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I'm always surprised to hear that a government agency administers polygraph tests in something as serious as hiring but then I remember the CIA also spent millions of dollars trying to develop telekinetic assassins and train clairvoyants to spy on the Kremlin.
The polygraph doesn't have to emit any useful data at all to be very useful in interrogations. Like a bomb doesn't have to have any explosive in it to clear a building. Interrogation is a head game and a complicated box with knobs and buttons and maybe even blinking lights makes a fine prop.
And there's enough ambiguity in it that it's easy for the operator to believe it helps. Like a dowser with their rods, a clergyman with a holy book or an astrologist with a horoscope. That gives them the power boost of sincerity.
That research was oriented towards making sure it wasn't possible though.
You're saying "of course it isn't" - but how do you know that?
At the time the Soviets had the same sort of projects. So until you're sure it's not possible, the potential capability is an enormous threat if it is.
How they went about that research is where the waste creeps in.
> General Brown: So they started doing psy-research because they thought we were doing psy-research, when in fact we weren't doing psy-research?
> Brigadier General Dean Hopgood: Yes sir. But now that they are doing psy-research, we're gonna have to do psy-research, sir. We can't afford to have the Russian's leading the field in the paranormal.
Source: The Men Who Stare at Goats
Plenty of things we could be wasting money on if the only criteria is "how do you know it's not real?", why stop at killing goats with mind bullets? We could be looking for yetis or Atlantis or lunar nazi spaceships.
It was a giant waste of time and money and, this being the CIA, it likely harmed many people.
I always wonder when I see one of those hypnosis shows, where someone from the audience makes themselves a docile fool in front of a large crowd, whether they are stooges or it is the real deal. But I wouldn't volunteer to get hypnotised to figure that out, in fear of being the next person who stands imitating a dog in heat on such a stage.
Was drugging random Americans with LSD also a valid experiment? Parts of the CIA was just insane back then, maybe still is.
Yeah absolutely. Figuring out which, if any, drugs can be used to control people is extremely valuable for defence, not to mention offence. Same with the fascist Japanese frostbite experiments.
Let me be clear: these were all wrong and unethical, and I would not have approved or conducted them. But if you're a government agency tasked with doing wrong and unethical things in the name of national security, they were all good ideas to at least try.
> but I wondered why a petty thief thought she could get into the Agency.
It’s reassuring to know no one at the CIA has ever done anything wrong, like stealing fifty dollars.
The problem from the CIA's perspective isn't petty theft, it's getting caught.
Knowing someone had committed petty theft is at least a red flag. I can't blame an employer for considering it disqualifying when they have many equally qualified candidates without it. Even for a burger flipper, let alone a secret agent.
We know nothing about the situation. It's entirely possible that the person took $50 from their parent's purse as a child.
My parents used to love to tease me about the time I stole candy from the grocery store as a child. Is that a red flag?
If you don’t at least mention that damning fact on your polygraph, of course it is!
> Knowing someone had committed petty theft is at least a red flag.
Not really, since everyone has done so. Even you.
Not getting caught for it on the other hand could be a positive.
I remember hearing you can't even get government clearance if you admit you have ever smoked weed. Incredible
"Someone who hated computers so much that she had the secretary print out her emails so she could read them was interrogated for hours about hacking into Agency networks [...] there was often a gross mismatch between a person and the accusations made against them."
Well, isn't it expected? If I were a double agent, faking that I was so computer illiterate that I ask my emails to be printed out would be the perfect cover for my hacking =:-)
Didn't RMS do this with his emails?
I've no idea why I read to the end of that, seems like a long ramble, I kept expecting something to happen and it never did.
He is a good writer. I also read to end and my attention span isn't good! I think the switching between what happened, what he felt and just the plain "daily WTF" rediculousness of the situations is what kept me locked in.
>He is a good writer.
I assumed the author was a she…
It made me cringe at how boot-licking the author, and apparently a lot of people at the CIA, are (like defending the “petty thief” not getting the job).
People will work for one of the most evil organizations in the world and expect pity for being interrogated, while that same organization has torture sites.
"One of the most evil organizations in the world responsible for untold human misery treats its employees and applicants badly :( :( :("
That was all that was in there. Just complaining from someone that was salty they might have missed their chance at playing with the infant annihilator gun in South America.
This was how I felt about reading War and Peace
tl;dr: polygraphs aren't reliable and can be misused?
