Sunday, 18 September 2005 marks AntiPolygraph.org's fifth anniversary on-line, and this seems a fitting occasion to look back at what has been accomplished and what remains to be done.
Back in 2000, Gino Scalabrini and I decided to co-author a book on polygraph procedure and countermeasures. We were both false positive victims of polygraph screening, and had gotten to know each other through the website NoPolygraph.com (no longer on-line) that Glen Wallace founded in 1998.
Gino and I agreed that more public information was needed to enable those facing polygraph screening to protect themselves against the risk of a false positive outcome, and that it should be made available free of charge. We had already done a great deal of research into the polygraph literature, and work on the book progressed rapidly. Scientific polygraph experts David T. Lykken, John J. Furedy, William G. Iacono, and Drew C. Richardson kindly reviewed our manuscript and provided valuable feedback. Our fellow polygraph victims Mark Mallah and Bill Roche also helped to make it a better book.
As the book neared completion, we turned to considering how best to distribute it. We ultimately agreed that the best approach would be to create a new website for this purpose. While our immediate goal was to provide information to those who face polygraph screening, our ultimate goal was and remains the abolition of polygraphy. We settled on the name AntiPolygraph.org because it's easy to remember and tells the vistor up front what the site is about.
AntiPolygraph.org went on-line on 18 September 2000 and was an instant hit.
The Lie Behind the Lie Detector was downloaded hundreds of times in its first week. Now in its 4th edition, it has been downloaded close to 200,000 times, while our home page has been accessed about a million times.
Snapshots of the AntiPolygraph.org home page at various times during the past five years are available from Archive.org's "WayBack Machine" here:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://antipolygraph.org The AntiPolygraph.org message board opened on 29 September 2000. The first post is here:
http://antipolygraph.org/cgi-bin/forums/YaBB.pl?board=Policy;action=display;num=... Since then, there have been more than 18,000 posts and more than 2,300 users have registered. We're proud to provide this much needed, open forum for discussion and debate of polygraph issues.
In the past five years, we've answered literally thousands of public inquiries and granted numerous media interviews. We're also proud to have assembled the Internet's largest repository of polygraph documentation.
The polygraph community, seeing its dirty little secrets publicly aired and unable to reliably detect countermeasures, is running scared. An instructor at the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute has gone so far as to suggest that providing countermeasure information to the public
should be outlawed. Polygraphers from federal agenies such as the CIA, NSA, and FBI, as well as examiners employed by state and local agencies, routinely ask examinees whether they've researched polygraphy on-line, some even mentioning AntiPolygraph.org by name. They rightly fear examinees knowing the truth about lie detectors.
Still, much work remains to be done. The federal, state, and local agencies that rely on polygraphs have willfully ignored the overwhelmingly negative
findings of the National Academy of Sciences, just as they ignored the earlier
findings of the Office of Technology Assessment. If anything, governmental reliance on the pseudoscience of polygraphy seems to be growing.
We still need members of Congress to sponsor a
Comprehensive Employee Polygraph Protection Act. You can help by asking your representatives to sponsor this much needed legislation. See our
Get Involved page for more on what you can do to help make polygraph reform a reality. With your help, we've succeeded over the past five years in making the truth about polygraphs much more widely known. In the next five, working together, we can put a long overdue end to polygraph screening.
