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.
Everyone repeats this old canard but no one has any evidence even anecdotes to show that a polygraph machine is better than any other way to head fake someone in an interrogation
As normal HN shows that "power structures" completely eludes them as a group.
Here is why lie detectors exist.
1. They are legal.
2. Abusive interrogation of US citizens is not legal.
A polygraph is a risk assessment. If you break under completely safe sanctioned questions. You are gonna spill everything if someone from the others side is questioning you.
This person could have just shown up and shrugged for X hrs and they would have had no more than 1 polygraph every 10 years. Instead they kept doing exactly what the test is concerned about. How easy are you to break? Which is why they kept getting more and more tests. They were considered high risk.
If you ever get the opportunity to read what people admit, unprompted, during these "conversations" then you'll know why they'll never go away. Stuff like, "yeah i stepped on a kitten's head once, but i was young... No i don't see why anyone would have a problem with that."
Are you sure? Post 9/11 the CIA decided they needed to be in the business of kidnapping and torturing. They didn't seem to have any trouble finding employees to do it.
Soldiers need to kill people, but you don't want sociopathic soldiers - you want the opposite: Someone who can handle their emotions, not someone who hides from them, runs from them, or tries to bury or ignore them. The latter are not stable or reliable under stress.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The few people I’ve asked who’ve been hypnotized said it was true and had no reason to lie or trick me, and it seems true. But if the lens is “we already figured out all biology and physics so we can ignore the possibility of actual hypnosis (putting someone in a trance stage) being possible” then it’s hard to see things that there’s actually immense evidence for (eg the telepathy tapes).
The main job of every station chief is to sit drunk in bars, listen to the high tales of the locals and yell "i did that" everytime the people had enough into the telephone to washington. Secret services are first and foremost storytellers...
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.
I'm not sure what culture or friends you live around, but to believe everyone has thieved is disturbing. What other ills may you believe everyone does, and so do flippantly?
I always thought the workings of polygraphs were common knowledge.
It's fiction. Analysts get scared and don't do anything wrong preemptively. Analysts admit stuff they'd never do otherwise. The agency gets to show who's in charge. It creates a legal fiction that allows you to abuse your employees. It creates a fiction that the abusers themselves can believe in.
Why should the believe in the non-working polygraph be any weaker than in a nonexistent god?
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.
You should. Men drop their guards in front of women, especially old women. I expect a lot of active agents in the field look like/are grandmas for this reason.
"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.
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.
Fond memories of planning the assassination of a politician in South America and creating popular unrest through a disinformation campaign in China :,)
"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 =:-)
> I spend most of my time editing in Emacs. I read and send mail with Emacs using M-x rmail and C-x m. I have no experience with any other email client programs.
You may have confused this with his somewhat idiosyncratic way of browsing the web:
> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.
Donald Knuth, on the other hand, quit email in 1990, after using it for 15 years:
> I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Since then, he prefers snail mail but has a secretary who will print out his emails:
> My secretary also prints out all nonspam email messages addressed to taocp@cs.stanford.edu or knuth-bug@cs.stanford.edu, so that I can reply with written comments when I have a chance. If I run across such a message that was misaddressed --- I mean, if the message asks a question instead of reporting an error --- I try not to get angry.
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'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.
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.)
The paradigm of a residence is much more fluid than many people think.
I used to work on boats. For income tax purposes I was a BVI resident, for immigration purposes I was a US resident since I didn't have a residence permit in the BVI (not necessary for boat crew), for the purpose of immigration establishing a relationship with my future wife we did not - by their judgment - live together, or even in the same country (despite sharing a cabin with ~10 sq. ft. of floor space), for the purposes of voter registration I was a Colorado resident.
Depending on which government and agency within that government you ask, I could be a US resident (Colorado sec. of state), while not being a US resident (IRS), while being a US resident (US CBP), while not being a resident of the country I was physically living and working in (BVI), while living in a different country than my wife who I was never more than 100 ft. from (CBSA).
The actual foreign address accepted by the IRS, and Canadian immigration authorities (slightly anonymized): [BOAT_NAME],Bob's dock, East End, Tortola, BVI.
Residence is far more complicated for many people than the standard government mold assumes.
Cool story. The paradigm is actually incredibly simple: if the government can’t be reasonably certain you aren’t a spy or likely to become one, no clearance. To that end they want to know where you physically reside and who knows you there. Not the other stuff.
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.
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 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.
I think the point is that, since polygraph readings are pseudoscience, it's always the interrogator who picks what they "mean". If this is true, a smart test subject cannot mislead them, since there's nothing to mislead, as the polygraph is just a pressure technique and it means whatever the interrogator needs it to mean.
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
Maybe Reformation religions require belief, but the paganism was a set of rituals known to work (by virtue of having worked before), sort of a like a spiritual experimental science. Belief was not required.
Religions don't necessarily work because people believe in it, either. There are a number of religious sects that started with end of the world prophecies.
I think that religions work the opposite way: people believe in them because they work. Since the purpose of religion is generally to explain the nature of reality and how to flourish in it, it needs to work for you. If it doesn't, you either just go through the motions, or quit and find a different religion (or swear off religion, which is sort of the same thing).
Reminds me of Julius Caesar describing the druids. Part of his political career meant precisely performing important orthopraxy. He probably didn’t meet a druid, but amazingly described them playing the same role he did as Pontifex Maximus.
The orthopraxy requiring those precision rituals, take Rome and Greece, had little or maybe no mandatory beliefs. City-state-sized gods in Mesopotamia probably functioned the same way. Traditions still have precise orthopraxy today. But we talk about differences in belief whereas Caesar doesn’t even acknowledge any.
Charitable read, would suggest slight touch of tongue in a cheek.
A bit of spelling it out
Point-1. People just interpreted that paganism works.