It's not that they're unreliable, they simply don't work in the first place.
The misuse is that they're used at all.
It’s a prop to conduct an adversarial interrogation without the same stigma.
And they are performed interrogation style but cannot be refused without risking your career.
OTOH, someone arrested can (probably should?) refuse.
I went through national-security polygraph exams twice, and they were no big deal. Filling out SF-86 (which used to start "List all residences from birth"), now that's a hassle.
In my aerospace company days, almost everything I did was unclassified, but I was put through the mill of getting higher level security clearances so I could be assigned to classified projects. Fortunately, I never was.
> I was put through the mill of getting higher level security clearances so I could be assigned to classified projects. Fortunately, I never was.
Sure was lucky you didn’t work on any of those classified projects - <wink>
The company had decided to move networking R&D to Colorado Springs, where they supported USAF facilities, and I didn't want to leave Silicon Valley for that.
[delayed]
I'm curious about how "residence" is defined for this purpose (and for many purposes). Often it's just presumed that people will know what a "residence" is, but I've lived many years of my life houseless, including on a skoolie.
I never know what to say about my residence. Even now, I own a house, but I don't consider it my home, at least not all the time. Have a specific "residence" presumes that there's one set of coordinates on earth that is canonical for each human, but many people don't live this way.
Is there a definition that cuts through this?
90 days living there is the threshold.
You wouldn’t make a good candidate for a national security job, not that it sounds like you want to be. Investigators would want to know who you’d been associating with at all those different places, and tracking it all down would take a long time ( the wait for the investigation can be years, the period during which you’d be unhireable for the job you were going after.)
...I think I'd make a great candidate for a national security job, if the job meant the security of the nation rather than the security of the state.
But I take your point of course. :-)
I applied for an internship with the NSA. My understanding of the process (years ago, pre-Snowden) was that they did a pass on your resume (I can't recall if there was even a phone screen), then they started background checks and if there were N internships the first N people to pass the security clearance were selected.
They went through the standard stuff, interviewing my neighbors, etc. Then they flew me to Fort Meade for a polygraph. This article matches my experiences well - the interviewers latched on to arbitrary accusations and threw them at you over and over. I walked out feeling absolutely miserable and the examiner still claiming I was hiding past crimes and drug use (nope, I confessed to everything all the way down to grabbing coins out of the fountain at the mall when I was quite young). My interviewer said some large percentage of people fail their first and most pass the second.
...except there was no second, because shortly after I passed an interview and got an internship at a large tech company that paid significantly more and didn't require me to take a polygraph. No regrets on that decision.
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I watched at Derbycon multiple times someone that could make a polygraph test do whatever he wanted, otherwise he was a murderer that murdered himself and it all happened before he was born. The test was being administered by a long time veteran polygraph operator who had recently retired.
I don't know what that means, because a polygraph by design tells the polygrapher whatever they want it to.
I believe it was the subject of the test who could make the polygraph reading show whatever they wanted, even though it was being administered by an experienced operator.
If the demonstration was performed in some blinded protocol then perhaps there was more room for ambiguity in the results than usual.
Polygraphs are junk science. I wonder why they haven’t graduated to fMRI. Can’t be for lack of funds. My guess is the polygraph bureaucracy is what’s known in Washington as a self-licking ice cream cone.
It isn't really much better, but is a lot more expensive:
I was a security guard at a big ritzy condo with access to all of the keys when one of the apartments was burgled. Two local detectives showed up and questioned me with a polygraph. I failed to suspend my disbelief. It seemed like bullshit from the start. I lied about smoking weed.
Then they told me to wait. An hour later one of them came back and told me I had passed. I had the impression he was watching me very carefully for some kind of relief, and that moment was the actual test. I laughed at him, which seems to have been the right answer.
I still think it's an interrogation manipulation prop, and the courts that don't admit polygraph results have it right.
> countermeasures such as butt-clenching
Ehm ...
I am actually not that convinced of that, largely because e. g. the KGB operated quite differently. And it seems very strange to me that the CIA would train an army of wanna-be's as ... butt-clenching recruits. The more sensible option is to have a poker face; and totally believe in any lie no matter how and what. That's kind of what Sergey Lavrov does. He babbles about how Ukraine invaded Russia. Kind of similar to a certain guy with a moustache claiming Poland invaded Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident).
