From - Mon Oct 25 20:29:00 2004 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00800000 Message-ID: <417D45EC.1090903@zonnet.nl> Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 20:29:00 +0200 From: "George W. Maschke" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (Windows/20040913) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Louis Rovner Subject: A Public Challenge Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear Dr. Rovner,

In a Rovner & Associates press release distributed today by PR Newswire, you are quoted as saying that "[a]lmost no human being
can beat a polygraph test." I challenge you to support this claim with any peer-reviewed research (or any other evidence on which you may base it). In peer reviewed studies by Charles R. Honts and collaborators, some 50% of polygraph subjects were able to beat the polygraph with no more than 30 minutes of instruction. (Citations and abstracts are provided in the bibliography of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector.) Moreover, spies like Ignatz Theodor Griebl, Karel Frantisek Koecher, Larry Wu-tai Chin, Aldrich Hazen Ames, and Ana Belen Montes all passed the polygraph while lying about relevant issues. So, too, did Gary Ridgway, A.K.A. "The Green River Killer," the deadliest serial murderer in U.S. history. The results of the aforementioned research, and the real world examples provided, are hard to reconcile with your assertion that "almost no human being can beat a polygraph test."

Your press release additionally avers that "lie detection technology has become so sophisticated that a polygraph can now detect a person's efforts to try to beat the test." On what basis do you make this claim? I am not aware of any peer-reviewed research (or indeed, any published research at all) that would support this conclusion.

Finally, you also claim that you "are confident that polygraph tests have a 96% accuracy rate when done properly." If you truly believe this, and are confident in your ability to do a polygraph test properly,  why not accept Dr. Drew C. Richardson's standing polygraph countermeasure challenge? As of today, this challenge has gone 1,001 days without takers.

Sincerely,

George W. Maschke
AntiPolygraph.org

PS: A copy of this message will be posted to the AntiPolygraph.org message board.