E.g. Somebody made offering to gods, and year later won a war - proof.
Point-2 paganism had this transactional notion with gods giving and taking based on your offerings.
While christianity on the other hand does not promise anything good in this life (the only promise being: bear all the bad things in this life, you will be rewarded in the afterlife), so there can’t be proof.
That's the point though. The testers wouldn't actually abuse their victims without the conviction of doing something righteous. Or they would, accidentally or intentionally, spill the secrets.
But if you make even the instruction material lie, then there is nothing that could be leaked and "expose" the system.
Right. And I don't think the abuse of the vetting people is by accident. I think it's a vulnerability, where people in positions of "collecting dirt" on others, often end up fabricating the dirt, and doing other very bad things because the power imbalance of asymmetric information corrupts.
COme to think of it, maybe that's why priests who take confessions are also correlated with abuse. Something about having this assymetry over many others maybe scrambles their moral circuitry...The Catholic conneciton is just a theory that surfaced now tho, haven't thought it more than that. But the badness of the vetting people is certain. Sad that governments have to tarnish their good names employing such miscreants.
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.
>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.
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.
You're not wrong. The NSA circa 2008 was probably doing some of the most algorithmically interesting CS work in the world. That said, I think that in terms of living with myself, sleeping well at night, and being able to travel the world without asking permission, not working there was the right call.
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.
Perhaps the point is it's "confession theatre". You're put in a stress position, worried that the "magical machine" can read your darkest secrets, and told that everything will go easier if you're just honest, and so that's why you're inclined to spill them. Which is what they are trying to get you to do.
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).
This is because the vagus nerve interfaces with the parasympathetic nervous system, the responses of which are what the instrument measures. And the vagus nerve terminates in the...you know. And so that's one way that you can get control over the metrics.
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.
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.
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.
Even if the polygraph examiner is not abusive, the whole process is stressful, especially to "Type A" people. It's designed to be stressful. You are under constant surveillance, and they make sure that you know this. They make you wait for a long time before beginning. They keep the rooms cold, so you aren't comfortable. They don't let you wear a jacket, because "it could interfere with the equipment." The chair is uncomfortable, and the sensors (especially the blood pressure cuff) are deliberately too tight. My arm would often turn purple.
You are obligated to keep coming back until they say you're finished. More often than not, they will not tell you that you "passed" the exam.
I always had issues with their "baseline" question where they tell you to give an incorrect answer. They've told you to lie, and they know that you're lying. I have no stress at all in that situation because everybody has agreed and knows that I'm expected to lie. For some dumb reason, they are looking for some sort of physiological response from me that indicates deception. Maybe some people will react subconsciously, but I don't.
This rings so true and I only ever took one polygraph test. I was a nerdy 21 year old and they told me I had failed on the marijuana use question and encouraged me to think about it and come back and retry. I remember being very confused. I withdrew my application and never went back. I wonder how many others gave up on a job opportunity because it was drug abuse Wednesday or whatever.
I didn't lie. Did you read the article? Apparently the point is to break you down, to see how strongly you challenge the interviewer, and assorted other things which are not about telling the truth.
For fun, ask your preferred LLM (or perhaps a google search would also work?) for specific questions that lifestyle polygraph interviewers typically ask to throw you off your rhythm or to establish a baseline for later questions. No joke, it's an absolute riot.
More seriously, I'd be reluctant to take a polygraph-based job. If the very concept is flaky and you fail out at the beginning, no big deal. But I'm not sure I'd want to invest in a career in which something that flaky could on its own start creating career problems for you years or decades in.
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.
Adding my POV from a former National Security perspective:
Author is 100% on point. The point of a polygraph is three-fold: weeding out the dipshits; exerting power over the powerless; and identifying the valuable assets (typically sociopaths). It does not - cannot - identify liars, deceit, or bad actors on its face (that comes from the manual the author linked). It's not scientific assessment, it's psychological torture.
Would I take a polygraph to reactivate my clearance? Yeah, if I had to. Would I pass? That's up to the examiner, because much like the author I won't tolerate being called a liar, nor will I capitulate to power games. I'll be honest, forthcoming, and cooperative - and if that's not enough to pass, then I don't want to work for you.
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.
This is so interesting. I guess I was a dipshit in this scenario? Because I just accepted that the reviewer thought I was lying. Began to question my own memory. And just gave up on the idea of working at that place. In hindsight, I should have protested and not given up. But I was a meek 21 year old and didn't know anything. Seems like a strange filter to apply.
Nah, the dipshits are the ones who take the polygrapher at their word that they can be trusted/"this is a safe space" and blab about the crimes they've committed.
Almost anyone who spent enough time at an alphabet agency has stories about polygraph candidates who spill the beans on crimes during their initial polygraph, thinking that somehow gives them "cred" or immunity.
What’s the organizational rationale behind using the polygraph? Its reliability at detecting deception doesn’t on the face of things seem correct, with “bureaucratic inertia” not really enough to explain its persistence either. Is it something different then? Perhaps when someone’s response patterns simply don’t match known types or some other reason?
Go watch the JCS episode with the Chris Watts interrogation including his polygraph, you’ll see it’s actually extremely effective.
As a scientific tool to literally detect lies it’s completely bunk, but all the interrogator has to say is “the machine said you weren’t 100% truthful” and humans will 9 times out of 10 start blabbing.
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?
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.
Not bad, just as misinformed as most folks out there about the process and requirements.
National Security is a PITA, full of cutthroat sociopaths who would eat the SV VC-types for breakfast. That is a compliment, because the work they do is broadly dark and grimly necessary, at least at the levels of global geopolitics a lot of them are expected to operate at. I washed out in contracting for much the same reason this person kept "failing" polygraphs: honesty to the point of external perceptions of naivety. The types who excel in these sectors see folks like us as doormats or tissues, and react poorly when we catch them in the act and demand anything resembling respect because they know we're a threat to the entire establishment if we're allowed to succeed.
