Original reporting and commentary about polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, and other purported "lie detectors."
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 …
Three Pittsburgh police officers who stand accused of wantonly beating 18-year-old honor student Jordan Miles have all passed lie detector tests. But Miles also passed a lie detector test regarding the incident. So whose lie detector is lying? Jill King Greenwood reports for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Three Pittsburgh police officers accused of beating a Homewood …
On Thursday, 11 March 2010, in testimony before a subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, it was disclosed that the failure rate associated with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) pre-employment polygraph screening program stands at 60 percent. New York Times correspondent Randal C. Archibold reports, among other things: Polygraph examinations, which officials …
AntiPolygraph.org has obtained a copy of an NSA leaflet (1.7 mb PDF) titled, “Your Polygraph Examination: An Important Appointment to Keep.” This leaflet, which has blanks for filling in the time, date, and place of an appointment, merits some discussion. The leaflet begins with a section on what to do before the polygraph: Prior to …
An article published today in a small town newspaper provides a good example of the sort of shoddy reporting that perpetuates the myth of the lie detector. Lisa Rogers reports for the Gadsden, Alabama Times: Polygraphs useful law enforcement tool By Lisa Rogers Times Staff Writer Published: Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 9:37 p.m. A suspect …