Personal Statement of a CIA Analyst(antipolygraph.org) |
Personal Statement of a CIA Analyst(antipolygraph.org) |
>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?
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.
Eh, all the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) definitely have extradition treaties with the U.S.
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.
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.
ACAB, Including being B to other C.
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.
“Americans are stupid people, by and large. We pretty much believe whatever we’re told”.
“The bigger the lie, the more they believe”.
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.
Hey a goat actually died you know
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.
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?
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.
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 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.)
Sure was lucky you didn’t work on any of those classified projects - <wink>
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do they also have little "Hang in there!" posters on the wall, too?
....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.
(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
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.
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.
Are you sure that’s the right word?
Maybe…too disrespectful? (Abusive, in your words.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If the people telling the interviewers to use polygraphs believe the suspects will believe in polygraphs, it's enough.
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 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 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. :-)
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).
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.
But if you make even the instruction material lie, then there is nothing that could be leaked and "expose" the system.
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?
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.