The point of polygraphs has always been about control, and folks who resist that sort of control are incidentally highlighting themselves as being uncontrollable to power alone. The books the author links are excellent starting points for understanding the true function of a polygraph, and why more places are outlawing them as a means of trying to diversify a deeply broken and hostile security apparatus by preventing it from being a "blind fools and sociopaths-only" club.
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.
In my experience, 99.9% of the federal bureaucracy is regular normies just trying to make a living, pay the bills, and eke out a pension if they're lucky.
The remaining 0.1% aren't "lizard people" so much as apex predators in their fields, or political appointees. The latter are dangerous because they're fickle, vain, and narcissistic; the former are dangerous because they know where the skeletons are in the closet, where the bodies are buried in the desert, and have dirt on everyone whose corpse they didn't have to climb over into their position.
> I'm curious if you're willing to elaborate on this story.
My story is simple: I wrote extensive system documentation that the developers refused to (but gleefully took credit for), caught a colleague picking locks on secure doors and ditching work to go on dates, and noped out of the politicking between subcontractors maneuvering for a bigger cut of the pie in lieu on focusing on the mission at hand. This was not the problem.
The problem is I reported the first two, and thus became a ripe target for the third.
When she started the CIA described her personality as naively honest. She concludes that the way they treat honest people makes it an unwise career choice. But, a pathological fantasist might have quite a different experience and no motivation to write an op-ed.
> but I wondered why a petty thief thought she could get into the Agency.
....do you not understand what "the Agency" actually does?
It's no wonder they create this giant wall of existential dread to the applicants. It prevents them from seeing the scope of what they're about to get themselves into.
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.
Just have the courage of your convictions and extend this logic of culpability to everybody who works for the United States Government. Otherwise, it just sounds like you don't understand that a huge fraction of the work of intelligence is preventing wars.
I don't think the CIA is broadly a force for good. I think that the presumption that most people working there are evil is unfounded, though. It's a huge organization with a big portfolio, most of which isn't telegenic or activating.
That’s true of every criminal org. Enforcers are usually a small percentage of the population, because they are fundamentally businesses. Violence is "expensive" in terms of heat from law enforcement, lost revenue, lower internal stability, etc.
You don’t need to defend it with weak arguments. If you feel like you do, that is a bigger issue, maybe talk to your local therapist or priest.
It's very hard to understand what you're arguing though.
You agree the CIA is not "broadly a force for good" (which I consider a big understatement). You also don't seem to disagree it's an organization whose activities involve, among others, torture, assassinations, extraordinary renditions, psyops, etc. Yes, sometimes to "prevent wars", other times to incite wars or to topple governments they don't like, or to help crush down rebellions they don't like, or to help rebellions they do like.
So why this fixation on pointing out that the majority of CIA analysts are pencil pushers and not directly involved in unsavory activities? They still enable them. And they willingly work for this organization, why make excuses for them just because some of them are nerds who wear a suit and don't personally torture anybody, and instead translate Farsi or Chinese?
As a reminder, this is the comment to which you're reacting:
> The guy trying to work for the psychological torture club got psychologically tortured a little? My heart bleeds for him
I mean, the comment is right. This guy in TFA did willingly belong to a psychological torture group, even if he's not directly involved in this particular activity. It's ok for us to react at the irony of the situation, that he feels tortured by the polygraph, given the organization he belongs to. They didn't even physically touch him, yet he felt "abused".
I'm sure you understand the slippery slope of comparing the CIA to all of the US government is just not right.
Oh boy, something on the HN front page i have direct personal experience with (CIA polygraph exams in general not this specific one).
>Then she asked if I'd read about polygraphs. I said I'd just finished A Tremor in the Blood. She claimed she'd never heard of it. I was surprised. It's an important book about her field, I would have thought all polygraphers knew of it.
They'll also ask you about antipolygraph.org which is the site OP is hosted on. CIA is well aware that it is one of the top search results for polygraph. My examiner actually had the whole expanded universe backstory behind the site memorized and went on a rant about george maschke, the site's owner who lost his job at a major defense contractor then ran away to some place in scandanavia from which they are unable to extradite him.
BTW by reading this comment you may have already failed your polygraph exam at the CIA.
>My hand turned purple, which hurt terribly.
OP should have included more context here; part of the polygraph test involves a blood pressure cuff which is put on EXTREMELY tight, far more so than any doctor or nurse would ever put it on. It is left on for the entire duration of the test (approximately 8 hours). My entire arm turned purple and i remember feeling tremors.
>The examiner wired me up. He began with what he called a calibration test. He took a piece of paper and wrote the numbers one through five in a vertical column. He asked me to pick a number. I picked three. He drew a square around the number three, then taped the paper to the back of a chair where I could see it. I was supposed to lie about having selected the number three.
This is almost certainly theatrical. It is true that they need to establish a "baseline of truth" by comparing definite falsehoods with definite truth but the way they get that is by asking highly personal questions where they can reasonably expect at least one of them will be answered untruthfully. They'll ask about drugs, extramarital affairs, crimes you got away with, etc. Regarding the one about crimes, supposedly your answer will not be given to law enforcement but if you actually trust the CIA on this you're probably too retarded to work there anyways. I'm not confident that lying to somebody who has specifically directed you to lie to him would produce the same sort of physical response as genuine lies.
>On the bus back to the hotel, a woman was sobbing, "Do they count something less than $50 as theft?" I felt bad for her because she was crying, but I wondered why a petty thief thought she could get into the Agency.
