Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has proposed polygraph screening for members of Congress who receive CIA briefings. Susan Crabtree reports for The Hill:
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wants fellow lawmakers who receive classified CIA briefings to submit to polygraph tests.
“We should have a very high standard for those who are briefed by CIA — to make sure the information isn’t compromised and [lawmakers] who are briefed are telling the truth about what they’ve been told,” he said. “Fact-finding and oversight is only as good as the group of people able to do it.”
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Issa said he first believed all members of Congress with oversight over the CIA should submit to polygraph tests during former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s (R-Calif.) bribery scandal that ultimately landed him in jail. Issa, the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, won a seat on the Intelligence panel after Cunningham resigned his seat in Congress and pleaded guilty to taking $2 million in bribes in a criminal conspiracy involving at least three defense contractors.
Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking member on Intelligence, quickly shot down the idea of forcing members to submit to polygraph tests, arguing that constitutional separation-of-powers protections would prevent the FBI or the CIA from administering the test to federal lawmakers. Hoesktra, an outspoken defender of the agency, had spent weeks hammering Pelosi over her charges that the CIA lied in its congressional briefings.
“We’re not talking about leaks — that’s a very different issue,” he said. “[The idea of polygraphs] open[s] a whole series of separation-of-powers questions. The FBI cannot be evaluating the people who manage them.”
Issa said he believed that Congress could develop and administer its own polygraphs.
Rep. Issa’s assumption that polygraph screening increases security is deeply flawed. As the National Academy of Sciences has confirmed, polygraphy has no scientific basis. It’s inherently biased against the truthful, yet easily fooled through the use of simple, readily available countermeasures.
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), a member of the Intelligence panel, was even more blunt.
“Cut me some slack,” he said when asked whether he believed members on the Intelligence panel should submit to polygraph tests. “We take an oath to uphold the Constitution when we’re elected.”
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But military, intelligence, and law enforcement officers subject to polygraph screening also take an oath to uphold the Constitution when they are hired. That doesn’t immunize them from having their honesty and integrity assessed through the pseudoscience of polygraphy.
If members of Congress are unwilling to subject themselves to polygraph screening, then they should close the giant loophole in the 1988 Employee Polygraph Protection Act that allows federal, state, and local government agencies to use this voodoo science on applicants and employees.
In a commentary addressing the case of retired CIA polygrapher John F. Sullivan, who is suing the CIA after failing a polygraph test for post-retirement contract employment, Congressional Quarterly National Security editor Jeff Stein, himself a veteran Army Intelligence case officer, proposes that CIA polygraphers — who “claim to be able to read the inner thoughts” of others — should themselves “undergo regular psychiatric tests.” Perhaps he’s onto something.
On Friday, 20 March 2009, AntiPolygraph.org received a communication from a lawyer for NCS Pearson, Inc. demanding the removal of a post from our message board that purports to list the first 75 questions of the 567-question Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test 2 (MMPI-2). (A seemingly knowledgable poster on the message board maintains that the questions are not from the MMPI-2, but from the older MMPI.)
Many government agencies in the United States use the MMPI-2 to screen applicants for employment, so it is of considerable public interest. The post, made some three years ago, initiated one of the longest discussions on our message board–one that remains active with over 260 posts to date. Continue reading ‘AntiPolygraph.org Receives (and Rejects) a Copyright Takedown Request’ »
In an oral history posted on YouTube, musician Tom Henry recounts the story of how, as a young Navy seaman, he was caught with a pound of marijuana in his locker, but escaped punishment after fooling the lie detector:
The technique Tom thought of for fooling the lie detector (dissociation) wasn’t very sophisticated. But it evidently worked against what, given the time (1966) was very likely a Relevent/Irrelevant polygraph “test.” For more on various polygraph techniques and how they can be manipulated, see The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF).
Tom Henry’s story helps highlight the foolhardiness of relying on polygraph results. For more background on how Mr. Henry came to have a pound of marijuana in his locker, see his preceding video, Busted for Pot.
Israeli lie detector company Nemesysco has issued a press release responding to Professors Anders Eriksson and Francisco Lacerda’s article, “Charlatanry in Speech Science: A Problem to Be Taken Seriously,” which laid bare in devastating detail the pseudoscientific nature of Nemesysco’s lie detection “technology.” It should be noted that Nemesysco’s press release opens with a misleading characterization of Erksson & Lacerda’s article:
We wish to clarify our position with regard to the so-called ‘scientific research’ written by Professors Lacerda and Eriksson and published in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law in December 2007, but later withdrawn.
In fact, the article has not been withdrawn, rescinded, or otherwise disavowed by the journal that published it. Rather, the publisher (rather cravenly, in our opinion) withdrew the on-line availability of the article in response to legal threats from Nemesysco’s lawyers. For background, including part of the correspondence between Nemesysco and the publisher, see Nemesysco Founder Amir Liberman Is a Charlatan on this blog.
