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Lie Detectors & Polygraphy

Lie detectors for sex offenders 'to be rolled out'

Mandatory polygraph testing for sex offenders is set to be rolled out across England and Wales following a successful pilot scheme, ministers say.
It found offenders who were tested were more honest and gave better information, which meant they were managed more effectively.
The pilot took place in the East and West Midlands probation areas from April 2009 to October 2011.

There are approximately 3,000 sex offenders on licence in the community.
Of these, 750 are considered to be in the most serious category of offender.
The government said it was now considering how the tests could best be used to manage offenders.

The pilot scheme found offenders using lie detectors made twice as many admissions to probation staff, for example admitting to contacting a victim or entering an exclusion zone.
Offenders also reported that the tests helped them to manage their own behaviour better

An offender can immediately be returned to prison if the lie detector tests and other information indicate they have broken their conditions or present a risk to public safety.
The government said the tests would be in addition to the rigorous conditions sex offenders face when they are released from prison, which includes signing the sex offenders register.

A Downing Street source said: "It's vital that we protect the public from serious sex offenders. That's why the conditions after they leave prison need to be both strict and rigorously enforced.
"The pilot schemes using lie detectors to manage offenders in the community have been a success.
"So now we're looking at how it could be rolled out to provide probation officers with more information to manage the most serious sex offenders."

Polygraph tests, often referred to as lie detector tests, measure blood pressure, heart rate, breathing and levels of perspiration.
Experts use the tests to assess whether an individual is answering questions truthfully.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18916405
 
If lie detectors do work, the first people we should be using them on are politicians.
For example - you could have Osbourne on Newsnight and at the press of the red button watch his heart/lie rate vary with each question.
 
jimv1 said:
If lie detectors do work, the first people we should be using them on are politicians

Unnecesary, surely, given that the easiest way to tell if a politician is lying, is if his/her lips are moving. It'd be better if someone invented a truth detector for politicians's use.

Boom boom.
 
ramonmercado said:
Another twist on this topic.

Spy Sat Agency Let Child Molesters in Its Ranks Go Free
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/polygraph/
By Robert BeckhusenEmail Author July 11, 2012 | 12:41 pm | Categories: Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance

National Reconnaissance Office patch commemorating a satellite launch. Photo: mr. smashy/Flickr

The National Reconnaissance Office — the secretive Pentagon agency in charge of spy satellites — is supposed to safeguarding Americans and American interests from foreign threats. But the agency has done an incomplete job, at best, at protecting American children from its own employees and job applicants.

According to documents obtained by the McClatchy news service, a former California substitute teacher who sought a security clearance from the National Reconnaissance Office confessed during a lie detector exam to molesting an elementary school student. The agency never informed police nor the school district where the incident allegedly occurred. An Air Force lieutenant who confessed to assaulting a child in Virginia was never reported to either the Air Force or police.

Like many of America’s national security services, the Pentagon’s spy satellite agency screens employees and applicants with polygraph machines. The so-called “lie detector” tests are supposed to stop spies, and polygraphers’ questions are officially limited to national security questions in order to protect employee privacy. But whistleblowers now say the polygraph program is “squeezing every personal secret out of people without regard for the consequence.” Which wouldn’t be so bad — if the NRO actually reported to the police confessions to serious crimes like child molestation extracted during polygraph sessions. But McClatchy could not confirm that this took place. The agency responded that criminal confessions were “forwarded to appropriate authorities,” but didn’t provide more information to the news service.

Now, it’s possible the polygraph records would never have made it to court — many courts refuse to accept results from polygraph tests as evidence, due to skepticism the tests reflect more pseudoscience than science, and don’t detect lies as much as emotional responses. Charges might not be filed “even if there’s a confession,” the report notes.

Whistleblowers, though, say the agency may be trying to shield its practices from the public eye. Dissent within the agency over the scale of the program could threaten to leak out, sources told McClatchy, if interviews and test notes were handed over to the courts.


Instead, internal critics say, polygraphers were told to ask questions that were humiliating, abusive and extraneous to the subject of national security. “I was coached to go after this stuff,” a polygrapher told McClatchy. “It blew my mind. They were asking me to elicit information that I’m not permitted to ask about, and I told them I wasn’t going to do it.” The polygrapher added that while the agency has official policies to only ask specific, relevant questions and leave out the personal lives of interviewees, bosses were “in fact behind closed doors … pushing (polygraphers) to actively pursue it.”

