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The following message was received by AntiPolygraph.org for anonymous posting:
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This is an account of my polygraph test with a U.S. intelligence agency.
I received a conditional job offer from the agency. The only things standing between me and an intelligence career were a security interview, a polygraph test, and a clearance investigation.
This process supposedly evaluates your "trustworthiness" for access to classified information. Interestingly, the multiple days of interviews and testing are all conducted on weekdays, so unless you want to tell your employer that you are looking for another job, you must skip out of work and travel long distance for MULTIPLE days under FALSE pretences. I find this to be quite ironic.
At the end of the process, I regretted taking precious time off in order to go through it. Everything about the polygraph test turned out to be just as I read it would be on "antipolygraph.org". The interrogator was, predictably, the stuffy, undereducated, ex-military type. He was a poor actor, pretending to take notes and to get upset when I said "yes" to the control questions (i.e. have you ever told a lie?). He pretended to leave the room for "evaluation" or "consultation", but I'm sure it was just a bathroom break.
I almost felt sorry for him, but resolved to play along with his act. After all, I am a considerate person and don't want to mock someone's profession to their face.
Anyhow, he jumped on me almost from the beginning. "What are you hiding?", etc. He falsely accused me of using countermeasures. I explained that some of the questions make me nervous for whatever reason, but he kept digging to make me admit something, anything. I made up some stories to make him happy, but it wasn't enough. I saw that my chance for an intel job had disappeared, and now he was simply trying to get me to confess to something serious in order to put a check mark on his performance plan. ("See, boss, I'm weeding out the criminals for you!").
When it was over, after three grueling hours, he gave me a chance to take the test a second time around, "after you've had the chance to think things over". I walked out and never looked back. This interrogation was the worst experience of my life, and I wasn't going to volunteer for a second round. Even though I understood all of the interrogator's tricks, I still felt abused, raped, violated, mind-crappity smacked. He tried to make me feel like a felon, when in fact I am a model citizen.
What made it even worse, was that I had been interrogated by someone who was so obviously inferior to me in every respect. He was unintelligent and not even very good at his own job. I saw through his bag of tricks, and only played along so as not to offend him. But he certainly did his part to offend me, and it hurt. If people like him are what stands between us and another 9/11, then we are as screwed as we were for the first 9/11.
Needless to say, I will never again apply for a government job. In fact, I am happy to have learned what I learned and come to this decision. I do not want to be part of a work culture that spies on its employees and routinely subjects them to polygraphs and investigations and piss tests even though they are under no suspicion whatsoever. If you value your privacy and your dignity, don't even bother with these clowns.
--Anonymous
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