Your regular reminder that polygraphs are junk science that arent admissible in court.
You'd be just as successful finding the truth by hiring a phrenologist to study the bumps of peoples heads.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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I had a co-worker that managed to score himself a pretty decent aerospace job. He was a damn good coder, college graduate, No debt no drug use whatsoever, nicest guy in the world. This one time a baby mouse got stuck in a recycling can by his desk. He gave it water put a little piece of Rice krispie treat and with it so it had something to eat. The mouse took a bite of the rice krispie treat and kealed over dead. He sobbed about that for the whole day and was mopey for the rest of the week.
Anyway he passed all the practical exams with flying colors. They've gone through months of investigation and he was fine. Finally came time for the polygraph. He went for the poly, found some time later that it was not good. Listen I'm back for another poly. Some number of days or weeks later it came back is not good.
I'm like dude, what's happening when you're going in there are they asking you complicated morality questions or something? Basically it came down to about halfway through the test he would just start freaking out that he wasn't going to pass it get nervous, upset, The second time he actually cried a little bit.
He never did get that job. But I can assure you that if he had he would have gone to his grave with any secrets that ever would have come out of there.
“To find leakers” lol nope. This is being done to fire non loyalists to Trump.
Have they stopped to consider that they maybe are just super incompetent idiots? Who am I kidding, they lack the intelligence for introspection and are incapable of coming to rational conclusions.
Can we perform these test on all high levels of government? “Trump are you a Russian Asset?
If you're going to rely on pseudo-scoentific bullshit, you might as well bring in some palm readers and voodoo priests instead. At least that'll be entertaining.
EDIT - Just want to add this - Never, under any circumstances, should you take a polygraph test. If you are a suspect (legally or otherwise), they will not use the results to exonerate you. If they suspect you did it, but the polygraph doesn't detect any deception, they will throw out the results as "unreadable" and pursue other means of investigating you. But if the results detect deception, they will treat it like the fucking Oracle at Delphi.
Seriously american obsession with this snake oil bullshit is staggering. It never worked in any reasonable extent and how could it?
The idea of detecting lying by measuring "heart rate and co" is plainly idiotic and anyone who's part of this should be shamed into obscurity.
That might have made more sense if polygraph testing actually performed better than a dice roll. The US Congress Office of Technology Assessment and the National Academy of Sciences could've told DHS that, but I guess they didn't think to ask.
Or think in general.
Polygraph tests are so unreliable, they’re not even admissible in court.
Not exactly a rock solid case if someone who’s fired decides to sue - which I hope happens frequently.
they're "reliable enough" for their intended purpose here: fire people who aren't "in line".
Yeah, but the DHS is taking a massive risk each time they fire someone because of a polygraph. Without other evidence, they will have no legal defense if sued.
Do laws even matter anymore?
They aren't really though. It's basically reading tea leaves.
It's in their contract that the results of a polygraph are grounds for dismissal alone. They have no grounds to sue.
Ah. Thank you. I didn’t know that.
That’s a really shitty contract.
Glad they're using polygraphs, they're unreliable enough that the leakers won't be caught.
No, they're unreliable enough that whoever they want to be caught, will be caught.
Hit the nail on the head here.
5 bucks says the "suspects" all end up being gay, women, or non-white. You know. the same groups of people they blame everything on.
They’re just trying to scare people enough into having a reaction or admitting fault. Someone could also fail because they are afraid they will fail or they’re afraid they’re a suspect. If the actual leaker ~~thinks they’re doing the right thing and~~that the poly can’t catch them, they probably won’t even have a reaction.
Yeah but they're unreliable enough that someone will get caught regardless of whether they leaked anything.
As someone who has taken a polygraph, there's nuance.
First, they're unreliable because they can be beat- but neither you or I are beating them, you have to be trained to beat it.
Second, the reason they don't work is because you can just not talk. But if you're forced to talk to keep your job, you're gonna show lots of lying indicators.
Third, it's not a binary "did you lie". They're watching your blood pressure, heart rate, detecting any fidgets; things you subconsciously do when you lie. The person administrating the polygraph will then press you into a confession.
Polygraph is the biggest snake oil in contemporary crime “science” and frankly its infuriating that it still exists and everyone who defends it should be bullied into returning back to sanity.
Edit: Not going to bother responding to the silly replies from armchair psychologists who feel smart "knowing" polygraphs are unreliable. For the vast majority of the population, when answering binary questions, you will answer them differently depending on whether or not you lie. Regardless of whether or not "this is admissible in court", it's more than enough to deny someone a clearance renewal. Rub your brain cells together and extrapolate.
Thats just plainly false.
There's no reliable correlation between lying and heart rate or any other bodily functions. It's an intellectual act after all not a physical one. It simply doesn't compute.
The physiological response could be driven by literally anything and there's no way to isolated it to "lying" - what if I'm nervous just because I'm being interrogated by people who are known to be dirty and untrustworthy?
Polygraph is the biggest snake oil in contemporary crime "science" and frankly its infuriating that it still exists and everyone who defends it should be bullied into returning back to sanity.
The physiological response could be driven by literally anything and there's no way to isolated it to "lying" - what if I'm nervous just because I'm being interrogated by people who are known to be dirty and untrustworthy?
This is why they're unreliable. Too many false positives. But the stress of lying can produce a physiological response, which is the basis for the polygraph in the first place.
But people can also control their responses, so there's also a high possibly of false negatives.
The true positive and true negative rate is too low to be considered reliable, but it's not like there's zero basis in fact, like those bomb scanners that were literally empty shells.
There is no machine or drug or anything else that can "detect" a lie or signs of deception. Polygraph results are purely interpretive, and anything that's given to interpretation is given to the bias of the interpreter. Polygraph results are also wildly inconsistent. That's why they are generally not admissible in court.
Do we officially call them the US Gestapo yet or do we wait until they resort to torture on US soil?
bruh. us prisons employ multiple "pacification" techniques that draw from torture tricks. the intelligence community that's willing to work with musk is absolutely a modern gestapo or okrana
Razzia’s ✅ Secret police ☑️ Torture interrogation 📋
This is just nuts.
Why don't they use a ouija board?
Probably because it's kinda hard to check if a ghost had the "correct" skin color and/or genitals...
You could honestly just ask the ghost via the oiuja board and it would be roughly as meaningful as a polygraph
Legend of Korra did it first
Could it perhaps be the Fox News camera crews they bring around with them?
Well, good thing polygraph tests are just voodoo bullshit.
Doesn't matter. They are good enough to justify denial of clearance which means loss of job.
I have no faith that lawsuits will prevail here based on precedence supporting polygraphs as a credibility and suitability discriminator.
Thats actually banana republic shit.
You bet your ass it is!
Snow Crash isn't supposed to be a how-to.
Is the current US regime actually fascist, or is it just some kind of nausea-inducing Keystone Kops reality TV farce doomed to total failure & obscurity?
Fascism always is full of incompetent idiots, and yeah fascism is doomed to failure. The only question is how much damage the idiots can do before they fail.
Fascism is cannibalistic in nature. The rage eats its own until paranoia takes over.
Well, let's just say corporate wants you to identify what's different...
It can be both.
Yes!
Does the US have whistleblower protection laws that would make it easy for a judge to rule this illegal?
Well, Trump fired all of the heads of the whistle blower protection departments.
They were pretty shitty to begin with before that too, the laws existed but in practice, you'd still be fucked.
That's where I'm at with the whole thing. Yeah they really fucked up everything, but at the same time most of those agencies were fucking us anyway.
I've heard that if you take propranolol before the test it makes it easier to mislead the results.
Or say whatever you want since polygraphs are horse shit.