If she failed this isn't why. You're supposed to lie at least once or else they have no baseline for truth (see above). In addition, the point of the Polygraph isn't just to evaluate your loyalty to the United States but also to make the agency aware of anything that could be used by an adversary to compromise you in the future. Somebody who shoplifted 50$ worth of merchandise isn't a liability but somebody who shoplifted 50$ worth of merchandise and believes that it would damage their career if their employer found out is a huge liability even if they are wrong and their employer does not actually care. Putting employees under interrogation until they break down and confess to things like this so that they know it has not endangered their employment is one of the primary objectives of the polygraph.
>A pattern emerged. In a normal polygraph, there was often a gross mismatch between a person and the accusations made against them. I don't think the officials at Polygraph had any idea how unintentionally humorous this was. Not to the person it happened to, of course, but the rest of us found it hysterically funny.
As said above, the whole point is to make you break down and confess to something embarrassing. If you don't confess to anything it is assumed that you are still hiding something from them and you could fail.
>"Admit it, you're deeply in debt. Creditors are pounding on your door!" I said. "You've just revealed to me that you haven't bothered to pull my credit report. Are you lazy, or are you cheap?"
this is another thing they look for that doesn't necessarily indicate you are compromised but could be used to compromise you in the future. Unlike the above example of petty theft this is actually something that can disqualify you since obviously the agency isn't going to pay off your credit card.
>I was so frustrated, I started to cry.
Working for the government is extremely unhealthy because these people only surround themselves with other government employees and somehow they get this idea in their head that they have to work for the federal government or work indirectly for the federal government via a defense contractor (they call this "private sector" even though no sane person would ever think that adding a middleman between you and the people who tell you what to do changes anything). In some cases this is justified because there are many career paths which are impossible or illegal to make profit off of and the only people who will pay you to do them are the government. There are literally people whose entire adult lives are spent looking at high-altitude aerial photography and circling things with a sharpie so i can kind of understand how they might be devastated if they lose their clearance, but at least 75% of all glowies have some skill which would be in demand by actual private industry if they didn't suffer from this weird "battered housewife syndrome" that compels them to keep working for the government even though it subjects them to annual mandatory bullying sessions.
>I'd just refused a polygraph. I felt like Neville Longbottom when he drew the sword of Gryffindor and advanced on Lord Voldemort. I was filled with righteous indignation, and it gave me courage.
Again, glowies are so fucking lame. This person just unironically compared failing a polygraph exam to the climactic scene from a seven-volume series of childrens' books about an 11 year-old boy in england who goes to a special high school for wizards.
> part of the polygraph test involves a blood pressure cuff which is put on EXTREMELY tight, far more so than any doctor or nurse would ever put it on. It is left on for the entire duration of the test (approximately 8 hours). My entire arm turned purple and i remember feeling tremors.
It's the CIA, manipulation is their speciality. MK-ULTRA didn't just study drugs and wacky pagan magic, they also studied more mundane methods of mind control which are undoubtedly real.
The CIA understands why beautiful young women with a multitude of better options will stay slavishy dedicated towards the one boyfriend who beats them, why people stay in cults with outrageous belief systems, and how fascist and communist dictatorships could motivate entire nations to commit genocide against their neighbors and fellow countrymen.
BTW the bit I described above about compelling you to tell them your embarrassing personal secrets so that they won't be used to blackmail you bears a striking resemblance to anonymously confessing your sins to a priest so that you will be forgiven in Christ's name.
> the site's owner who lost his job at a major defense contractor then ran away to some place in scandanavia from which they are unable to extradite him.
Eh, all the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) definitely have extradition treaties with the U.S.
(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.
> 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 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.
I'd like to say "I'm always surprised to hear that a government agency administers institutionalized mental abuse". But I'm not surprised at all.
ACAB, Including being B to other C.
Everyone repeats this old canard but no one has any evidence even anecdotes to show that a polygraph machine is better than any other way to head fake someone in an interrogation
Why would it have to be better to still be used?
If people believe it, that's enough. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to mess with people enough.
It's dumber than that.
If the people telling the interviewers to use polygraphs believe the suspects will believe in polygraphs, it's enough.
As normal HN shows that "power structures" completely eludes them as a group.
Here is why lie detectors exist.
1. They are legal. 2. Abusive interrogation of US citizens is not legal.
A polygraph is a risk assessment. If you break under completely safe sanctioned questions. You are gonna spill everything if someone from the others side is questioning you.
This person could have just shown up and shrugged for X hrs and they would have had no more than 1 polygraph every 10 years. Instead they kept doing exactly what the test is concerned about. How easy are you to break? Which is why they kept getting more and more tests. They were considered high risk.
This comment reminds me of one of my favourite scenes from The Wire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgrO_rAaiq0
“Americans are stupid people, by and large. We pretty much believe whatever we’re told”.
“The bigger the lie, the more they believe”.
If you ever get the opportunity to read what people admit, unprompted, during these "conversations" then you'll know why they'll never go away. Stuff like, "yeah i stepped on a kitten's head once, but i was young... No i don't see why anyone would have a problem with that."
No one wants that guy working at the cia.
Are you sure? Post 9/11 the CIA decided they needed to be in the business of kidnapping and torturing. They didn't seem to have any trouble finding employees to do it.
Yeah, they need people who will do the most inhumane things to other human beings, not animals.
Soldiers need to kill people, but you don't want sociopathic soldiers - you want the opposite: Someone who can handle their emotions, not someone who hides from them, runs from them, or tries to bury or ignore them. The latter are not stable or reliable under stress.
Than how do you explain the marine corps? The average enlisted marine is a sociopath. You have to be to get through the crucible.
yeah CIA never has a history of doing terrible things and causing harm to people. Why would they hire pyschopaths?
Actually it sounds more like hazing to me (unethical but not entirely irrational).
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.
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.
So you have no idea what they actually did.
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.
