Original reporting and commentary about polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, and other purported "lie detectors."
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 …
On Thursday, 13 August 2020, FBI Special Agent Chris Jensen filed under seal a criminal complaint against Alexander Yuk Ching Ma of Honolulu, Hawaii, charging him with “Conspiracy to Gather and Communicate National Defense Information of the United States to a Foreign Nation.” On Monday, 17 August 2020, the complaint was unsealed. In an accompanying …
The FBI’s first documented use of the polygraph in an espionage investigation came in 1938 in connection with a Nazi German spy ring operating in the United States. The most important suspect interrogated with the polygraph was Dr. Ignatz Theodor Griebl, a medical officer in the U.S. army reserve who is believed to have been …
AntiPolygraph.org has obtained a copy of the National Center for Credibility Assessment’s documentation of the polygraph screening technique “used by federal law enforcement agencies during the pre-employment process.” The 23-page document, dated 3 March 2016, provides instructions for administration of the so-called “Law Enforcement Pre-Employment Test” (LEPET), to which applicants for employment with such agencies …
Electrical engineer Byron Johns, “a polygraph victim who was constantly recruited and rejected from CIA, NSA, FBI, DOD contractors, and later resigned from the U.S. Foreign Service,” tells his story in a blog titled, The U.S. Intelligence Community Reject.
Huffington Post reporter Jessica Schulberg tells the story of a senior FBI intelligence analyst who lost his security clearance and his job over a polygraph operator’s accusation that he employed polygraph countermeasures. Excerpt: WASHINGTON — Logan tried to stay calm as he boarded the subway to take the one-mile trip from his office at FBI …
On 9 June 2016, Chief United States District Judge for the District of New Mexico M. Christina Armijo signed an 8-page order suppressing inculpatory statements made to an FBI polygraph examiner by the suspect in a child molestation investigation. The post-polygraph statements made by Jamaico Tennison to FBI Special Agent and polygraph examiner Jennifer Sullivan …
Marisa Taylor reports for McClatchy on the high failure rate of the FBI’s pre-employment polygraph screening program using, among other sources, a 198-page document containing complaints of discrimination associated with the Bureau’s polygraph program. Excerpt: WASHINGTON — Thousands of job applicants come to FBI offices all across the country every year, eager to work for …
On Tuesday, 15 February 2011, the National Research Council made public its Review of the Scientific Approaches Used During the FBI’s Investigation of the Anthrax Letters, seriously undermining the Bureau’s case against U.S. Army researcher Bruce Ivins, whom the FBI maintains was the sole perpetrator of the anthrax mailings. Polygraphy was not among the scientific …
Washington Post staff writer Peter Finn reports in an above-the-fold front page article on the case of retired army lieutenant colonel and Defense Intelligence Agency analyst John Dullahan, whose security clearance was suspended in February 2009 after he failed three polygraph “tests.” Then DIA director LTG Michael D. Maples fired Dullahan in March 2009 (his last …