According to the article below, "when applicants and employees believe they have been unfairly rejected, however, it can be almost impossible to appeal. According to attorney Mark Zaid, some 300 employees of the CIA remain in "polygraph limbo," denied promotions and overseas assignments while they await investigations of their 
appeals. But the agency has little motivation to conduct  views that could expose the inaccuracy of polygraphs, and some employees have waited for years without a resolution. "It is essentially the end of their career," says Zaid."

1) would those 300 employees passed the polygraph before they worked for the CIA? Were there changes between the time they passed the polygraph to 5 or 10 years later when procedures were changed or not?

2) If an employee in any agency appeal the result, does she/he win sometimes? Do current employees have "more rights" than applicants who were turned down by polygraph tests?

3) Finally, someone should do an economic impact study on those who failed the polygraph.



http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2002/43/ma_148_01.html

Lie Detector Roulette
Everyone admits that polygraphs are unreliable. So why are government 
employees subjected to tests that can ruin their careers?

Brendan I. Koerner
November/December, 2002

No problem, he shrugged. After all, Roche had already passed three 
polygraphs over his police career. But not long after he arrived at the 
Secret Service's field office in San Francisco, things started to go awry. 
Roche was hooked up to a computer set to monitor his breathing and 
perspiration, and says he answered each question as truthfully as possible. 
But as the seven-hour session wore on, the polygrapher grew increasingly 
angry with Roche's responses, insisting that his physiological reactions 
"were not in the acceptable range." He accused the veteran cop of 
withholding information about his drug use, his criminal history, and his 
honesty on the job. The more strenuously Roche protested his innocence, the 
more confrontational the examiner became. "At one point, he's sticking his 
finger right in my face," recalls Roche, "and he's yelling stuff like 'Have 
you ever stolen a car? You better not have!'"

His pulse racing and his sweat glands in overdrive due to the bullying, 
Roche didn't have a prayer. His polygraph results were labeled "deceptive," 
he says, and he was abruptly bounced from the applicant pool. If he ever 
wants to apply for another government job, he'll have to admit to failing 
the Secret Service's polygraph -- a black mark that will likely disqualify 
him from federal employment for life. "I was washed up at that point," he 
says, fighting back tears. "To lose your career over a polygraph -- my God, 
it's devastating."

Puzzled as to why he failed, Roche began to investigate the history and 
validity of lie detector technology. He soon discovered an enormous 
community of people like himself who blame flawed polygraph results for 
derailing their careers -- as well as a host of reputable scientists, like 
John Fuerdy of the University of Toronto, who dismiss lie detectors as no 
more valuable than "the reading of entrails" by ancient Roman priests. 
Studies have long shown that polygraphs are remarkably unreliable, 
particularly for screening job applicants. As early as 1965, a congressional 
committee concluded that there was no evidence to support the polygraph's 
validity; a 1997 survey in the Journal of Applied Psychology put the test's 
accuracy rate at only 61 percent. Polygraph evidence is generally 
inadmissible in court because, as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas 
noted in his majority opinion in the 1998 case U.S. v. Scheffer, "there is 
simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable." Indeed, the lie 
detector is so untrustworthy that Congress passed the Employee Polygraph 
Protection Act in 1988, making it illegal for private-sector employers to 
compel workers to take polygraph exams. Prior to the law's passage, 
according to Senate testimony, an estimated 400,000 workers suffered adverse 
consequences each year after they were wrongly flunked on polygraphs.

But Congress exempted government agencies from the ban on lie detectors, and 
"going on the box" remains a key part of the hiring process for the FBI, 
Secret Service, and hundreds of other federal, state, and local agencies. At 
last count, 62 percent of the nation's police departments require job 
applicants to take a polygraph test -- up from only 19 percent in 1964. 
Polygraphs are also widely used to ferret out spies and to wring confessions 
out of military personnel suspected of criminal offenses. All told, the 
federal government now has at least 20 polygraph programs staffed by more 
than 500 examiners, and the CIA and FBI alone have tested at least 40,000 
job applicants and employees over the years. "The polygraph is clearly one 
of our most effective investigative tools," the Department of Defense 
reported to Congress last year.

