s most notorious reputed drug lord, who is on the CIA payroll. Jeff Stein reports in his Washington Post SpyTalk column that a secret State Department cable recently published by Wikileaks reveals that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half-brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai, wanted a polygraph test to clear …
Washington Post staff writer Peter Finn reports in an above-the-fold front page article on the case of retired army lieutenant colonel and Defense Intelligence Agency analyst John Dullahan, whose security clearance was suspended in February 2009 after he failed three polygraph “tests.” Then DIA director LTG Michael D. Maples fired Dullahan in March 2009 (his last …
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation mentions in a report dated 23 September 2010 that anticipated polygraph testing is among the causes of an armored car drivers’ strike in the provinces of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island: Armoured car drivers have set up picket lines across New Brunswick and P.E.I. Members of the International Brotherhood of …
Kevin Rowson of WXIA television news in Atlanta reports on Clayton County sheriff Kemuel “Kem” Kimbrough’s plans to subject 40-50 employees to polygraph screening in an attempt to determine who anonymously e-mailed reporters a complaint about work conditions in the department: CLAYTON COUNTY, GA — Clayton County Sheriff deputies are being asked to take a …
The National Security Agency (NSA) has produced a video about its polygraph screening program. Watch it here, along with AntiPolygraph.org’s commentary: The original source video is available here. For commentary on the NSA’s accompanying polygraph leaflet, see our earlier blog post, NSA Leaflet: Your Polygraph Examination. For a thorough debunking of polygraphy, with extensive citations …
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Seattle 911 blog today featured a video report by Parella Lewis of KCPQ-TV’s Washington’s Most Wanted show. Lewis interviewed Detective Sally VanBeek, a polygraph operator with the Everett Police Department, who opined that sociopaths cannot beat the polygraph. Is VanBeek, who is also president of the Northwest Polygraph Examiners Association, somehow unaware …
WCBS TV reports that Lee Evans, an early suspect in the 1978 disappearance of five Newark, New Jersey teenagers, has been arrested for their murder along with another as-yet-unidentified man. The Associated Press reports that Evans had earlier been eliminated as a suspect after passing a polygraph test: The boys, Melvin Pittman and Ernest Taylor, …
Rachel Dissell of the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court Judge Alison Floyd has ordered the victims in four sexual assault cases to submit to polygraph “testing.” In addition, Floyd has ordered the perpetrators of the assaults, who have already been found guilty, to submit to polygraph tests for sentencing purposes. It …
AntiPolygraph.org has received a complementary copy of statistician Kaiser Fung’s new book, Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probability and Statistics on Everything You Do (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010), a short primer on statistics written for a general audience. In Chapter 4, Fung addresses the trade-off between false positives and false negatives …