Original reporting and commentary about polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, and other purported "lie detectors."
On 21 February 2013, federal agents raided former police polygraphist Doug Williams‘ home and office, seizing his customer records as part of an investigation targeting polygraph countermeasure instructors. The U.S. government used these records to create a interagency watch list of individuals who had purchased Williams’ manual, How to Sting the Polygraph, an accompanying DVD, …
Steven Williams, a 30-year-old U.S. Air Force staff sergeant stationed at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, has confessed to killing his ex-wife, Tricia Todd, on the night of 26 April 2016. Williams reportedly dismembered Todd with a chain saw and buried her body parts in an acid-filled container in a pre-dug grave …
In an address to members of the Federalist Society at the South Texas College of Law that was posted to YouTube on 15 April 2016, Department of Defense (and probable NSA) polygraph operator Brian R. Morris mentioned that in the aftermath of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations, the Department of Defense tripled the number of …
The following is a guest post from Doug Williams, who writes from the federal prison camp at Florence, Colorado. Williams, who for decades had taught people how to pass or beat polygraph “tests” without incident (and whose website, Polygraph.com, remains online), was targeted for entrapment in a federal criminal investigation dubbed Operation Lie Busters. On …
In September 2014, retired Defense Intelligence Agency counterintelligence agent Scott W. Carmichael accused Donald Krapohl, then the number two official at the National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA, the federal government’s polygraph school), of violating the Espionage Act by indirectly making classified information about the U.S. government’s methodology for polygraph countermeasure detection available to the …
A week before he is to begin serving a two year federal prison sentence, Doug Williams, the founder of Polygraph.com, has made a final appeal to the U.S. government to end its misplaced reliance on the pseudoscience of polygraphy. Williams, a former police polygraphist who offered training and instructional materials on how to pass a …
Bloomberg Business has published a video report on how to beat a polygraph test featuring Doug Williams of Norman, Oklahoma, who was targeted for entrapment in the federal government’s Operation Lie Busters investigation. Williams, himself a former police polygraph examiner, has been a vocal critic of polygraphy for some 35 years and is the author of How …
On Wednesday, 3 June 2015, Business Insider published a story by reporter Christina Sterbenz titled “The one thing you need to know to pass a polygraph test.” ((The less click-baity title suggested by the article URL, “How to pass a polygraph test,” would have been more appropriate. There are numerous things that anyone hoping to …
In a memo nominating his friend and colleague Special Agent Fred C. Ball for a polygraph association award, U.S. Customs and Border Protection polygraph unit chief John R. Schwartz claimed that “[Operation Lie Busters] revealed that sophisticated countermeasures can be routinely identified when all best practices are employed, including proper training of examiners and stringent …
Defense Intelligence Agency documents (40 MB .zip archive) obtained by AntiPolygraph.org suggest that the agency lacks the ability to detect sophisticated polygraph countermeasures ((In this context, “sophisticated” doesn’t mean that the countermeasures are complicated or difficult to learn. They’re not. It simply means that they are the kind of countermeasure that a subject with knowledge …