By relying so heavily on such an unreliable device, however, government 
agencies have jeopardized the reputations and careers of honest employees 
and job applicants. A study in the journal Polygraph found that 1 in 4 
applicants for jobs as police officers is disqualified solely on the basis 
of their polygraph results. Federal agencies report a similar failure rate: 
According to a 1997 letter submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee by 
Donald Kerr, then assistant director of the FBI's Laboratory Division, 20 
percent of the bureau's job applicants were "de- termined to be withholding 
pertinent information" on lie detector tests and were denied federal 
employment. Even if the machine is wrong only 2 percent of the time, as the 
nation's leading trade group of polygraph examiners claims, the government 
is routinely denying jobs and promotions to thousands of people who are 
guilty of nothing more than nervousness.

Given the polygraph's dubious record, resistance to the lie detector has 
started to stir. AntiPolygraph.org, a website devoted to the test's 
inaccuracy, has attracted more than 170,000 visitors over the past two 
years, many of them disgruntled polygraph subjects. More than a dozen 
plaintiffs -- Bill Roche among them -- have filed a lawsuit in federal court 
seeking to have polygraphs declared unconstitutional for hiring purposes. In 
May, the Philadelphia Police Department stopped using lie detectors to 
screen applicants, on the grounds that too many qualified candidates were 
being disqualified by unreliable polygraph scores. And in recent months some 
federal employees have taken an increasingly vocal stand against the 
gov-ernment's decision to conduct polygraphs of scientists who oversee the 
nation's nuclear stockpile. "If this was just about the government wasting 
$10 million a year on polygraphs, I'd just say, 'Eh?'" says Alan Zelicoff, a 
senior scientist at the Center for National Security and Arms Control in 
Albuquerque. "But this is about people getting hurt."

Monitoring physiological cues for signs of deception is a concept that 
predates polygraphs by centuries. Suspected criminals in ancient China were 
once fed handfuls of dry rice during their interrogations, on the premise 
that liars tend to have dry mouths; if the rice stuck to their tongues, they 
were deemed to be untruthful.

The father of the modern lie detector was Dr. William Marston, a Harvard 
psychologist perhaps better known for creating the comic-book character 
Wonder Woman under the nom de plume "Charles Moulton." Marston, who built 
his first primitive polygraph unit in 1915, believed that lies were 
invariably accompanied by an uptick in blood pressure. He often used his 
contraption during marital counseling sessions, just as other American 
scientists of the age relied on electroshock, handwriting analysis, and 
other "modern" techniques thought to be far superior to the mere observation 
of humans.

Today's polygraphs typically measure subjects' respiratory rate, heart rate, 
and "electrodermal activity" (fingertip sweat) as they're interviewed. The 
paper scrolls and whirring needles of bygone police dramas have been 
replaced by laptop computers. But the underlying premise of the Chinese rice 
technique -- that lying spurs physiological changes -- remains the core 
theory behind the technology.

That assumption is the polygraph's chief flaw, says Drew Richardson, a 
retired polygraph researcher for the FBI who is now an outspoken critic of 
the test. "Blood pressure, respiration, and so forth are all physiological 
parameters which we have been able to measure very accurately for a very 
long period of time," he says. "People confuse the fact that we can 
accurately measure these with the fact that we can't accurately connect 
these with emotional causes." Indeed, no study exists to support a universal 
correlation between, say, sweaty palms and prevarication. And a polygraph 
cannot differentiate between anxiety caused by dishonesty and anxiety caused 
by other factors.

One of the most common of those factors is the aggressive tactics of many 
polyg- raphers. Job applicants are routinely treated like criminals, grilled 
for hours with repetitive questions about extramarital affairs or drug use. 
One Secret Service applicant who asked not to be identified recalls being 
assailed with drug questions again and again, at one point being accused of 
snorting cocaine prior to the exam. When he left the room after over two 
hours, he recalls being "filled with the worst anger I have ever 
experienced." He was disqualified from the selection process; he asked to be 
retested, but the Secret Service did not respond to his request.

