Late-breaking Government Opinion on Polygraph Privacy

TimK — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:00:00 -0800

Via AntiPolygraph.org News: Just before the dawn of President-elect Obama’s reign, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury has issued a late legal opinion contradicting an anti-polygraph memorandum from President Lyndon B. Johnson. Yes, you read that right: LBJ.

LBJ’s memo states, “I am convinced that action is necessary to prevent unwarranted intrusions into the privacy of individuals. Hereafter, use of the polygraph is prohibited with the following limited exceptions…” The memo then goes on to describe 3 classes of use and how the government must be restricted in using the polygraph in each.

Bradbury’s late-breaking opinion is now that LBJ’s memo “does not now bind the Department of Justice or other entities within the Executive Branch.”

LBJ assumed that polygraph results were valid. His concern was privacy. He didn’t want the government to be able to read peoples’ minds against their wills. But we now know that polygraphy and other forms of lie detection don’t actually work as their proponents claim. A 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the polygraph’s “accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies.”

This makes sense, because polygraphy bears more a resemblance to a mind-reading magic trick than to actual science. I recently mused that lie detection would make a great subject for an episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.

AntiPolygraph.org News notes:

It is not clear why Bradbury, who last year testified before Congress against all evidence and reason that waterboarding is not torture, has issued such a legal opinion at this late stage. Nor is it clear what this opinion may portend for future polygraph policy.

Maybe Bradbury is just trying to make his mark, as a lame-duck Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General.

Or maybe he’s hoping to give the Obama administration an excuse to increase the power of the federal government over the people, and blame it on the Bush administration. After all, Eric Holder, Obama’s choice for Attorney General, when he was Deputy Attorney General under Clinton, reportedly “removed a US Attorney and his assistant US Attorney from any civil or criminal proceedings related to Waco because they dared to ask questions about the possibility of a cover-up, proposed more stringent penalties for terrorizing and jailing medical marijuana users, played a key role in the terror kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez, aspired to clamp down on the free Internet by imposing ’reasonable restrictions,’” and now he’s talking about prohibiting people from using a gun to defend themselves from criminals in their own homes. (In case you think I’m exaggerating, a quote from the article: “ban on the use of any firearm for self-defense in the home.”)

Always watching!
-TimK

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Late-breaking Government Opinion on Polygraph Privacy