Polygraphers’ work performance was measured according to “the number of personal confessions” the employee was able to extract. A former agency polygrapher, Chuck Hinshaw, who has since gone public, said he received “thousands of dollars in bonuses” for his good record of extracting confessions. Another whistleblower, Mark Phillips, had a poorer record, as he was uncomfortable pursuing personal details. The agency has since labeled him as a troublemaker.

A contract employee, who revealed she smoked marijuana as a youth, was called back in for a four-hour session and grilled by Hinshaw. Hinshaw says his superiors ordered him to continue interrogating the woman on her drug use. The woman then revealed she had been molested as a youth. Hinshaw wanted to end it there, but his superiors “demanded that Hinshaw continue the questioning.”

“You don’t understand,” Hinshaw told them. “This woman needs help.”

Hinshaw says he stepped aside. But the agency sent another polygrapher in to press the employee.

There could be another reason for the thoroughness of the tests: “By collecting confessions to repulsive or criminal behavior, officials can justify using polygraph screenings to their bosses, Congress and a skeptical public despite questions about the test’s reliability,” according to agency polygraphers cited by McClatchy.

This is while Pentagon polygraph programs have continued to expand. Despite a poor record, scant support from the scientific community, and skepticism from the National Academy of Sciences that the tests are flimsy, the tests have “increased fivefold, to almost 46,000 annually” at the Pentagon, the report notes.

It’s also become a tool to help the Obama administration stop suspected leakers. The administration is already prosecuting more officials for leaking secrets than any other administration. The White House also wants to be more proactive.

But it’s another question as to whether it’s effective, or whether agencies are trying too hard, while paradoxically not doing enough.


To be fair, I don't think these 'rules' are supposed set in concrete anyway, more of a guide really. Most good NLP practitioners will tell you you need to establish a baseline of behaviour in someone and then look for telling changes in that. I'm not particularly defensive of NLP by the way, but I think this may be another example of Wiseman knocking down a straw man once again, which I am starting to notice he does rather a lot.
 
drbastard said:
Most good NLP practitioners will tell you you need to establish a baseline of behaviour in someone and then look for telling changes in that

Indeed. You don't need to be a great liar though. Best way to beat a polygraph is not to make the lie sound like the truth, but to make the truth sound like a lie. If you make your baseline questions (question, the answers to which the tester knows to be true) sound like a lie, then it invalidates the whole test, and you can be home in time for tea.
 
drbastard said:
Most good NLP practitioners will tell you you need to establish a baseline of behaviour in someone and then look for telling changes in that

Indeed. You don't need to be a great liar though. Best way to beat a polygraph is not to make the lie sound like the truth, but to make the truth register as a lie. If you make your baseline questions (question, the answers to which the tester knows to be true) register like a lie, then it invalidates the whole test, and you can be home in time for tea.
 
Sergeant_Pluck said:
drbastard said:
... If you make your baseline questions (question, the answers to which the tester knows to be true) register like a lie, then it invalidates the whole test, and you can be home in time for tea.

Just so we're clear ... There's no standard reading for 'lie' versus 'truth'. That's why a conventional polygraph test starts with some test questions to establish a baseline reading for the given victim - errr, subject. There is no baseline level that automatically invalidates or truncates the testing session.

The alleged indicator of 'lying behavior' is a significant *difference* between the baseline reading(s) and the reading(s) recorded during response to an actual (i.e., non-test) question.

All a conventional polygraph 'measures' is somatic stress, which is assumed to be uniquely higher when lying than when telling the truth. Eliminating significant difference among response readings eliminates the presumptive basis for suspecting lying behavior. As a result, there are two primary strategies for 'gaming' a polygraph:

(1) Induce and uniformly maintain somatic stress throughout the interview (to elevate the baseline 'true' readings to approximate any stressed / 'lying' ones. The most commonly alleged tactic for this is to induce physical discomfort throughout the session (e.g., a rock in one's shoe, keeping muscles clenched, etc.).

(2) Reduce and uniformly avoid somatic stress throughout the interview to reduce stressed / 'lie' readings to somewhere close to the baseline reading level(s). Suggestions related to this approach include meditative / relaxation practices and tranquilizers.

The only way to make polygraph results useless from the polygrapher's perspective is to eliminate the 'difference' - regardless of the specific readings between which such 'difference' is discernible.
 
Council conned into spending £50,000 on pseudo-science.