Another fundamental problem with lie detectors is how operators establish 
what a lie looks like. Subjects are peppered with a variety of "control 
questions" to which the examiner anticipates a dishonest answer. Those who 
insist, for example, that they never stole something as a child or never 
tried illegal drugs in their youth are assumed to be lying -- and the 
examiner then uses those responses as a baseline for detecting deceptive 
answers to other questions. George Maschke, a doctoral student at UCLA who 
applied to be an FBI special agent in 1994, was shocked when his polygrapher 
accused him of "deception with regard to each and every relevant question," 
including whether he'd ever sold narcotics, contacted foreign agents, or 
divulged classified information. He blames the test failure on his response 
to a control question about whether he had ever driven while under the 
influence of alcohol. "His assumption was that everyone who drinks will 
eventually drive when doubtful about their sobriety," Maschke recalls. "But 
I was always very meticulous -- I always waited so many hours so that I 
would be completely sober. So I felt quite comfortable answering that 
question 'no.'" The physiological reaction associated with that answer 
became the baseline for a suspected lie, so all of Maschke's subsequent 
truthful responses were judged deceptive.

"I figured I was in a small minority of people who fell afoul of the 
polygraph," says Maschke. But the response to his book, The Lie Behind the 
Lie Detector, and to the website he created, AntiPolygraph.org, gave him an 
indication of how widespread the problem is. Many job applicants use the 
website to share "countermeasures" to ensure positive results -- some not 
wishing to put their fate in a polygrapher's unpredictable hands, others 
perhaps simply wanting to get away with lying. Taking measured breaths, 
biting the tongue, and thinking anxious thoughts during the control 
questions are all common -- and effective -- tactics.

Polygraphs not only falsely accuse honest people of lying -- they also fail 
to detect skilled liars. Convicted spies Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames 
both passed repeated lie detector exams during their careers as double 
agents. A former Border Patrol agent who was rejected for a job with the Los 
Angeles Police Department after failing a polygraph says his fellow recruits 
swapped "tip sheets" on how to beat the test -- in the hallways right 
outside the interview rooms. "I've talked to people who were less than 
truthful on the test, but employed countermeasures and breezed through it," 
the former agent says. "What's happening is there's this whole antagonistic 
environment of 'I've got to beat them because they're trying to screw me.'"

There are no government statistics on how many people fail polygraphs each 
year, and those who seek legal recourse rarely succeed. In fact, many 
federal and local agencies have taken steps to prevent legal challenges to 
their methods. Before applicants to the lapd take their polygraphs, for 
example, they must sign a waiver agreeing not to question the examiner's 
expertise or judgment in the event of a lawsuit. That may be because many 
attorneys would take issue with the training of many professional 
polygraphers: In many states, a 10-week course and a passing grade on a 
written exam is all that's required to obtain certification.

Government polygraphers readily acknowledge that their exams are not 
faultless, since humans must ultimately interpret the physiological data. 
FBI Special Agent Thom-as Lewis, a polygraph expert, testified in federal 
court in 1996 that he had a "difficult time" agreeing that the process is a 
science. "In the FBI, we're taught it's an art," he said.

But polygraphers also say that the public's innate trust in the reliability 
of the equipment, reinforced through countless cop dramas, makes the lie 
detector an indispensable tool for extracting confessions. If people believe 
they can't fool the machine, the theory goes, they'll confess before they're 
actually trapped in a lie. According to a recent Pentagon report, roughly 90 
percent of the information it obtains during security screenings comes from 
confessions prompted by lie detector tests.

That's small comfort to job applicants who have been wrongly rejected based 
on a polygraph exam. Flunking a lie detector test has long-term 
consequences: Fail one agency's polygraph, particularly at the federal 
level, and other employment opportunities immediately evaporate. Maschke 
recalls a law student named Mark Doyal who was rejected for a job with the 
FBI in 1996 after failing a polygraph. (Doyal says he was falsely accused of 
lying about drug use merely because he had attended Southwest Texas State 
University, known as a "party school.") Later, when Doyal applied for a job 
with the Secret Service, his examiner asked whether he had ever failed a 
polygraph. When Doyal responded "yes," he was immediately unhooked from the 
machine and sent home; two months later, he received a rejection letter 
stating that he was "no longer competitive with the other agent applicants."

