I am a big supporter of transparency in government just like my hero and fellow Kossack, Jesselyn Raddack. So I am disheartened that this has happened:
But this week, the nation’s top intelligence official announced that the government is expanding its use of the polygraph to expose federal employees who leak classified information to the media.
The testing could put intelligence workers at risk of being falsely stigmatized, jeopardizing their careers and their ability to contribute to the national security. It also could have a chilling effect on employees considering blowing the whistle on government wrongdoing, whistleblower advocates said.
http://truth-out.org/...
Furthermore, lie-detector tests are not accurate but rather subjective. As USA Today finds:
It turns out that polygraphy is not only an incredibly inexact science, but that reading the results of a lie detector is almost entirely subjective. In short, lie detectors don't work. But people's lives have been ruined by them.
The problem isn't that the machines don't record something—they do: heart rate, respiration, sweat-gland activity, and so on. But what the changes in those numbers mean is entirely up to interpretation.
http://www.usatoday.com/...
Furthermore as Professor Fienberg finds:
Briefing a Senate committee on the study in 2003, Fienberg put it this way: “Unfortunately tests that are sensitive enough to spot most violators will also mistakenly mark large numbers of innocent test takers as guilty.” (from Truthout)
These Tests do serve a function however:
Despite its ineffectiveness at detecting deception, the lie detector can serve as an interrogation tool, he said. If people believe it works, he said, it can intimidate them into admitting misconduct.
One of the greatest columns I read on the ineffectiveness of polygraph tests is by William Safire for the NY Times:
The C.I.A. had been the first to fall for it. By relying on widespread polygraph tests to ''flutter'' its employees, the agency believed it was invulnerable to ''moles.'' But the Soviet penetrator Aldrich Ames breezed through two of those tests, causing our counterspies to lower their guard and ignore obvious clues to the source of espionage that cost the lives of 10 U.S. agents in Russia.
Because professional spies are trained to defeat the device; because pathological liars do not cause its needles to spike; and because our counterspies relax when a potential suspect ''passes'' -- the system breeds the opposite of security.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Before that Safire claims:
After 19 months of study, experts convened by the National Research Council, an arm of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, concluded that ''national security is too important to be left to such a blunt instrument,'' and noted pointedly that ''no spy has ever been caught [by] using the polygraph.''
More importantly, however leaks serve a special function in a democracy. Leaks expose a government’s lies. One of the best arguments for leaks was given my Robert Fisk (please watch this two-part video):