Original reporting and commentary about polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, and other purported "lie detectors."
On Wednesday, 27 July 2022, U.S. senators John Barrasso (R-WY) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) introduced Senate Bill 4634, “A bill to require the Secretary of Energy to administer polygraph examinations to certain foreign nationals with access to nonpublic areas or information of the National Laboratories.” The full text of the bill is available here (PDF). …
On 14 June 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice in a press release announced that Luke Michael Churchill of Wilmington, North Carolina, had been sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to a single count of production of child pornography. The press release notes that Churchill “photographed his sexual abuse of a four-year …
According to an official news release, Arizona governor Doug Ducey on 25 April 2022 signed into law H.B 2159, a bill introduced by Representative John Kavanagh that withdraws authorization for the use of polygraphs in law enforcement internal investigations. Kavanagh, a Republican representing Arizona’s 23rd district, previously worked as a police officer with the Port …
On 25 April 2009, 17-year-old Brittanee Drexel of Chili, New York went missing while on holiday in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The investigation of the case dragged on for years and garnered nationwide attention. In 2016, Tequan L. Brown, a jailhouse informant, implicated Timothy Da’Shaun Taylor in Brittanee Drexel’s disappearance, claiming that Drexel “was gang …
Craig Greiwe, currently favored to lose the 7 June 2022 Los Angeles mayoral primary election by a wide margin, has submitted to a polygraph “test” and is challenging other candidates to also do so, as Travis Schlepp reports for KTLA. Excerpt: It’s no secret that many voters are skeptical about trusting the word of their …
Polygraph operator and American Polygraph Association board of directors member Lisa Ribacoff, who is in business with her father, fraud-tainted celebrity polygrapher and private investigator Dan Ribacoff, was a speaker at the Oxygen Network’s recently concluded CrimeCon 2022 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her talk was styled as an “AMA” (“Ask Me Anything”) affair, but …
On Tuesday, 8 February 2022, the regional council of Halifax, the largest municipality of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, voted to end polygraph screening of applicants for employment with the Halifax Regional Police as of 30 September 2022. See Zane Woodford’s reporting for the Halifax Examiner and Jen Taplin’s reporting for the Chronicle Herald. …
In 1951, the NSA’s forerunner organization, the Armed Forces Security Agency, began “voluntary” polygraph screening of civilian applicants for employment. On 6 December 1953, the National Security Agency (NSA) made pre-employment polygraph screening mandatory for civilian applicants. Writer Stephen Budiansky describes the origins of the NSA’s polygraph program at pp. 163-65 of his 2016 history, …
In July 2020, the Santa Clara County, California District Attorney’s Office charged Robert E. Foster, then a polygraph operator with the San Jose Police Department, “with using his private security company to commit insurance fraud, tax evasion, wage theft, and about $18 million in money laundering.” On Friday, 14 January 2022, the Santa Clara County, …
A formerly secret CIA report (PDF) provides derogatory information about three prominent polygraph operators of the mid-20th century. The report was declassified and publicly released pursuant to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The subject of the two-page report, dated 14 August 1968, is Chris Gugas (1921-2007), a former CIA …