Continue reading ‘U.S. President Accompanied by Polygraph Operator When Traveling Abroad’ »]]>

Haruspex reading entrails

“When the president travels overseas, the Secret Service will bring along a polygraph examiner in case they need to determine quickly whether someone acting suspiciously is intent on doing harm.” So note Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady in a parenthetical remark at p. 164 of their new book, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry.

But as emeritus professor of psychology John Furedy has observed, polygraph operators can no more divine truth from the examination of polygraph charts than ancient Roman haruspices (entrail readers) could divine future events from the examination of intestines. Make believe science yields make believe security.

Continue reading ‘Secret Service Wants to Polygraph Agents Implicated in Colombia Prostitution Scandal’ »]]> Norah O’Donnell reports for CBS News that the U.S. Secret Service “wants to polygraph a number of agents and officers involved” in a scandal wherein they allegedly hired prostitutes while in Cartagena, Colombia as part of President Obama’s security detail. It should be noted, however, that the unscientific polygraph is in part responsible for the selection of personnel with such poor judgment: all Secret Service agents and uniformed officers are required to undergo to pre-employment polygraph screening.

While polygraphy has an inherent bias against truthful persons, liars can easily beat the polygraph using simple countermeasures that polygraph operators cannot detect. The Secret Service would do well to terminate its reliance on this unreliable pseudoscience.

Update: ABC News reports that the Secret Service personnel suspected of consorting with prostitutes will be “forced to submit to lie detector tests.” CBS’s earlier reporting suggested that any such “testing” would be voluntary.