Councillor resigns over 'lie detector' fears
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-21151002

Fiona Ferguson announced her resignation in an email to council leader Jim Currie

A senior councillor from Cornwall's cabinet has resigned over an alleged plan to use what she has described as "lie detector" technology.

Councillor Fiona Ferguson said she was unhappy about the monitoring of phone calls to claimants of single-person's 25% council tax relief.

The council said contractor Capita would be reviewing people receiving the discount using specialist technology.

It added it wanted to prevent abuse of the system.

Portfolio holder for corporate resources Ms Ferguson, who had only been in the post for two months, announced her resignation in an email to Conservative-Independent council leader Jim Currie.

In it, she said: "It came to my attention that the contract let to Capita (before I took up my portfolio duties) to survey claimants of the single person's council tax relief will include the use of 'Voice Risk Analysis' (VRA) techniques when making phone calls to claimants.

"These techniques are sometimes called 'lie detector' tests."

According to Capita, who dispute the phrase "lie detector test", "VRA analyses, in real time, changes in voice frequency" which are then assessed by "trained operators" to identify possible bogus claimants.

The company has previously used the technology, combined with other techniques, in a similar review of single person council tax discounts in Derbyshire.

Ms Ferguson, who is leader of the Conservative group, said she had no reason to believe Councillor Currie was aware of this aspect of the contract, but added she thought it was extremely damaging to the council's reputation and she could not accept it on ethical grounds.

Ms Ferguson said she would be launching a petition to require any use of this technology to be approved by full council.

Mr Currie released a statement saying: "While I am aware of Fiona's views over the issue of voice recognition software, the use of this technology is a key part of the review of council tax single person discount which is being carried out by Capita."

The council said it had entered into a £50,000 contract with Capita to carry out a review of all council tax payers receiving the single-person benefit.

It said telephone interviews would be carried out with a number of claimants to verify the details they had provided, and that trained assessors would "use specialist technology to assist with the process".

It added: "All claimants will be advised that the calls will be recorded, monitored and used for fraud prevention purposes."
 
Another con job.

SITTING IN FRONT of a Converus EyeDetect station, it’s impossible not to think of Blade Runner.

In the 1982 sci-fi classic, Harrison Ford’s rumpled detective identifies artificial humans using a steam-punk Voight-Kampff device that watches their eyes while they answer surreal questions. EyeDetect’s questions are less philosophical, and the penalty for failure is less fatal (Ford’s character would whip out a gun and shoot). But the basic idea is the same: By capturing imperceptible changes in a participant’s eyes—measuring things like pupil dilation and reaction time—the device aims to sort deceptive humanoids from genuine ones.

It claims to be, in short, a next-generation lie detector. Polygraph tests are a $2 billion industry in the US and, despite their inaccuracy, are widely used to screen candidates for government jobs. Released in 2014 by Converus, a Mark Cuban–funded startup, EyeDetect is pitched by its makers as a faster, cheaper, and more accurate alternative to the notoriously unreliable polygraph. By many measures, EyeDetect appears to be the future of lie detection—and it’s already being used by local and federal agencies to screen job applicants. Which is why I traveled to a testing center, just north of Seattle, to see exactly how it works. ...

However, a close reading of records of EyeDetect’s use, obtained through public records requests, suggest that a reliable, useful, and equitable lie detector is still the stuff of science fiction. WIRED found that like polygraphs, EyeDetect’s results may introduce human bias and manipulation into its results. “Converus calls EyeDetect a next-generation lie detector, but it's essentially just the same old polygraph,” says Vera Wilde, a transparency activist and independent researcher who has been studying polygraphs for many years. “It's astounding to me that there are paying customers deploying this technology and actually screening people with it,” adds William Iacono, professor of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and law at the University of Minnesota. ...

https://www.wired.com/story/eye-sca... NL 120418 (1)&utm_medium=email&utm_source=nl
 
Building a better lie detector.

Even so, we are hopeless at spotting deception. On average, across 206 scientific studies, people can separate truth from lies just 54% of the time – only marginally better than tossing a coin. “People are bad at it because the differences between truth-tellers and liars are typically small and unreliable,” said Aldert Vrij, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth who has spent years studying ways to detect deception. Some people stiffen and freeze when put on the spot, others become more animated. Liars can spin yarns packed with colour and detail, and truth-tellers can seem vague and evasive.

