Gordon,

Should you care to FULLY respond to my previous three posts and the other unfinished business (others' unanswered questions) before you, I thought I'd add just another thought or two for your commentary. In your next to last posted response (5/5/01 largely addressed to George Maschke, although not answering his questions), you raise the notion of examinee dissociation (by starring at a spot on a wall). Although you correctly characterize this as something that would not work, via the sin of omission, you may well give the wrong impression to the readers of this site. You know well that this would never have any theoretical possibility of working, but yet, by implication, suggest that this is just one more countermeasure tried and failed by the antipolygraph crowd. In fact, as you well know, such an effort would come under the category of trying to prevent a response (presumably to relevant questions). You further know that even those few (Buddhist monks, etc.) who can reliably manipulate the output of their own autonomic nervous system (heart rate, etc.) cannot do so within the time frame of a polygraph exam (questions being asked, separated in time by 15-20 seconds). Because you know that this clearly would not work and confuse it with meaningful activity to produce (not inhibit) reactions to control questions, one has to wonder if this is not intentional disinformation, simply a straw man, and/or a red herring to mislead those who would apply countermeasures down a wrong trail to begin with and secondarily suggesting that they will be caught if they do such a thing. If not, I fail to understand why you did not explain what, no doubt, is obvious to you.

But getting back to that which is meaningful, on the home page of this web site is an item entitled DoDPI Test Data Analysis. Within that document are the specific scoring criteria DoDPI uses for scoring the individual polygraph channels. Why would you have this audience believe that it would not be relatively simple to learn how to produce these responses within a timely manner (independent of which of several possible mid-line physical or mental countermeasure methods is employed) to control questions? The notion you raise of a separate system of scoring criteria for countermeasures is quite dubious. Examiners don't really know how to use the original scoring system in a particularly effective manner. The notion of another system on top of or in replacement appears to be nonsensical and again, in any real meaningful application, little more than a bluff.