LLPOF,
I agree with you that spies, terrorists, and other criminals could exploit the information provided on AntiPolygraph.org to pass the polygraph and obtain positions of trust from the United States Government.
However, the fact that various agencies of the executive branch of our government rely on polygraphy does not mean that polygraphy is reliable. Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences in its authoritative report,
The Polygraph and Lie Detection, warns
"Overconfidence in the polygraph--a belief in its accuracy not justified by the evidence--presents a danger to national security objectives" (
p. 219, original emphasis), elaborating at
p. 221:
Quote:Federal officials need to be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions from negative polygraph test results. Our discussions with polygraph program and counterintelligence officials in several federal agencies suggest that there is a widespread belief in this community that someone who “passes” the polygraph is “cleared” of suspicion. Acting on such a belief with the results of security screening polygraph tests could pose a danger to national security because a negative polygraph test result in a population with a low base rate, especially when the test protocol produces a very small percentage of positive test results, provides little information on deceptiveness beyond what was already known prior to the test, that the probability of true transgression is very low.
But the federal agencies that rely on polygraphy have wilfully ignored the National Academy of Sciences' warning. (See, for example, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence John P. Stenbit's 5 November 2002 memo,
"Continued Use of Polygraph Techniques.")
Note that spies like
Ignatz Theodor Griebl,
Karel Frantisek Koecher,
Larry Wu-tai Chin,
Aldrich Hazen Ames, and
Ana Belen Montes all passed the polygraph without any assistance from AntiPolygraph.org. These spies were all arguably the benificiaries of the U.S. Government's misplaced faith in the pseudoscience of polygraphy.
AntiPolygraph.org provides information on polygraph countermeasures in order to provide truthful persons a means of protecting themselves against the random error associated with this invalid procedure that is wrongly called a "test." False positive results have
caused considerable harm to the careers and reputations of many truthful, law abiding persons. I and others associated with AntiPolygraph.org find the U.S. Government's practice of branding applicants and employees as liars based on polygraph chart readings to be intolerable, and indeed, un-American.
To protect national security, the U.S. Government should stop pretending that the polygraph can detect lies. It can't. It's pseudoscientific quackery. Don't blame us for pointing out that the emperor is naked.
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Anti-Poly'ers Are a Menace to the USG (Read 4449 times)
