I am currently under investigation in the U.S. for money laundering and racketeering.  I suspect that I am under physical surveillance and that my phone calls and emails are being monitored.  The state police have asked me to take a voluntary polygraph as part of their investigation.  I have not been arrested or charged yet but I feel like that moment is coming.   

Should I take the polygraph or refuse?  I have beaten polygraphs in the past and after researching this site I am sure I can beat it again.  By beating the poly, will it clear my name so these LE guys can get off my back?

I need to communicate with some people and since my phone calls and emails are being monitored, I want to know if anyone can give advice on a technique known as "drafting."  The way drafting works is that me and the others I need to communicate with would have an anonymous email account that we would set up, maybe Protonmail or Yandex, and share the password.  We would only ever access it through Tor and save emails as drafts for each other to read and then delete them.  We would never actually send the emails.  Email providers don't store draft emails on their servers, and even if they did, Protonmail and Yandex are not U.S. companies.  Can anyone comment on how successful drafting is?

I appreciate the prompt response, George Maschke.  The only reason David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell were caught is because they, or maybe just Ms. Broadwell, did not mask their real IP addresses.  Broadwell's IP and emails were already being monitored by the feds based on some threatening emails that Broadwell sent Jill Kelly.  Therefore, when Broadwell logged into the anonymous drafting Gmail account with her real IP, the FBI simply matched up that IP to her and got a subpoena to monitor the drafting Gmail account, which had the same user login IP address, as well.  This coupled with the fact that Google is a U.S.-based company with Gmail servers in the U.S. so the FBI can take legal action to monitor Gmail accounts as necessary.  If Petraeus and Broadwell had used Tor, and only Tor, to create and access an anonymous drafting email account, they would have gotten away with it.

Usually people who get caught from their communications are caught because they did not take the proper precautions to ensure anonymity. I remember this story of a Harvard college student, Eldo Kim, who sent bomb threats through Tor.  It was not Tor that failed.  It was Kim who confessed when the police questioned him.  He was the only one using Tor on his campus and the police suspected that the campus bomb threats came from someone on the campus, so he was the prime suspect.  Law Enforcement can find out if someone is using Tor, but they have no idea what that person is doing on Tor.  If Kim had not confessed, he would have gotten away with it.


I will probably reject the idea of taking that polygraph based on your advice.  It seems it would do more harm than good.  I like your point that if the police have credible evidence, the polygraph will not help me, pass or fail.