Original reporting and commentary about polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, and other purported "lie detectors."
Reuters health and science correspondent Maggie Fox reports. Excerpt: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Lie detectors may work in some cases, but they are too flawed to use for general security screening and could let through skilled spies, an independent panel said on Tuesday. Not only do polygraphs cost many honest people a government job, but there …
Pittsburg Post-Gazette science editor Byron Spice reports. Excerpt: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Not polygraph examiners, at least not those charged with finding spies and other security risks within the ranks of federal employees, a new National Research Council report concludes. Lie detectors simply aren’t accurate enough to ferret out …
Los Angeles Times staff writer Charles Piller reports. Excerpt: Polygraph testing for national security screening is little more than junk science, with results so inaccurate that they tend to be counterproductive, according to a long-awaited report released Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences. The nation’s premier scientific organization said such tests, a key counterespionage …
Dan Stober reports for the San Jose Mercury News. Excerpt: Lie-detector tests are useless in ferreting out spies and they have unfairly tainted innocent employees and job applicants, the nation’s leading researchers concluded in a report issued Tuesday. Prompted by the controversial case of Wen Ho Lee, who was accused of spying for China, the …
Washington Post staff writer Shankar Vedantam reports. Excerpt: Polygraph tests are ineffective in catching spies and have probably tarred thousands of innocent government employees and applicants with unwarranted suspicion, a top scientific panel has concluded. While lie detectors may have some utility in criminal investigations, where subjects can be tested on specific questions about a …
William J. Broad reports for the New York Times. Excerpt: In a report to the government, a panel of leading scientists said yesterday that polygraph testing was too flawed to use for security screening. The panel said lie-detector tests did a poor job of identifying spies or other national-security risks and were likely to produce …
This short article from the website of KRQE News in Albuquerque, New Mexico is cited here in full: Sandia National Laboratories is looking into allegations of improper questioning of one of its employees by a U.S. Energy Department polygraph examiner. The unidentified employee alleges the examiner asked inappropriate medical questions during a lie detector test. …
Dan Vergano reports for USA Today. Excerpt: A long-time law enforcement favorite, the lie detector, now finds itself sweating the hot lights of scientific inquiry. Crime dramas have long depicted the polygraph’s tangle of wires and wiggling chart lines uncovering lies during a hard-boiled criminal interrogation. As suspects are questioned, the device checks for sweaty …
Tangeni Amupadhi reports for The Namibian. Excerpt: THE Roads Authority has stopped trying to catch out liars among people it wants to hire or promote. The Authority abandoned using lie detector tests after unhappy workers seeking promotion complained to The Namibian. While the Roads Authority has stopped using lie detectors, the man hired to conduct …
Boston Globe correspondent Dan Ephron reports on the case of Dr. Marcus Klingberg in an article titled, “Israel details damaging espionage case.” Excerpt: JERUSALEM – The first reports of his arrest surfaced in 1991. By that time, Marcus Klingberg, one of Israel’s leading scientists, already had been languishing in jail for eight years. Even then, …