Original reporting and commentary about polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, and other purported "lie detectors."
Polygraph “testing” of eight of nine Greensboro City Council members appears set to begin this week in an ostensible attempt to discover who amongst them provided an investigative report on the city’s former police chief to the local News & Record newspaper. To date, none of the city council members have responded to George Maschke’s …
Andrew Zajac of the Chicago Tribune reports on the CIA’s reliance on the polygraph in its efforts to detect and deter unauthorized truth-telling. This feature article is cited in its entirety: Polygraphs target leak cases U.S. intelligence, FBI use tool to police their ranks, but some say it is vulnerable to abuse By Andrew Zajac …
Dana Priest, the Washington Post intelligence reporter whose Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé on the CIA’s secret prison network set up to evade U.S. and international law led to a polygraph hunt for leakers at CIA, answered, among others, a question about polygraphs in an on-line chat session held on Thursday, 27 April 2006: Gaithersburg, Md.: With …
So warns National Public Radio senior news editor Daniel Schorr in this commentary published in The Christian Science Monitor, noting that “often leaks are acts of whistle-blowing done in the public’s interest.”
The latest issue of the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board publication, Integrity Bulletin (Vol. No. 25) includes mention of a cadet who beat the polygraph: CASE NO. 18 FALSE INTO [sic] TO OBTAIN CERT Cadet R informed his fellow cadets that he beat the polygraph test and had passed it even though he …
WOOD TV news reporter Brad Edwards reports on the case of Jason Burns, who reports that he was punched on the campus of Hope College in Holland, Michigan by two men who taunted him because he is homosexual. After he reported the attack, Holland police asked Burns to submit to a lie detector “test.” See, …
It appears that CIA officer Mary McCarthy was not the source of Washington Post reporter Dana Priest’s information on the CIA’s secret prisons. In “Dismissed CIA Officer Denies Leak Role,” Post staff writers R. Jeffrey Smith and Dafna Linzer report that she denies it, and the CIA is not alleging it. Excerpt: A lawyer representing …
In “Moves Signal Tighter Secrecy Within C.I.A.,” New York Times reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti write that CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson is among the employees polygraphed in the Agency’s ongoing leak hunt. Excerpt: WASHINGTON, April 23 — The crackdown on leaks at the Central Intelligence Agency that led to the dismissal of …
While there is broad agreement amongst scientists that polygraph “testing” has no scientific basis, and the National Academy of Sciences has recently confirmed that polygraph screening is completely invalid, there is no question that the polygraph can be useful for getting admissions from those who can still be convinced that the polygrapher can see their …
Greensboro, North Carolina News Record staff writer Eric Swensen reports in a 19 April article titled, “Council Says Yes to Polygraphs” that with a lone dissenting vote, the Greensboro City Council has voted to voluntary subject itself to lie detector testing in an effort to determine who amongst them leaked a police report to the …