stoppolyabusenow wrote on Dec 6
th, 2007 at 2:49am:
I don't think that this person is looking for a lawyer to be his hero. I think he just wants to clear his good name and help put a stop to this pseudoscience bullshit. There is no other way to fight these $%#^idiots, except through the courts and unfortunately you need a lawyer to do that. If there was some way that I could make a difference and put a stop to the wholesale abuse of government employees and applicants that doesn't involve the courts, let me know and I'm there. Someday we will all look back on this, like our parents looked back at the McCarthy era. People will say with disbelief, "Can you believe they actually did this to people? What a bunch of morons." But, until that day comes, we are stuck with this rampant injustice and the lawyers who deserve to make a living more than polygraphers. I don't know how they can even sleep at night. Anyone who can conduct polygraph examinations on people who are not criminal suspects has not morals.
Here we are over ten years later, and what’s happened? Innocent lives are being ruined more than ever by power hungry DIA officials on a witch hunt for the next Snowden. The Insider Threat Task Force has morphed in to an entire industry (see my other posts under Polygraph Policy on this topic), which relies heavily on nothing more than a cheap parlor trick known as the polygraph creditability assessment.
These days, the polygraph lobby is deeply ingrained in politics and the old saying, “good enough for government work” seems to be the collective mantra in D.C. The National Center for Credibility Assessments was recently quoted as saying that it was acceptable to have some false positives – “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” they said. Well, good enough is not good enough anymore. When you dishonestly ruin someone’s reputation, career and their life with it, you’ve gone too far. All those responsible for allowing this abuse to continue have egg on their faces and on their hands.
As we all know, people can “fail” the polygraph for several reasons. These are called false positives, and happen at a rate of 10-50%, depending on who you ask. The point is, it is an indisputable fact that there are reasons that can cause ones physiological reactions to mimic a “lie reaction”.
In my case, I had already been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder – a disorder that was exacerbated by being forced to undergo five polygraph interrogations in three years. Because of my uncontrollable anxiousness, I was overwhelmed with fear. Fear of failure. When the failure will result in terrifying consequences, this “fear reaction” is intensified. Once I was accused, it was impossible for me to suppress that reaction – which I re-experienced with increasing intensity over 2,000 times.
This fear reaction, is fraudulently being labeled as a lie reaction by senior Department of Defense officials. They have also perjured themselves in federal documents. It is reprehensible that we permit a policy that condones using the polygraph results by themselves, to rule against, or to punish anyone. Especially, when there are approved and relevant regulations that prohibit doing so in the first place. It is a pernicious form of abuse to impugn ones character, to label them untrustworthy and a vulnerability.
Now is the time to stop the fraud, waste and abuse known as the polygraph. Let’s all work together to remove the government’s exemption to use this scientifically unreliable polygraph test to punish, abuse or judge an otherwise innocent individual.