Original reporting and commentary about polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, and other purported "lie detectors."
The United States government is so worked up about polygraph countermeasures that it launched an ongoing criminal investigation dubbed Operation Lie Busters targeting individuals who teach others how to pass or beat polygraph examinations. An Indiana electrician named Chad Dixon who taught people how to pass the polygraph as a side job was sentenced to …
Coming on the heels of an accusation that a senior official at the National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA) facilitated the transfer of classified information to the government of Singapore via the Lafayette Instrument Company, AntiPolygraph.org has received information that NCCA has provided polygraph countermeasure documentation to a representative of Stoelting Co., another polygraph-manufacturing company. …
A 2013 presentation by the National Center for Credibility Assessment documents that the federal polygraph school is working on a computer software project intended to automate the detection of polygraph countermeasures. It appears that the software does not employ a new approach to countermeasure detection, but rather seeks to “[v]alidate the countermeasure detection features taught …
Georgia polygraph operator Ken Blackstone has pleaded guilty to a single count of perjury, a felony punishable by one to ten years’ imprisonment and a fine of up to $1,000 under Georgia state law. Blackstone committed perjury by falsely claiming during a court hearing that another polygraph examiner, Charles Slupski, had reviewed the charts of …
Scott W. Carmichael, a recently retired counterintelligence investigator with the Defense Intelligence Agency, has accused Donald Krapohl, Special Assistant to the Chief, National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA) and longtime editor of the American Polygraph Association quarterly, Polygraph, of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. In an e-mail message to retired FBI polygraph examiner Robert …
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 …