Examiner,

You wrote:


Quote:

The 17 individuals I spoke of all were unsuccessful in their efforts to employ countermeasures.  All confessed to commiting the crimes they were suspected of.  All admitted to obtaining your download and practicing and then employing the countermeasures described in the text.  These, by no means represent the total number of people I have detected performing countermeasures.  This thread originated from a discussion of two additional cases, which are not included in that 17.

I would not dispute that it is possible that you have indeed polygraphed 17 subjects who admitted to having obtained The Lie Behind the Lie Detector and practiced and then employed the countermeasures decscribed therein. But I don't believe you.

I cannot reconcile your above claim with what you wrote in your original private message to Gordon Barland:


Quote:

In the last several weeks I have encountered numerous DI subjects, who abruptly terminated their interviews at the 40-60 minute mark.  I spoke with you briefly about this at DoDPI.  Per your suggestion I "studied" George's book and sure enough at the top of page 81, he instructs them to do exactly what I had experienced.

Your words to Gordon strongly suggest that you only recently learned about the existence of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector. If I am wrong about this, I apologize for having questioned your word, and suggest that you contact Dr. Andrew Ryan, chief of the DoDPI Research Division, at research@jackson-dpi.army.mil, as I suspect the charts of these 17 individuals will be of great research interest to DoDPI.

You also wrote:


Quote:

And I do find this confusing, George you cite peer-reviewed research that people with not more than 30-minutes training in the type of countermeasures you describe can easily defeat a polygraph.  But now you say that anyone planning to utilize this approach is well advised to spend more than 30-minutes training.  If this is true, how is that paticular research project applicable in supporting what you advocate.  It appears to me that you do not believe that the polygraph can be easily defeated.

Before addressing the point you raise, I would remind you that our purpose in writing The Lie Behind the Lie Detector and making it publicly available for free is to help truthful persons to avoid a false positive outcome, not to help liars beat the system.

In the laboratory studies by Honts et al., about half of programmed guilty subjects were able to beat the polygraph after no more than 30 minutes of training (and, as I mentioned earlier, experienced polygarphers were not able to detect the countermeasures at better than chance levels). For persons who face a polygraph interrogation in the real world, the stakes are typically high. A person's career or even his liberty may depend on the outcome. Hence, it is, in my opinion, only prudent that someone planning to use countermeasures to protect himself against a false positive outcome should invest more than 30 minutes studying and practicing.