The few people I’ve asked who’ve been hypnotized said it was true and had no reason to lie or trick me, and it seems true. But if the lens is “we already figured out all biology and physics so we can ignore the possibility of actual hypnosis (putting someone in a trance stage) being possible” then it’s hard to see things that there’s actually immense evidence for (eg the telepathy tapes).
The telepathy tapes don't have immense evidence in their favor, unless they've redone everything recently in a controlled way.
There’s a good book about this called Reality is Plastic. It may give you a new perspective.
You don't waste resources researching something with no plausibility or explanation as to how it could exist.
<looks sideways at the entire AI industry and it's AGI claims>
> train clairvoyants
Hey a goat actually died you know
The main job of every station chief is to sit drunk in bars, listen to the high tales of the locals and yell "i did that" everytime the people had enough into the telephone to washington. Secret services are first and foremost storytellers...
> 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.
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!
Since you asked: How old of a child?
Six or seven.
37. (/s)
> 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'm not sure what culture or friends you live around, but to believe everyone has thieved is disturbing. What other ills may you believe everyone does, and so do flippantly?
> but to believe everyone has thieved is disturbing.
No, it's fact. It's part of learning and growing up. You never stole anything in your life, not a piece of candy, nothing?
I genuinely have no memory of doing that.
Convenient.
The problem from the CIA's perspective isn't petty theft, it's getting caught.
I remember hearing you can't even get government clearance if you admit you have ever smoked weed. Incredible
I always thought the workings of polygraphs were common knowledge.
It's fiction. Analysts get scared and don't do anything wrong preemptively. Analysts admit stuff they'd never do otherwise. The agency gets to show who's in charge. It creates a legal fiction that allows you to abuse your employees. It creates a fiction that the abusers themselves can believe in.
Why should the believe in the non-working polygraph be any weaker than in a nonexistent god?
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…
The title is "A CIA Analyst Shares Her Polygraph Experience" so it appears you are correct. I'd assumed incorrectly, so appreciate the discussion!
You should. Men drop their guards in front of women, especially old women. I expect a lot of active agents in the field look like/are grandmas for this reason.
Every person i inhabitate his or her views in writting becomes a copy of me so she is a he for the time of me reading.
"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
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.
And they were the happiest years of her life!
Fond memories of planning the assassination of a politician in South America and creating popular unrest through a disinformation campaign in China :,)
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.
"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 =:-)
If someone has that level of opsec, the CIA should be trying to recruit and turn them even if they're guilty.
Didn't RMS do this with his emails?
No, Stallman uses Emacs:
> I spend most of my time editing in Emacs. I read and send mail with Emacs using M-x rmail and C-x m. I have no experience with any other email client programs.
You may have confused this with his somewhat idiosyncratic way of browsing the web:
> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.
https://stallman.org/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?path=/stallman-com...
Donald Knuth, on the other hand, quit email in 1990, after using it for 15 years:
> I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Since then, he prefers snail mail but has a secretary who will print out his emails:
> My secretary also prints out all nonspam email messages addressed to taocp@cs.stanford.edu or knuth-bug@cs.stanford.edu, so that I can reply with written comments when I have a chance. If I run across such a message that was misaddressed --- I mean, if the message asks a question instead of reporting an error --- I try not to get angry.
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
Ah, you're 100% correct (the best kind of correct). It was his web-browsing that seemed so very odd at the time.
You may be thinking of Don Knuth
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'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.)
The paradigm of a residence is much more fluid than many people think.
I used to work on boats. For income tax purposes I was a BVI resident, for immigration purposes I was a US resident since I didn't have a residence permit in the BVI (not necessary for boat crew), for the purpose of immigration establishing a relationship with my future wife we did not - by their judgment - live together, or even in the same country (despite sharing a cabin with ~10 sq. ft. of floor space), for the purposes of voter registration I was a Colorado resident.
Depending on which government and agency within that government you ask, I could be a US resident (Colorado sec. of state), while not being a US resident (IRS), while being a US resident (US CBP), while not being a resident of the country I was physically living and working in (BVI), while living in a different country than my wife who I was never more than 100 ft. from (CBSA).
The actual foreign address accepted by the IRS, and Canadian immigration authorities (slightly anonymized): [BOAT_NAME],Bob's dock, East End, Tortola, BVI.
Residence is far more complicated for many people than the standard government mold assumes.
Cool story. The paradigm is actually incredibly simple: if the government can’t be reasonably certain you aren’t a spy or likely to become one, no clearance. To that end they want to know where you physically reside and who knows you there. Not the other stuff.
...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. :-)
[dead]
> 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.
Sure <wink>
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.
I think the point is that, since polygraph readings are pseudoscience, it's always the interrogator who picks what they "mean". If this is true, a smart test subject cannot mislead them, since there's nothing to mislead, as the polygraph is just a pressure technique and it means whatever the interrogator needs it to mean.
If the demonstration was performed in some blinded protocol then perhaps there was more room for ambiguity in the results than usual.
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.
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
https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/gatekeeper/180053
It sounds like religion; it only works if people believe in it.
Maybe Reformation religions require belief, but the paganism was a set of rituals known to work (by virtue of having worked before), sort of a like a spiritual experimental science. Belief was not required.
Religions don't necessarily work because people believe in it, either. There are a number of religious sects that started with end of the world prophecies.
I think that religions work the opposite way: people believe in them because they work. Since the purpose of religion is generally to explain the nature of reality and how to flourish in it, it needs to work for you. If it doesn't, you either just go through the motions, or quit and find a different religion (or swear off religion, which is sort of the same thing).
Reminds me of Julius Caesar describing the druids. Part of his political career meant precisely performing important orthopraxy. He probably didn’t meet a druid, but amazingly described them playing the same role he did as Pontifex Maximus.