The “Ministry of Truth” blog, which has been following the saga particularly as it pertains to the use of Nemesysco’s lie detection software in the United Kingdom (where it is marketed as “Voice Risk Analysis”), provides a point-by-point critique of Nemesysco’s press release.
Alexis Madrigal writes for Wired.com about what is reportedly the first attempt to have fMRI lie detector results admitted in court:
Defense attorneys are for the first time submitting a controversial next-generation lie-detection test as evidence in criminal court.
In an upcoming juvenile-sex-abuse case in San Diego, the defense is hoping to get an fMRI scan, which shows brain activity based on oxygen levels, admitted to prove the abuse didn’t happen.
The technology is used widely in brain research, but hasn’t been fully tested as a lie-detection method. To be admitted into court, any technique has to be “generally accepted” within the scientific community.
The company that did the brain scan, No Lie MRI, claims their test is over 90 percent accurate, but some scientists and lawyers are skeptical.
“The studies so far have been very interesting. I think they deserve further research. But the technology is very new, with very little research support, and no studies done in realistic situations,” Hank Greely, the head of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford, wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com.
Dee J. Hall reports for the Wisconson State Journal that “Dr.” E. Gary Baker, the faux Ph.D. who markets what he styles a “Digital Voice Stress Analyzer” to law enforcement agencies, has lost the Jefferson, Wisconsin Police Department as a customer:
Jefferson police cancel training on voice-stress analyzer
By DEE J. HALL
608-2523-6132
dhall@madison.com
The city of Jefferson Police Department has cancelled a training session on how to use a controversial voice-stress analyzer after the Wisconsin State Journal raised questions about the technology and the qualifications of the business owner scheduled to conduct the training.
Voice-stress analysis is used by some law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin, including the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, to detect “microtremors” in the voice that backers of the technology say indicates speakers are stressed and therefore answering questions deceptively.
“If everything has been exhausted in investigative techniques and they have a suspect or someone they want to eliminate as a suspect, it (CVSA) has been used,” Madson said, adding that the technology has prompted confessions from suspects. “The tool works, as far as I’m concerned.”
Detective Sergeant Tim Madson is badly misinformed. The existing peer reviewed research suggests that voice stress analyzers perform at roughly chance levels of accuracy. While these devices might be useful for scaring confessions out of naive and gullible persons, they have no scientific basis and are no more to be relied upon than a colander wired to a photocopier with a sheet of paper saying “He’s Lying” on the glass paten. Continue reading ‘Baker DVSA Loses a Customer’ »
You’ve heard of the polygraph. Now the US Government is seeking to develop a “smellograph.” UPI Homeland and National Security Editor Shaun Waterman reports that the Department of Homeland Security is funding a “proof of concept” study into whether odors emitted by the human body can be used to determine whether a person is lying:
DHS wants to use human body odor as biometric identifier, clue to deception
Published: March 9, 2009 at 3:35 PM
By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
WASHINGTON, March 9 (UPI) — The U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans to study the possibility that human body odor could be used to tell when people are lying or to identify individuals in the same way that fingerprints can.
In a federal procurement document posted Friday on the Web, the department’s Science and Technology Directorate said it would conduct an “outsourced, proof-of-principle study to determine if human odor signatures can serve as an indicator of deception. … As a secondary goal, this study will examine … human odor samples for evidence to support the theory that an individual can be identified by that individual’s odor signature.”
The procurement announcement, titled “Human Odor as a Biometric for Deception” is available here. It should be noted that while they didn’t sniff for liars, the East German secret police had similar ideas about identifying people by their odor and maintained a vast “smell register” of glass tubes with cloth swatches storing for future reference the “odor signatures” of dissidents. The scheme didn’t work particularly well. Do we really want DHS to be emulating the Stasi?
Officials said that the work was at a very early stage, but the announcement brought criticism from civil liberties advocates who said it showed the department’s priorities were misplaced.
The procurement notice said the department is already “conducting experiments in deceptive behavior and collecting human odor samples” and that the research it hopes to fund “will consist primarily of the analysis and study of the human odor samples collected to determine if a deception indicator can be found.”
“This research has the potential for enhancing our ability to detect individuals with harmful intent,” the notice said. “A positive result from this proof-of-principle study would provide evidence that human odor is a useful indicator for certain human behaviors and, in addition, that it may be used as a biometric identifier.”
DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa told United Press International that “proof of concept” work was the very earliest stage of technological development.
The directorate “is trying to determine what factors of human behavior and chemistry can provide clues to the intent to deceive,” she said, adding that the work would be carried out by the Federally Funded Research and Development Center run by the non-profit Mitre Corp., which conducts cutting-edge research for U.S. military, homeland security and intelligence agencies.
Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty project, told UPI that the plan showed the department had “misplaced priorities.”
“The history of DHS’ deployment of these technologies has been one colossal failure after another,” he said. “There is no lie detector. This research has been a long, meandering journey, which has taken us down one blind alley after another.”
Steinhardt added that even well-established biometric-identity technologies like fingerprinting have resulted in individuals being inaccurately identified, like Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, who got an apology from the FBI after being wrongfully accused of having had a hand in the 2004 Madrid rail bombings.
“None of the biometrics for identity have worked very well, with the possible exception of DNA,” he said, adding that even fingerprint evidence was “increasingly being challenged in courts around the country.”
“This shows the misplaced priorities (of DHS),” he said. “The government doesn’t need to take us down another blind alley.”
Steinhardt is right, and given the current financial crisis, this technological flight of fancy should get the budgetary axe.
Recent scientific research shows that so-called volatile organic compounds present in human sweat, saliva and urine can be analyzed using a technique known as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.
Research published by the Royal Society in London in 2006 found “a substantial number of marker compounds (in human sweat) that can potentially differentiate individuals or groups.”
Researchers took five samples each from 179 individuals over a 10-week period and analyzed them, finding hundreds of chemical markers that remained more or less constant for each individual over time.
An analysis of these compounds “found strong evidence for individual (odor) fingerprints,” the researchers concluded.
However, they warned that some individuals appear to have less distinctive odors than others, adding that “the reason for the variation in distinctiveness is unclear.” More importantly, some individuals’ odors changed during the course of the study. “Not all subjects had consistent marker compounds over time, which might be due to physiological, dietary or other changes,” the researchers concluded.
The researchers also cautioned that some of these marker compounds might be “exogenous chemical contaminants” from skin-care or perfume products or tobacco smoke and other substances present in an individual’s environment. About a quarter of the 44 apparently distinctive marker compounds they were able to analyze appeared to be artificial contaminants, the researchers said.
“Determining the origins of individual and sex-specific odors — and controlling exogenous chemical contaminants — may provide the most important challenge for future … studies,” the researchers said.
Those challenges are likely to be significant, and they will multiply if the techniques are deployed in the field.
“While some of these sensors perform well in the lab, the real world may be different,” technology consultant and author John Vacca said. “The technology is still in its infancy.”
AntiPolygraph.org’s George Maschke has prepared the following video commentary regarding DHS’s plans for a smell-based lie detector:
Amir Liberman, the founder of Nemesysco, an Israeli company that internationally markets voice based lie detectors that simply don’t work, successfully pressured an academic journal into withdrawing the Internet availability of a peer-reviewed article that exposes Liberman’s lie detection “technology” for the pseudoscientific flapdoodle that it is.
The Article
Swedish linguists Anders Eriksson and Francisco Lacerda co-authored an article titled “Charlatanry in Speech Science: A Problem to Be Taken Seriously” that was published in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law (vol. 14, no. 2 [2007]). Eriksson & Lacerda review several voice-based lie detectors, including Nemesysco’s “Layered Voice Analysis” (LVA) which the U.S. military’s Special Operations Command has purchased and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is considering adopting. A variant of LVA customized for security checkpoints has reportedly been trialled at Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport.
Anders Eriksson and Francisco Lacerda
Eriksson & Lacerda point out that so-called “thorns” and “plateaus” — characteristics of digitized voice recordings that Nemesysco claims reflect emotional states — are merely artifacts produced by the digitization process! With regard to the LVA software, Eriksson & Lacerda note:
Contrary to the claims of sophistication — ‘The LVA software claims to be based on 8,000 mathematical algorithms applied to 129 voice frequencies’ (Damphousse et al. 2007: 15) — the LVA is a very simple program written in Visual Basic. The entire program code, published in the patent documents (Liberman 2003) comprises no more than 500 lines of code. It has to be said, though, that in order for it not to be possible to copy and run the program as is, some technical details like variable declarations are omitted, but the complete program is unlikely to comprise more than 800 or so lines. With respect to its alleged mathematical sophistication, there is really nothing in the program that requires any mathematical insights beyond very basic secondary school mathematics. To be sure, recursive filters and neural networks are also based on elementary mathematical operations but the crucial difference is that these operations are used in theoretically coherent systems, in contrast to the seemingly ad hoc implementation of LVA.
As has been discussed on the message board, Penn Jillette, the “bigger, louder half” of the magic and comedy duo Penn & Teller, has disclosed via Twitter that a forthcoming episode of the Emmy Award-winning Showtime series Penn & Teller Bullshit! will concern “the bullshit of lie detectors.” AntiPolygraph.org anticipates that this PTBS episode will be one of the most informative and entertaining ever.