I got yelled at for inadvertently "closing my sphincter" (the examiner's exact words) the one time I tried to take a polygraph at the CIA, they do actually care about that.
It's not butt clenching it's Kegels you just say butt clenching because it's funny.
Been there, done that. It's a good account, but I'm pretty surprised that the author felt that he could get away with "butt clinching", which is a form of deception, even when you're using it because you know the polygraph process is flawed. So he had to have lied to the investigator about whether or not he was being deceptive, and he never should have been cleared in the first place.
My last few polygraphs (I've had well over a dozen of them) were abusive. Before one of the later tests, the investigator tried to establish rapport, and told me that he had interrogated terrorists in the middle east, who had threatened to kill him. Before the test, I sympathized with him on this and thought that those terrorists must have been really bad people. After the test, I completely understood why those subjects had threatened to kill him.
The polygraph is basically a mind fuck. They try to guilt you into admitting some wrong that you've done by pretending that they already know about it. People with a conscience will break down and admit something, but different personality types react differently.
A senior security officer that I knew always passed his polygraphs on the first sitting, and never had any trouble. The reason was because he was a pathological liar. One of the requirements for his job was to come up with "cover stories", which are lies that you must convincingly tell others, to protect the security of a program.
Two co-worker engineers I know failed, because they refused to go back for more abuse. They were not bad or deceptive people -- They were "Type A" personalities, and it was just too stressful for them.
Refusing to take (or re-take) a polygraph is a red flag, and gets a lot of high level attention. The government will assume that you are refusing because you've done something wrong, and may go after you, and could ruin you life, even if you are innocent.
I don't get it, I thought it's settled science that polygraphs don't work. Why are these agencies still using them?
They do work. Their purpose is intimidation. They’re not truth machines, they’re pressure cookers.
They have only filter out the morons, though.
Exactly, the whole point is to put someone into an interrogation scenario for hours or days, where you control whether nor not they "passed". Unfortunately, it probably has zero effect on psychopaths.
Unfortunately psychopathy may be the most desirable trait.
There's an old interview on C-SPAN's BookTV with a CIA polygrapher. He seems to genuinely believe in the validity of the polygraph, but watching the interview, I was convinced that the only value comes from intimidation and stress.
(all-caps bad transcription)
> THE ESSENCE OF A POLYGRAPH TEST IS IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO LOSE BY FAILING A POLYGRAPH TEST IF YOU WILL, OR SOMETHING TO GAIN BY PASSING IT, THAT IS WHAT MAKES THE POLYGRAPH EFFECTIVE. WITHOUT THE FEAR OF DETECTION IT IN A SIMPLE WAY AS I CAN PUT IT THAT IS WHAT MAKES IT WORK. YOU HAVE TO BE AFRAID. IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BY TAKING THE POLYGRAPH TEST THAN THE PRESSURE IS NOT ON YOU. BUT AS I SAID THAT IS WHAT MAKES YOU WORK. IT HAS TO BE PROTECTION MORE THAN GILTS. NOW YOU MAY FEEL GUILTY, BUT FEAR OF DETECTION IS THE OVERRIDING CONCERN IN IN A POLYGRAPH TEST
It sounds like religion; it only works if people believe in it.
>I thought it's settled science that polygraphs don't work
Of course they do. And if you read the article in the OP you also realize why.
Polygraphs are an interrogation tactic, you can force a subject into a somewhat ridiculous procedure and ask them threatening questions, creating an disorientating situation. Afterwards you can accuse them of having "proven" that they are a liar. Polygraphs work, it just does not matter whether the machine is on or off.
Has the United States of America ever actually been a serious country?
Parts of it once were, yes.
> As we walked across the lobby, I thought I was going to faint.
I sort of detest people who always ask if things are ai slop, but... is this real? This guy has been working with a clearance for years - i think decades - and taken multiple polygraph, including failures, and is gonna pass out on his way to an interview regarding somewhere he no longer works?
Maybe hes just on the spectrum, but this article is weird.
I’m under the impression this was written by a woman. Obviously could be either gender, but it "fits better" if you read it from a female perspective.
> I left only because I got married and had a baby.
> I was so frustrated, I started to cry.
> As we walked across the lobby, I thought I was going to faint.
(2018)
Am I a bad person if the picture of someone in the CIA crying is funny to me? Not out of malice or anything. It's just something I didn't know they did.
