well, after a year of this shit, its finally over. I failed my 4th pre-employment FBI polygraph yesterday. well, my very first one was inconclusive, but the next 3 i tanked. I have never touched a drug but dont tell these numnuts that. My blood pressure rose so i must be a doper. IF the blood pressure cuff doesnt fit, you must acquit.

I am going to make my own website detailing my experiences soon so I can tell the world my story, cause Im very pissed about it. At least I wont end up in the FBIs new $170 million case tracking system.

pillpopper,

 I went through four CI polys with NSA, and "passed"
the fifth, because they stopped asking me about
hacking into computer systems.  This shit took me over
the course of 2 1/2 years, but since I went to a
different agency, I can say f'em now !  The funny
thing is, there is no record of having passed a poly;
I guess they were trying to prevent me from using it at
a different agency.  And to finially satisfy their curiosity,
as to whether I am "master of my domain", while
looking at pornography on the Internet - no, I am not !

pillpoper

How on earth did you manage to get 3 retests from the FBI?  I would kill just to get one retest?

I'm considering applying with the Feds, so I spoke with a buddy the other day--a former state trooper and now an SA with the FBI--about the FBI polygraph. 

He said the FBI poly was the absolute WORST experience of his life, and he told me he failed the first poly but passed the second. 

He said that he failed the first one supposedly due to the drug questions--although he has never used/sold drugs. 

Anyway, he passed the second and is now FBI.

Sad, very sad.  Pill popper is correct that there is a surplus of applicants.  The FBI can fail 50% of their final crop and still conduct business as usual.

Polyfool is correct that my case was an embaressment to the FBI because I had held a very sensitive position for many years in the Department of Justice.  None of my supervisors in that Agency would give the polygraph any validity and the appeal at the time would have had to go to Mr. Ashcroft to remove me from my position.   

Someone once described the Phantom Jet of the Vietnam war as an example that if you strapped enough horsepower to a brick, it would fly.  The polygraph in my instance was the brick but they could not find enough horsepower from polygraph findings to justify questioning my living life in service for this country for many decades.

Just because I "passed" my third polygraph does not mean I give any faith in its powers in pre-screening.

It saddens me so much to see when a truthful "failure" post on this site.  I know the feeling.  I hated the feeling.  I will never find a person of integrity who thinks their reputation is an acceptable casualty of "national security."

Regards

Regarding the FBI's 50% failure rate for applicants, I wouldn't have the slightest problem with that except for one thing: the false-positive rate.  If polygraph "tests" were fifty percent accurate at detecting actual falsehoods (not just at measuring physiological changes in one's body, but at actually detecting deception) and also had a ZERO percent chance of rendering a false positive, then I would be more willing to support it.  Then I would be more willing to endorse the theory that so many pro-polygraph people support, that of: "It's the best tool we have and it's better than nothing."

If there was absolutely no chance of a false positive, and at least some small chance of actually detecting a lie, then I would agree that it was better than nothing.  Then it might make sense to use a polygraph as a very small part of pre-employment screening.  In that specific instance, a person who passed the polygraph might not have been telling the truth, but a person who failed would certainly have been lying.

But as soon as you allow for even the most remote possibility that a subject can tell the absolute truth and still be judged to have "failed" the test, in my opinion the entire test process instantly becomes virtually worthless.  Actually, it's worse than worthless, because people and governmental agencies will still rely on it even though it generates data which can only be considered useless.

In my opinion, the only way to look at the results of a polygraph are as follows:
- The subject "passed."  That must mean that he wasn't deceptive, or that he used countermeasures successfully, or that the machine and the examiner failed to detect his deception...  OR...
- The subject "failed."  That must mean that the subject was lying, or that he was using countermeasures and got caught, or was completely truthful but the machine/examiner interpreted the results as "deception indicated."

I think that if the results of any "test" are broken down like that most people can see that, regardless of the results, you don't really know anything more after the "test" than you did before the test.

Of course, most of this is moot since the polygraph doesn't detect lies or deceit anyway.  But even if you generously agreed to the polygrapher's claim that "people respond in known ways when they lie" the utility of a test that can render three results (DI, NDI, and inconclusive), NONE of which are rendered with an accuracy rate even approaching 100%, is zero.