Humans have been trying to overcome this problem for millennia. The search for a perfect lie detector has involved torture, trials by ordeal and, in ancient India, an encounter with a donkey in a dark room. Three thousand years ago in China, the accused were forced to chew and spit out rice; the grains were thought to stick in the dry, nervous mouths of the guilty. In 1730, the English writer Daniel Defoe suggested taking the pulse of suspected pickpockets. “Guilt carries fear always about with it,” he wrote. “There is a tremor in the blood of a thief.” More recently, lie detection has largely been equated with the juddering styluses of the polygraph machine – the quintessential lie detector beloved by daytime television hosts and police procedurals. But none of these methods has yielded a reliable way to separate fiction from fact.

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...ct-lie-detector-and-the-dangers-of-succeeding
 
An important thing in lie detecting and polygraphs is belief.

My experience is that the best liars are capable of believing what they are saying at that moment. They adopt a position and then "live it" in the moment, rather than thinking it through carefully before speaking. They are often helped by cultural norms: things that people are expected to say in certain situations. It is a sort of method acting.

In my fraud investigation career, it was common for people who were later proven to be liars to have "sworn on their children's lives" and to have expressed anger, indignation, and distress completely convincingly in the early stages of the investigation.

The only explanation I could come up with — and I reached this over more than 10 years specialising in the subject — was that they believed what they were saying, even though they knew that it was factually untrue. Many people are capable of beleiving two contradictory things at once.

The fraudsters we suspected early were the weak ones: those who knew that what they were doing was dishonest and were afraid of being caught. They would display classic "risk behaviours" such as repeating your question while they thought of an answer, or asking why you wanted to know before answering the question. They would often stand on their dignity as a person of standing in the community, or as a person of faith.

In both cases, the only ways to establish whether they were lying were:
  • Look for inconsistencies: two things that could not both be true at the same time, and therefore at least one of them was false
  • Look for checkable facts: specific details which could be verified or falsified evidentially

Similarly with lie detectors, if they achieve any results at all, it is because they are presented in such a way that the subject believes that they will be caught out, so they waver and crack under interrogation.

I used to watch Jeremy Kyle. He claimed that the lie detector test was 95% accurate (a nonsense figure) but even that meant that 1/20 results would be wrong. I never heard any subject rely on this:

JK: "So if you're not lying, why does my test say you are?"

Subject: "Because by your own admission, your test is wrong 1 time in 20, which is at least once every 3 or 4 episodes."

Whether you are looking at "risk behaviours", body language, or polygraphs, all they betray is nervousness or a reluctance to answer the question. There are many potential reasons for this, only one of which is that they are lying.

The way to prove that someone is lying is to find evidence that what they are saying is untrue.
 
An important thing in lie detecting and polygraphs is belief. My experience is that the best liars are capable of believing what they are saying at that moment.
Wow. No wonder so many advertising execs are sociopaths.
 
The way to prove that someone is lying is to find evidence that what they are saying is untrue.

Re-reading my post after AlchoPwn quoted from it, I realise I should have written:

The way to prove that someone is lying is (1) to find evidence that what they are saying us untrue and (2) evidence that they know that it is untrue.

People say untrue things all the time because of misunderstandings, incorrect information, poor education, etc.

This is not just a pedantic point. Whether you rely on polygraphs or pendulums, behaviours or body language, a person is only lying if they are deliberately trying to deceive.

Depending on the context and intention, in (English) law, and in common sense, "know that it's untrue" may include:
  1. Knowing that the supposed fact is untrue.
  2. Suspecting that it is untrue, but nevertheless presenting it as the unqualified truth.
  3. Making a statement of supposed fact without making any effort to check whether it is true or not.
For example:
  1. When I was 9 years old, if I had told you that the Trent was the most dangerous river in England, I would have been wrong, but not lying. My dad had told me, and that was enough for me to believe it.
  2. If I said it now, I would be lying, because my own experience and access to statistics tells me that it is certainly untrue.
  3. At the age of 20, I probably suspected it was untrue but had never checked. If I had presented confidently it as a definite fact in an effort to influence someone else's decision, I would have been lying
Therefore, at 3 different ages, I could have said the same thing but got 3 different results on any lie detector tests I had taken.

(As for the most dangerous river, most searches suggest the Wharfe in Yorkshire is the most dangerous, specifically at a narrow deep stretch called the Strid. However, "dangerous" could be defined in many different ways and the statistics could be presented in many different ways too.)
 
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