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From
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Article19
April
2001
Polygraphs: the truth
by Howard Fienberg
Following the arrest on 25 February 2001 of Robert Philip Hanssen, who was accused of
spying on the USA for Russia, US attorney general John Ashcroft and Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) director Louis Freeh declared
a tightening of national security measures.
The FBI plans to require polygraph testing of many more agents with access to
important secrets, as is the policy in the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department
of Defense and the National Security Agency. Polygraphs
are also used to varying degrees for screening job candidates in the public and
private sectors, and in both private and criminal investigations.
Polygraphs are such familiar instruments that few question the validity or efficacy of
polygraph testing. But how well does the device really detect lies?
The US Department of Energy administered it to American physicist Wen Ho Lee when
first accusing him of leaking nuclear secrets to the Chinese. He passed the test, but
the FBI subsequently reviewed the same test results a
nd declared Lee a liar. Convicted spy Aldrich Ames passed numerous polygraph
examinations over the years, while he was also passing CIA secrets to Russia.
The American Polygraph Association in 2000 cited 12 studies demonstrating an average
accuracy of 98 percent (1). On the other hand, University of Minnesota psychologist
William Iacono accuses polygraph examiners of 'wishf
ul thinking' - 'almost no published peer-reviewed scientific papers exist that bear
out the accuracy of current polygraph techniques' (2).
That may be why the American Medical Association and the American Psychological
Association contend that polygraphs yield little more than a 50/50 chance of success.
Data is hard to come by. The false positive rate could
be anywhere from one percent to 20 percent. The National Research Council recently
convened a panel on polygraphs to try to settle the matter, but its report is not
expected until at least the end of 2001.
There is a burgeoning industry of books and webpages promising to teach how to fool
polygraphs
So what is the precise problem with polygraph testing? According to critics, it lies
not in the hardware, but in the interpretation of the test results.
Using a polygraph as a lie detector involves studying a subject's physical response to
specific questions. The series of questions asked usually starts with queries
unrelated to whatever matter is being investigated in or
der to establish a baseline of physical reading, including blood pressure, sweat gland
activity and breathing. Then other questions more directly address the areas of
suspicion.
But interpreting the results of the exam is a subjective task and confounding factors
are numerous. A fair number of fearful but innocent subjects could produce false
positives and psychologically-savvy or unstable guilty
subjects could yield false negatives. And there is a burgeoning industry of books and
webpages promising to teach how to fool polygraphs.
With an error rate that defies calculation, polygraph tests are much more useful as
tools of intimidation than as instruments of truth. Experts agree that, faults aside,
the tests can convince guilty parties to confess wh
o would otherwise have remained stoical. But few polygraph examiners speculate on what
effect this intimidation has on the innocent.
Previous big stories, like the case of Wen Ho Lee, elicited a number of reports on the
doubts scientists and judges held about the effectiveness of polygraph testing. Since
those doubts have not abated, it is strange that
so little skeptical attention was paid to polygraphs this time around.
Howard Fienberg is a research analyst with the non-profit non-partisan think-tank
Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), http://www.stats.org/
in Washington, DC.
Related links:
American Polygraph Association
http://www.polygraph.org/
Stop Polygraphs
http://www.stopolygraph.com/
(1) Denver Post, 2 May 2000
(2) Boston Globe, 15 August 2000
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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