The orthopraxy requiring those precision rituals, take Rome and Greece, had little or maybe no mandatory beliefs. City-state-sized gods in Mesopotamia probably functioned the same way. Traditions still have precise orthopraxy today. But we talk about differences in belief whereas Caesar doesn’t even acknowledge any.
Would you mind expanding on the scientific-ness of paganism? That sounds really interesting!
Charitable read, would suggest slight touch of tongue in a cheek.
A bit of spelling it out
Point-1. People just interpreted that paganism works.
E.g. Somebody made offering to gods, and year later won a war - proof.
Point-2 paganism had this transactional notion with gods giving and taking based on your offerings.
While christianity on the other hand does not promise anything good in this life (the only promise being: bear all the bad things in this life, you will be rewarded in the afterlife), so there can’t be proof.
Or like currency.
That's the point though. The testers wouldn't actually abuse their victims without the conviction of doing something righteous. Or they would, accidentally or intentionally, spill the secrets.
But if you make even the instruction material lie, then there is nothing that could be leaked and "expose" the system.
Right. And I don't think the abuse of the vetting people is by accident. I think it's a vulnerability, where people in positions of "collecting dirt" on others, often end up fabricating the dirt, and doing other very bad things because the power imbalance of asymmetric information corrupts.
COme to think of it, maybe that's why priests who take confessions are also correlated with abuse. Something about having this assymetry over many others maybe scrambles their moral circuitry...The Catholic conneciton is just a theory that surfaced now tho, haven't thought it more than that. But the badness of the vetting people is certain. Sad that governments have to tarnish their good names employing such miscreants.
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.
>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.
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.
At lesat now the IC has dirt on you should you ever step out of line.
Yeah, “help us into Yahoo Mail for a few years - or we’ll anonymously report to your mother the truth about where the coins came from”.
Why stop there? They can just make up whatever they want. Then say it as loaded questions to everyone they contact for your “vetting.”
really? working with the nsa would probably be very interesting work!
You're not wrong. The NSA circa 2008 was probably doing some of the most algorithmically interesting CS work in the world. That said, I think that in terms of living with myself, sleeping well at night, and being able to travel the world without asking permission, not working there was the right call.
There are probably interesting jobs at drug cartels and in organised crime.
[dead]
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.
Perhaps the point is it's "confession theatre". You're put in a stress position, worried that the "magical machine" can read your darkest secrets, and told that everything will go easier if you're just honest, and so that's why you're inclined to spill them. Which is what they are trying to get you to do.
Yes and also consider they want to assess how well you stand up to interrogation generally
Hm, what's the relevance for people who don't leave office?
[dead]
It isn't really much better, but is a lot more expensive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMRI_lie_detection
> 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).
This is because the vagus nerve interfaces with the parasympathetic nervous system, the responses of which are what the instrument measures. And the vagus nerve terminates in the...you know. And so that's one way that you can get control over the metrics.
It's not butt clenching it's Kegels you just say butt clenching because it's funny.
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.
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.
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.
> it was just too stressful for them.
Are you sure that’s the right word?
Maybe…too disrespectful? (Abusive, in your words.)
Even if the polygraph examiner is not abusive, the whole process is stressful, especially to "Type A" people. It's designed to be stressful. You are under constant surveillance, and they make sure that you know this. They make you wait for a long time before beginning. They keep the rooms cold, so you aren't comfortable. They don't let you wear a jacket, because "it could interfere with the equipment." The chair is uncomfortable, and the sensors (especially the blood pressure cuff) are deliberately too tight. My arm would often turn purple.
You are obligated to keep coming back until they say you're finished. More often than not, they will not tell you that you "passed" the exam.
I always had issues with their "baseline" question where they tell you to give an incorrect answer. They've told you to lie, and they know that you're lying. I have no stress at all in that situation because everybody has agreed and knows that I'm expected to lie. For some dumb reason, they are looking for some sort of physiological response from me that indicates deception. Maybe some people will react subconsciously, but I don't.
This rings so true and I only ever took one polygraph test. I was a nerdy 21 year old and they told me I had failed on the marijuana use question and encouraged me to think about it and come back and retry. I remember being very confused. I withdrew my application and never went back. I wonder how many others gave up on a job opportunity because it was drug abuse Wednesday or whatever.
Isn't the whole point to not lie about anything, so that later on it cannot be used to blackmail you?
I didn't lie. Did you read the article? Apparently the point is to break you down, to see how strongly you challenge the interviewer, and assorted other things which are not about telling the truth.
For fun, ask your preferred LLM (or perhaps a google search would also work?) for specific questions that lifestyle polygraph interviewers typically ask to throw you off your rhythm or to establish a baseline for later questions. No joke, it's an absolute riot.
More seriously, I'd be reluctant to take a polygraph-based job. If the very concept is flaky and you fail out at the beginning, no big deal. But I'm not sure I'd want to invest in a career in which something that flaky could on its own start creating career problems for you years or decades in.
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.
Adding my POV from a former National Security perspective:
Author is 100% on point. The point of a polygraph is three-fold: weeding out the dipshits; exerting power over the powerless; and identifying the valuable assets (typically sociopaths). It does not - cannot - identify liars, deceit, or bad actors on its face (that comes from the manual the author linked). It's not scientific assessment, it's psychological torture.
Would I take a polygraph to reactivate my clearance? Yeah, if I had to. Would I pass? That's up to the examiner, because much like the author I won't tolerate being called a liar, nor will I capitulate to power games. I'll be honest, forthcoming, and cooperative - and if that's not enough to pass, then I don't want to work for you.
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.
From the viewpoint of a security clearance, the employee is the enemy.
This is so interesting. I guess I was a dipshit in this scenario? Because I just accepted that the reviewer thought I was lying. Began to question my own memory. And just gave up on the idea of working at that place. In hindsight, I should have protested and not given up. But I was a meek 21 year old and didn't know anything. Seems like a strange filter to apply.