When applicants and employees believe they have been unfairly rejected, 
however, it can be almost impossible to appeal. The former Border Patrol 
agent who flunked the LAPD polygraph recalls the reaction of his examiner 
when he asked how he could contest his rejection: "He just looked at me like 
I was from outer space." According to attorney Mark Zaid, some 300 employees 
of the CIA remain in "polygraph limbo," denied promotions and overseas 
assignments while they await investigations of their appeals. But the agency 
has little motivation to conduct reviews that could expose the inaccuracy of 
polygraphs, and some employees have waited for years without a resolution. 
"It is essentially the end of their career," says Zaid.

In many cases, it appears that agencies are using polygraphs as a substitute 
for more costly and time-consuming background checks. The Aldrich Ames case, 
in particular, was an embarrassment for the CIA, which passed the notorious 
double agent on two separate polygraphs. During his nine years as a Russian 
mole, Ames spent lavishly on luxury items and an opulent residence. A simple 
stroll by his house would have sparked suspicion in any competent background 
investigator -- but the CIA trusted the polygraph. In a letter from prison, 
Ames derided the polygraph as an ineffectual substitute for background 
investigations, saying it "has done little more than create confusion, 
ambiguity, and mistakes."

The FBI's polygraph program has similarly failed to yield any moles. But it 
has ruined careers, most famously in the case of counterintelligence officer 
Mark Mallah.

In 1995, Mallah, an FBI special agent since 1987, was polygraphed as part of 
the Bureau's routine security screening. He was found to be deceptive when 
he denied ever having had unauthorized contact with foreign officials, and 
was summoned to Washington for two days of additional testing. His home was 
subsequently raided; he was placed under 24-hour surveillance; and several 
of his friends and relatives were asked to take polygraphs, too. The 
20-month investigation ended with no charges being filed; Mallah resigned 
from the FBI shortly afterward with a clean record. Mallah's case is 
frequently invoked by critics of the Department of Energy's two-year-old 
plan to subject at least 20,000 of its scientists and engineers to 
polygraphs. Those who refuse the examination will be stripped of their 
security clearances. The testing has sparked widespread dissent at Sandia 
National Laboratory and other critical research venues. In a September 1999 
letter to then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, Rep. Ellen Tauscher 
(D-Calif.) fretted that "even if polygraph tests match their optimistic 
expectations of 95 percent proficiency, 50 scientists out of every thousand 
tested could be put in a career-threatening predicament by registering a 
false positive." Despite the protests, the tests at Sandia are now 
proceeding at an estimated rate of four per day -- meaning that screening of 
all employees should be complete by 2022. The process has yet to uncover any 
spies, but some federal employees report that it has hurt morale. "People 
are losing faith in what they're doing here, which is building and 
maintaining nuclear weapons," says Zelicoff, the government scientist who 
has protested the screening. "If that's not affecting national security, I 
don't know what is."

Some of those who have promoted polygraphs in the past have changed their 
tune when faced with the prospect of taking a lie detector test themselves. 
In August, several members of the House and Senate intelligence committees 
refused to submit to polygraphs as part of an FBI investigation of who 
leaked classified information regarding the September 11 attacks. "I don't 
know who among us would take a lie detector test," says Senator Richard 
Shelby (R-Ala.). "They're not even admissible in court." Shelby's reticence 
was an about-face from his stance two years ago, when he spearheaded the 
expansion of the Department of Energy's polygraph program as the only 
effective way of tracking down moles.

Whether the government will continue to have faith in the polygraph depends 
largely on an upcoming report from the National Academy of Sciences, which 
is intended to be the definitive evaluation of the test's validity as a 
screening tool. If the academy echoes other studies that have found 
polygraphs unreliable, it could lead to a scaling back of lie detectors.