Dan Eggen and Shankar Vedantam have an interesting piece fronting today’s WaPo on the controversial nature of polygraphs as used by the American intelligence community in employee screening.
The CIA, the FBI and other federal agencies are using polygraph machines more than ever to screen applicants and hunt for lawbreakers, even as scientists have become more certain that the equipment is ineffective in accurately detecting when people are lying. Instead, many experts say, the real utility of the polygraph machine, or “lie detector,” is that many of the tens of thousands of people who are subjected to it each year believe that it works — and thus will frequently admit to things they might not otherwise acknowledge during an interview or interrogation.
Many researchers and defense attorneys say the technology is prone to a high number of false results that have stalled or derailed hundreds of careers and have prevented many qualified applicants from joining the fight against terrorism. At the FBI, for example, about 25 percent of applicants fail a polygraph exam each year, according to the bureau’s security director.
[…]
In settings in which large numbers of employees are screened to determine whether they are spies, the polygraph produces results that are extremely problematic, according to a comprehensive 2002 review by a federal panel of distinguished scientists. The study found that if polygraphs were administered to a group of 10,000 people that included 10 spies, nearly 1,600 innocent people would fail the test — and two of the spies would pass. “Its accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies,” the panel concluded.
[…]
But even critics of the polygraph concede that it can help managers learn things about employees that would otherwise remain hidden. That aspect of polygraph testing lies at the heart of its continuing appeal, said Alan Zelicoff, a former scientist at Sandia National Laboratories who quit because he believed that polygraphs are unethical.
[…]
The subjective opinions of polygraph examiners play a huge role in whether people are said to pass or fail, said William Iacono, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota who has extensively studied the technique. As evidence, Iacono said that polygraph tests rarely find problems among senior staff members at organizations, even as 30 to 40 percent of applicants for entry-level positions fail.
Ruining the careers of sixteen percent of the innocent workforce strikes me as too high a price for catching eighty percent of the spies.
My view is undoubtedly tainted by having been among the false positives a few years back after offered a position as an FBI counterintelligence analyst. I was unable to dissuade an examiner from his view that I was being evasive on his questioning as to whether I had ever sold illegal drugs, despite the test being Yes/No, answering No, and not having ever sold, purchased, or otherwise been affiliated with illegal drugs.
The process is truly bizarre and I have spoken with a fair number of intelligence community employees who have either failed polygraphs or refused employment offers by other agencies on the grounds that they were unwilling to place their careers in the hands of a polygraph operator.
Update: Regular commenter DC Loser, an intelligence professional, recommends retired CIA officer Larry Johnson‘s post on this which observes,
Most of my friends in the intel community believe it only works against folks who have a conscience and a strongly developed sense of right and wrong. Important to remember that the traitor, Aldrich Ames, passed the polygraph even though he had sold his soul to the Soviets.
True enough. Most of the post consists of a letter from George W. Maschke, proprietor of an anti-polygraph website. It quotes John J. Furedy, a professor emeritus of psychology, as saying the polygraph “is virtually useless for differentiating the anxious-but-innocent person from the anxious-and-guilty one.”
Update 2: Elsewhere, Paul Mirengoff and Stephen Spruell dissent from the article without refuting it on the basis that it seems vaguely favorable to Mary McCarthy and is thus WaPo commie spin. Conversely, Melanie Mattson jumps on the story as evidence that “the Bushies are relying on a technology which only works once and a while and by accident? This sounds like something the anti-science crowd would appreciate.” But McCarthy can simultaneously be guilty and the polygraph not a particularly good tool for distinguishing truth tellers from liars. And, while I disagreed with the use of polygraphs in this manner long before I ever took one, the Bush administration didn’t initiate their use for this purpose.
Michael Tanji calls the poly a “voodoo box” and tells us,
A good friend effectively wasted four years in the military because he couldn’t “pass” a poly. Nothing wrong with him, he just didn’t take to the box. A well-known and distinguished former Commander apparently passed only one out of several in a 20+ year career. Did we catch a spy in one case and miss one in another? Not likely, because a botched poly is supposed lead to a more thorough investigation, the findings of which should support or refute any discrepancies in what the voodoo box says. The high-performing and highly-regarded officer got his investigation; the apparently shady Private did not. It’s a numbers game: there are plenty of Privates to go around.
True enough. It stands our system on its head, questioning people with no probable cause and then, when given a positive result, putting people in the position of having to prove their innocence. Usually, that’s not possible. Indeed, they’re typically not given a chance.