Nah, the dipshits are the ones who take the polygrapher at their word that they can be trusted/"this is a safe space" and blab about the crimes they've committed.
Almost anyone who spent enough time at an alphabet agency has stories about polygraph candidates who spill the beans on crimes during their initial polygraph, thinking that somehow gives them "cred" or immunity.
They are the dipshits.
There's two kinds of sociopaths, the uncontrollable ones and the controllable ones. The CIA only wants the latter.
What’s the organizational rationale behind using the polygraph? Its reliability at detecting deception doesn’t on the face of things seem correct, with “bureaucratic inertia” not really enough to explain its persistence either. Is it something different then? Perhaps when someone’s response patterns simply don’t match known types or some other reason?
Go watch the JCS episode with the Chris Watts interrogation including his polygraph, you’ll see it’s actually extremely effective.
As a scientific tool to literally detect lies it’s completely bunk, but all the interrogator has to say is “the machine said you weren’t 100% truthful” and humans will 9 times out of 10 start blabbing.
It absolutely works as an interrogation tool.
https://youtu.be/nVZhV7M3mNE
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?
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?
It's a bureaucracy like any other.
Not a bad person, just lacking in wisdom.
Not really
Not bad, just as misinformed as most folks out there about the process and requirements.
National Security is a PITA, full of cutthroat sociopaths who would eat the SV VC-types for breakfast. That is a compliment, because the work they do is broadly dark and grimly necessary, at least at the levels of global geopolitics a lot of them are expected to operate at. I washed out in contracting for much the same reason this person kept "failing" polygraphs: honesty to the point of external perceptions of naivety. The types who excel in these sectors see folks like us as doormats or tissues, and react poorly when we catch them in the act and demand anything resembling respect because they know we're a threat to the entire establishment if we're allowed to succeed.
The point of polygraphs has always been about control, and folks who resist that sort of control are incidentally highlighting themselves as being uncontrollable to power alone. The books the author links are excellent starting points for understanding the true function of a polygraph, and why more places are outlawing them as a means of trying to diversify a deeply broken and hostile security apparatus by preventing it from being a "blind fools and sociopaths-only" club.
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.
In my experience, 99.9% of the federal bureaucracy is regular normies just trying to make a living, pay the bills, and eke out a pension if they're lucky.
The remaining 0.1% aren't "lizard people" so much as apex predators in their fields, or political appointees. The latter are dangerous because they're fickle, vain, and narcissistic; the former are dangerous because they know where the skeletons are in the closet, where the bodies are buried in the desert, and have dirt on everyone whose corpse they didn't have to climb over into their position.
> I'm curious if you're willing to elaborate on this story.
My story is simple: I wrote extensive system documentation that the developers refused to (but gleefully took credit for), caught a colleague picking locks on secure doors and ditching work to go on dates, and noped out of the politicking between subcontractors maneuvering for a bigger cut of the pie in lieu on focusing on the mission at hand. This was not the problem.
The problem is I reported the first two, and thus became a ripe target for the third.
I would use this information to reflect.
How do you mean? I don't look down on anyone.
I don't get it. The author is 'honest to a fault,' but then lies about discussing the polygraph with others and posts an anonymous op-ed.
When she started the CIA described her personality as naively honest. She concludes that the way they treat honest people makes it an unwise career choice. But, a pathological fantasist might have quite a different experience and no motivation to write an op-ed.
> but I wondered why a petty thief thought she could get into the Agency.
....do you not understand what "the Agency" actually does?
It's no wonder they create this giant wall of existential dread to the applicants. It prevents them from seeing the scope of what they're about to get themselves into.
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.
[dead]
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.
Just have the courage of your convictions and extend this logic of culpability to everybody who works for the United States Government. Otherwise, it just sounds like you don't understand that a huge fraction of the work of intelligence is preventing wars.
I don't think the CIA is broadly a force for good. I think that the presumption that most people working there are evil is unfounded, though. It's a huge organization with a big portfolio, most of which isn't telegenic or activating.
That’s true of every criminal org. Enforcers are usually a small percentage of the population, because they are fundamentally businesses. Violence is "expensive" in terms of heat from law enforcement, lost revenue, lower internal stability, etc.
You don’t need to defend it with weak arguments. If you feel like you do, that is a bigger issue, maybe talk to your local therapist or priest.
It's very hard to understand what you're arguing though.
You agree the CIA is not "broadly a force for good" (which I consider a big understatement). You also don't seem to disagree it's an organization whose activities involve, among others, torture, assassinations, extraordinary renditions, psyops, etc. Yes, sometimes to "prevent wars", other times to incite wars or to topple governments they don't like, or to help crush down rebellions they don't like, or to help rebellions they do like.
So why this fixation on pointing out that the majority of CIA analysts are pencil pushers and not directly involved in unsavory activities? They still enable them. And they willingly work for this organization, why make excuses for them just because some of them are nerds who wear a suit and don't personally torture anybody, and instead translate Farsi or Chinese?
As a reminder, this is the comment to which you're reacting:
> The guy trying to work for the psychological torture club got psychologically tortured a little? My heart bleeds for him
I mean, the comment is right. This guy in TFA did willingly belong to a psychological torture group, even if he's not directly involved in this particular activity. It's ok for us to react at the irony of the situation, that he feels tortured by the polygraph, given the organization he belongs to. They didn't even physically touch him, yet he felt "abused".
I'm sure you understand the slippery slope of comparing the CIA to all of the US government is just not right.
https://archive.ph/0gJFG
It is not paywalled....
I posted it because the site was overloaded and would not load at the time…
Has the United States of America ever actually been a serious country?
Parts of it once were, yes.
(2018)
I feel bad for this guy. Policies like this only occur where bureaucrats cannot be fired for incompetence and no one has the power to change anything.
