Word: polygraphed
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...information, the Pentagon has been working on an older and more basic problem: how to screen out security risks. Increasingly, the Pentagon is turning to the lie detector for this purpose. In 1983, the last year for which a count is available, the Defense Department administered 21,000 routine polygraph checks to its employees. This year, with special congressional authorization, some 3,500 key officials who have access to highly secret information, or may be under consideration for such access, will be given additional polygraph tests. They will be specifically designed to see whether those being examined have already divulged...
Stilwell insists that anyone failing the test would merely lose access to sensitive information while a further investigation was conducted to see whether the polygraph findings properly had designated the person as a security risk. Stilwell says the Pentagon is aware that a polygraph test is not wholly reliable, but he is satisfied that it is a useful tool since it has "an accuracy between 75% and 90%" when administered by skilled examiners...
Critics of the polygraph, which measures pulse rate, blood pressure, breathing patterns and perspiration, contend that it is most apt to be wrong in random screening where the tested person is not asked about a specific act of wrongdoing. Dr. John Beary, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for health affairs and now associate dean at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, further insists that "there is no physiological response unique to lying." The machine, he contends, detects excitement, not lies. Beary adds that Soviet agents are routinely trained to beat the machines and that the Pentagon's increasing...
Opponents called the directive a threat to constitutional rights. Correctly. Nor did top political aides at the White House, who undoubtedly account for more sensitive leaks than lower-level bureaucrats, relish the thought of facing polygraph straps and lifetime censorship. Last week the President backed down, suspending the controversial provisions until a "bipartisan solution" to the problem of safeguarding classified information can be worked out in Congress. Orwell's worries about 1984 apparently failed to take into account that it was an election year...
Millions of others subject to the surveillance sections could find their careers impaled upon he detector rests of dubious reliability. Though a recent Office of Technology Assessment study concluded "no scientific evidence exists to establish the validity of polygraph testing," with accuracy fluctuating wildly from 17 to 99 percent officials could face reassignment or demotion for refusing to take the test. Perhaps, though, accuracy is not the intent as Richard Nixon put it in the Watergate Tapes. "I don't know whether the detector tests) are accurate or not, but it doesn't make any difference. Test them...