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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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'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.
"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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Been there, done that. It's a good account, but I'm pretty surprised that the author felt that he could get away with "butt clinching", which is a form of deception, even when you're using it because you know the polygraph process is flawed. So he had to have lied to the investigator about whether or not he was being deceptive, and he never should have been cleared in the first place.
My last few polygraphs (I've had well over a dozen of them) were abusive. Before one of the later tests, the investigator tried to establish rapport, and told me that he had interrogated terrorists in the middle east, who had threatened to kill him. Before the test, I sympathized with him on this and thought that those terrorists must have been really bad people. After the test, I completely understood why those subjects had threatened to kill him.
The polygraph is basically a mind fuck. They try to guilt you into admitting some wrong that you've done by pretending that they already know about it. People with a conscience will break down and admit something, but different personality types react differently.
A senior security officer that I knew always passed his polygraphs on the first sitting, and never had any trouble. The reason was because he was a pathological liar. One of the requirements for his job was to come up with "cover stories", which are lies that you must convincingly tell others, to protect the security of a program.
Two co-worker engineers I know failed, because they refused to go back for more abuse. They were not bad or deceptive people -- They were "Type A" personalities, and it was just too stressful for them.
Refusing to take (or re-take) a polygraph is a red flag, and gets a lot of high level attention. The government will assume that you are refusing because you've done something wrong, and may go after you, and could ruin you life, even if you are innocent.
I 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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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. The threat is the real tool.
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.
The most troubling aspect of these accounts is the "unfalsifiable" nature of the countermeasure accusation. Once an examiner decides you’re manipulating your physiological response, there is no empirical way to prove you weren't. It essentially turns a high-stakes job interview into a test of how well you can suppress natural stress reactions. It’s a shame to see how many talented individuals are sidelined by a process that prizes a specific physiological profile over a demonstrated record of integrity.
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.
(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.
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.
No one wants that guy working at the cia.
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.
> 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
It was a giant waste of time and money and, this being the CIA, it likely harmed many people.
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.
It’s reassuring to know no one at the CIA has ever done anything wrong, like stealing fifty dollars.
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?
Not really, since everyone has done so. Even you.
Not getting caught for it on the other hand could be a positive.
I assumed the author was a she…
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.
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.
The misuse is that they're used at all.
OTOH, someone arrested can (probably should?) refuse.
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.
Sure was lucky you didn’t work on any of those classified projects - <wink>
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?
You wouldn’t make a good candidate for a national security job, not that it sounds like you want to be. Investigators would want to know who you’d been associating with at all those different places, and tracking it all down would take a long time ( the wait for the investigation can be years, the period during which you’d be unhireable for the job you were going after.)
I 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.
But I take your point of course. :-)
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.
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
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMRI_lie_detection
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.
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.
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).
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.
(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
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.
Do they also have little "Hang in there!" posters on the wall, too?
> 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.
Though Arendt seemed to imply those normal people were not very smart or imaginative. Just blindly doing evil stuff simply because they were told to.
I 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 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.
>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.
Why would you subject yourself to this?
Eh, all the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) definitely have extradition treaties with the U.S.
....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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
that just looks lIke grmticly crrct writing to meeee