Oh boy, something on the HN front page i have direct personal experience with (CIA polygraph exams in general not this specific one).
>Then she asked if I'd read about polygraphs. I said I'd just finished A Tremor in the Blood. She claimed she'd never heard of it. I was surprised. It's an important book about her field, I would have thought all polygraphers knew of it.
They'll also ask you about antipolygraph.org which is the site OP is hosted on. CIA is well aware that it is one of the top search results for polygraph. My examiner actually had the whole expanded universe backstory behind the site memorized and went on a rant about george maschke, the site's owner who lost his job at a major defense contractor then ran away to some place in scandanavia from which they are unable to extradite him.
BTW by reading this comment you may have already failed your polygraph exam at the CIA.
>My hand turned purple, which hurt terribly.
OP should have included more context here; part of the polygraph test involves a blood pressure cuff which is put on EXTREMELY tight, far more so than any doctor or nurse would ever put it on. It is left on for the entire duration of the test (approximately 8 hours). My entire arm turned purple and i remember feeling tremors.
>The examiner wired me up. He began with what he called a calibration test. He took a piece of paper and wrote the numbers one through five in a vertical column. He asked me to pick a number. I picked three. He drew a square around the number three, then taped the paper to the back of a chair where I could see it. I was supposed to lie about having selected the number three.
This is almost certainly theatrical. It is true that they need to establish a "baseline of truth" by comparing definite falsehoods with definite truth but the way they get that is by asking highly personal questions where they can reasonably expect at least one of them will be answered untruthfully. They'll ask about drugs, extramarital affairs, crimes you got away with, etc. Regarding the one about crimes, supposedly your answer will not be given to law enforcement but if you actually trust the CIA on this you're probably too retarded to work there anyways. I'm not confident that lying to somebody who has specifically directed you to lie to him would produce the same sort of physical response as genuine lies.
>On the bus back to the hotel, a woman was sobbing, "Do they count something less than $50 as theft?" I felt bad for her because she was crying, but I wondered why a petty thief thought she could get into the Agency.
If she failed this isn't why. You're supposed to lie at least once or else they have no baseline for truth (see above). In addition, the point of the Polygraph isn't just to evaluate your loyalty to the United States but also to make the agency aware of anything that could be used by an adversary to compromise you in the future. Somebody who shoplifted 50$ worth of merchandise isn't a liability but somebody who shoplifted 50$ worth of merchandise and believes that it would damage their career if their employer found out is a huge liability even if they are wrong and their employer does not actually care. Putting employees under interrogation until they break down and confess to things like this so that they know it has not endangered their employment is one of the primary objectives of the polygraph.
>A pattern emerged. In a normal polygraph, there was often a gross mismatch between a person and the accusations made against them. I don't think the officials at Polygraph had any idea how unintentionally humorous this was. Not to the person it happened to, of course, but the rest of us found it hysterically funny.
As said above, the whole point is to make you break down and confess to something embarrassing. If you don't confess to anything it is assumed that you are still hiding something from them and you could fail.
>"Admit it, you're deeply in debt. Creditors are pounding on your door!" I said. "You've just revealed to me that you haven't bothered to pull my credit report. Are you lazy, or are you cheap?"
this is another thing they look for that doesn't necessarily indicate you are compromised but could be used to compromise you in the future. Unlike the above example of petty theft this is actually something that can disqualify you since obviously the agency isn't going to pay off your credit card.
>I was so frustrated, I started to cry.
Working for the government is extremely unhealthy because these people only surround themselves with other government employees and somehow they get this idea in their head that they have to work for the federal government or work indirectly for the federal government via a defense contractor (they call this "private sector" even though no sane person would ever think that adding a middleman between you and the people who tell you what to do changes anything). In some cases this is justified because there are many career paths which are impossible or illegal to make profit off of and the only people who will pay you to do them are the government. There are literally people whose entire adult lives are spent looking at high-altitude aerial photography and circling things with a sharpie so i can kind of understand how they might be devastated if they lose their clearance, but at least 75% of all glowies have some skill which would be in demand by actual private industry if they didn't suffer from this weird "battered housewife syndrome" that compels them to keep working for the government even though it subjects them to annual mandatory bullying sessions.
>I'd just refused a polygraph. I felt like Neville Longbottom when he drew the sword of Gryffindor and advanced on Lord Voldemort. I was filled with righteous indignation, and it gave me courage.
Again, glowies are so fucking lame. This person just unironically compared failing a polygraph exam to the climactic scene from a seven-volume series of childrens' books about an 11 year-old boy in england who goes to a special high school for wizards.
> part of the polygraph test involves a blood pressure cuff which is put on EXTREMELY tight, far more so than any doctor or nurse would ever put it on. It is left on for the entire duration of the test (approximately 8 hours). My entire arm turned purple and i remember feeling tremors.
Why would you subject yourself to this?
Some people clearly do it for their paycheck.
It's the CIA, manipulation is their speciality. MK-ULTRA didn't just study drugs and wacky pagan magic, they also studied more mundane methods of mind control which are undoubtedly real.
The CIA understands why beautiful young women with a multitude of better options will stay slavishy dedicated towards the one boyfriend who beats them, why people stay in cults with outrageous belief systems, and how fascist and communist dictatorships could motivate entire nations to commit genocide against their neighbors and fellow countrymen.
BTW the bit I described above about compelling you to tell them your embarrassing personal secrets so that they won't be used to blackmail you bears a striking resemblance to anonymously confessing your sins to a priest so that you will be forgiven in Christ's name.
> the site's owner who lost his job at a major defense contractor then ran away to some place in scandanavia from which they are unable to extradite him.
Eh, all the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) definitely have extradition treaties with the U.S.
[dead]
[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.)
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.
[flagged]
> 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.
I thought that was communicated by the 134 lbs and objection to pornography.