Interesting People mailing list archives

POLYGRAPH: DOE DECIDES TO SIMPLY REISSUE ITS OLD POLICY.


From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 16:19:40 -0400


------ Forwarded Message
From: "What's New" <opa () aps org>
Reply-To: opa () aps org
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 15:44:34 -0400
To: "What's New" <whatsnew () lists apsmsgs org>
Subject: WHAT'S NEW    Friday, 18 Apr 03

1. POLYGRAPH: DOE DECIDES TO SIMPLY REISSUE ITS OLD POLICY.  The
National Academy of Sciences completed its review of scientific
evidence on the polygraph (WN 15 Dec 00).  The NAS report, "The
Polygraph and Lie Detection" (NAS Press, 2003), found polygraph
tests to be unacceptable for DOE employee security screening
because of the high rate of false positives and susceptibility to
countermeasures.  Congress instructed the Department of Energy to
reevaluate its policies on the use of the polygraph in light of
the NAS report.  DOE carefully reevaluated its policies and
reissued them without change, arguing that a high rate of false
positives must mean the threshold for detecting lies is very low.
Therefore, the test must also nab a lot of true positives.  Since
that's the goal, the DOE position seems to be that the polygraph
tests are working fine and false positives are just unavoidable
collateral damage.  But there is still a countermeasures problem:
anyone can be trained to fool the polygraph in just five minutes.
WN therefore recommends replacing the polygraph with a coin toss.
If a little collateral damage is not a problem, coins will catch
fully half of all spies, a vast improvement over the polygraph,
which has never caught even one.  Moreover, coins are notoriously
difficult to train, making them impervious to countermeasures.

------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To manage your subscription, go to
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/


Current thread: