Feds Target Instructors of Polygraph-Beating Methods 282
schwit1 writes "Federal agents have launched a criminal investigation of instructors who claim they can teach job applicants how to pass lie detector tests as part of the Obama administration's unprecedented crackdown on security violators and leakers. The criminal inquiry, which hasn't been acknowledged publicly, is aimed at discouraging criminals and spies from infiltrating the U.S. government by using the polygraph-beating techniques, which are said to include controlled breathing, muscle tensing, tongue biting and mental arithmetic. So far, authorities have targeted at least two instructors, one of whom has pleaded guilty to federal charges, several people familiar with the investigation told McClatchy. Investigators confiscated business records from the two men, which included the names of as many as 5,000 people who'd sought polygraph-beating advice. U.S. agencies have determined that at least 20 of them applied for government and federal contracting jobs, and at least half of that group was hired, including by the National Security Agency. By attempting to prosecute the instructors, federal officials are adopting a controversial legal stance that sharing such information should be treated as a crime and isn't protected under the First Amendment in some circumstances."
Bad summary is bad. (Score:5, Informative)
They aren't arresting people for just teaching the methods. The instructor they arrested had trained two undercover agents posing as criminals that wanted to lie on the exam. One was a drug trafficker and the other a correctional officer that smuggled drugs into prison and received sexual favors from an underage girl. The instructor taught them how to cover up those crimes. Seems pretty simple to me. If you say you want to rob a bank, and I give you a gun to do it I'm criminally liable for it. Why isn't fraud the same? It would be one thing if the instructor didn't know they were criminals, but he did. The summary makes it sound as if they're wantonly arresting people.
20th Century Witchcraft (Score:5, Informative)
Over the years I've seen 3 investigative reports on TV, and read many articles on the topic. It all comes down to the same thing: The polygraph is just a stage prop in an interrogation, for the purpose of scaring the ignorant into confessing. Here is Penn & Tellers report:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NLf7XwLpyQ [youtube.com]
Re:Be interesting if the course were a book (Score:5, Informative)
A quick search on Amazon turned up:
How to Beat a Lie Detector Test (Secrets Series) by Steve Gillman (Jul 20, 2010)
Beat the box: The insider's guide to outwitting the lie detector by Vlad Kalashnikov (1983)
Deception Detection: Winning The Polygraph Game by Charles Clifton (May 1991)
Streisand Effect, anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA: "Charles Honts, a psychology professor at Boise State University, said laboratory studies he’d conducted showed that countermeasures could be taught in one-on-one sessions to about 25 percent of the people who were tested. Polygraphers have no reliable way to detect someone who’s using the techniques, he said. In fact, he concluded that a significant number of people are wrongfully accused."
Mirror these sites and anything else you feel relevant
http://www.wikihow.com/Cheat-a-Polygraph-Test-(Lie-Detector) [wikihow.com]
https://antipolygraph.org/articles/article-034.shtml [antipolygraph.org]
Re:Only if they have a phrenology test (Score:2, Informative)
Phrenology is a bad example for crackpot science: in a time when all psychology was still stated in religious terms such as "soul" it was one of the first attempts to come up with something rational & measurable.
Phrenology turned out to be wrong, because it was falsifiable. Mainstream psychology at that time wasn't even wrong.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Be interesting if the course were a book (Score:4, Informative)
"Applied Cryptography" used exactly this method when crypto algorithms were subject to export controls.
You couldn't export say the source code for DES, but you could include the source code in a book on crypto, as first amendment protections applied.
The first amendment even protected use of an OCR friendly font for the source code.
Re:Liars to fedgov ARE criminal (Score:5, Informative)
Note, however, that is it not a crime for a federal agent to lie to you. Symmetry does not apply.