Do they also have little "Hang in there!" posters on the wall, too?
Not a bad person, just lacking in wisdom.
Not really
It's a bureaucracy like any other.
The movie Spy (2015) is probably the most accurate, realistic version of the CIA in cinema, replete with celebratory cakes for supervisors' birthdays and crumbling infrastructure due to insufficient funding.
How do you know it's realistic?
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It would seem there's a spectrum of beliefs regarding the people in the CIA, the FBI, in politics, etc. ranging from "They're just like us!" to "They're lizard people (for better or for worse)." In other words, is it the situation or is it the person/self-selection? I self-identify as uninformed about the bigger picture, but my experience working in a federally adjacent sector where all my colleagues are perfectly normal, and yet there is always above us the stench of lizardry in the decisions being made, has me believing in the hypothesis that every bureaucracy is largely staffed with normal people doing the legwork (sometimes very high level, high paying, and highly consequential legwork), and lizards controlling the brain at the management and director levels.
> I washed out in contracting for much the same reason this person kept "failing" polygraphs: honesty to the point of external perceptions of naivety.
I'm curious if you're willing to elaborate on this story. So far in my career I've yet been forced to bend my knee to a lizard, nor become one, but it sounds like you have some experience.
Your experience of "lizard people" vs "bureaucracy of normal people doing the legwork" seems to match Arendt's banality of evil, right?
Though Arendt seemed to imply those normal people were not very smart or imaginative. Just blindly doing evil stuff simply because they were told to.
I would use this information to reflect.
How do you mean? I don't look down on anyone.
That's an old classic, should have 2018 in the headline but the site is much older. Some people hate it because they're afraid that knowing the site might count as preparation and might make them fail their polygraph exam.
It is not paywalled....
I posted it because the site was overloaded and would not load at the time…
The guy trying to work for the psychological torture club got psychologically tortured a little? My heart bleeds for him
What do the people writing these kinds of comments think the CIA is? There are mustache-twirling villains there, in greater proportion than in other government organizations, but the median CIA employee sits at a desk and translates cables from Farsi to English and back again, or keeps track of the rainfall in Azerbaijan. A very small fraction of the agency does anything more "interesting" than that, and the majority of people there perform functions that every government in the world also performs.
It's not about mustache twirling villains though is it. There are also a large number of people there who sit at desks and handle the logistics of moving people who are entitled either to be treated as PoWs or to a fair trial, into countries where they can be tortured while preserving a facade of it not being done by the agency itself.
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The most troubling aspect of these accounts is the "unfalsifiable" nature of the countermeasure accusation. Once an examiner decides you’re manipulating your physiological response, there is no empirical way to prove you weren't. It essentially turns a high-stakes job interview into a test of how well you can suppress natural stress reactions. It’s a shame to see how many talented individuals are sidelined by a process that prizes a specific physiological profile over a demonstrated record of integrity.
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This comment or something like it should be at the top, because it's the main point about polygraphing. It's the process, not the answers that matter.
I knew a guy who did security clearance checking for the Three Letter Agencies for many years. He told be that if I ever had to do these interviews, I just need to pick good sounding lies and stick to them. He said it's the ones who try to be honest and introspective who get failed out.
This was all so weird to read about. I guess I just assumed the polygraph was of marginal utility, and you either passed, or you didn't. I didn't realize it was part of a combative interrogation process, even for regular employees.
There's two kinds of sociopaths, the uncontrollable ones and the controllable ones. The CIA only wants the latter.
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[flagged]
(Offtopic but since we're already there, and a standalone post for this seems inappropriate..)
@dang/tomhow, could we consider amending the "no accusations of astroturfing" rule to cover "accusing people of being bots (or using LLMs)"?
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.
For the same reasons as the former, the latter are virtually never adding to the conversation.
I agree it's (increasingly) a threat to the quality of discourse here, but adding to the noise does not solve it.
stego-tech looks like a normal person? Are we entering an era were proper writing and grammar makes you less believeable?
(It would be better to report this sort of thing by email. It's off-topic to the actual submission.)
Comment was deleted :(
where'd ya learn to spot AI slop m8
that just looks lIke grmticly crrct writing to meeee
Comments by nubg are AI bot slop. This site is being absolutely swarmed by them lately.
Lmao you have no proof.
You also have not presented any proof.
Crafted by Rajat
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