Original reporting and commentary about polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, and other purported "lie detectors."
On Monday, 9 June 2014, the Los Angeles Times reported that U.S. Customs and Border Protection Assistant Commissioner James F. Tomsheck, who headed CBP’s Internal Affairs unit, “was removed from his post…amid criticism that he failed to investigate hundreds of allegations of abuse and use of force by armed border agents.” Tomsheck, himself a former …
McClatchy investigative reporter Marisa Taylor reports that the Drug Enforcement Agency has agreed to pay 14 contract translators $500,000 to settle a lawsuit brought under the 1988 Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA). While the EPPA includes exemptions that allow individuals under contract to the FBI, NSA, DIA, and CIA, among others, to be polygraphed, no such exemption …
Reason TV, in a report produced by Joshua Swain and published on 11 February 2014, spoke with McClatchy investigative reporter Marisa Taylor and Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy about recent efforts by the federal government to criminalize the teaching of methods for passing or beating polygraph examinations. Also …
Former Oklahoma City police polygraph examiner Doug Williams, who has campaigned against polygraphy since realizing in the 1970s that what he and fellow polygraphers were doing is a fraud, has for the first time told the story of how federal agents in February 2013 attempted to entrap him for teaching people how to pass polygraph …
John R. Schwartz, who heads the U.S. Customs and Border Protection polygraph unit, claims that sophisticated polygraph countermeasures (the kind described in AntiPolygraph.org’s free book, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector), can be routinely identified “when all best practices are employed, including proper training of examiners and stringent Quality Control.” Schwartz made the claim in …
McClatchy Newspapers investigative reporter Marisa Taylor reports that the National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA), which trains all federal polygraph operators, is proposing that certain training and research materials be classified or subjected to limited distribution. An NCCA internal draft memo dated 2 December 2013 obtained by McClatchy notes that “there is almost nothing about …
McClatchy investigative reporter Marisa Taylor reports that a list of 4,904 individuals whose names were derived from the customer records of Doug Williams and Chad Dixon, both of whom were targeted in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection-led criminal investigation called Operation Lie Busters, has been circulated to nearly 30 federal agencies including the CIA, …
On Thursday, 14 November 2013, the Washington Post reported that Ignacio Zamora Jr., a U.S. Secret Service senior supervisor who oversaw members of President Obama’s security detail, was removed from his assignment and is under investigation for alleged misconduct. Excerpt: A call from the Hay-Adams hotel this past spring reporting that a Secret Service agent …
AntiPolygraph.org has received a copy of a presentation (1.4 mb PDF) on interrogation given by John R. Schwartz, who now heads the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs Credibility Assessment Division. In that capacity, Schwartz heads one of the federal government’s largest polygraph units, with some 71 polygraph examiners and a fiscal year 2012 …
In May 2013, I was the target of an attempted entrapment. ((McClatchy newspaper group investigative reporter Marisa Taylor first reported on this matter on 16 August 2013 in “Seeing threats, feds target instructors of polygraph-beating methods.” The present article explains this incident in fuller detail.)) Whether it was a federal agent attempting to entrap me …