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A Times Editorial
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 6, 2003
In a stark overreaction to the spying allegations against Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico, Congress ordered the Energy Department to begin a massive polygraph screening program for employees at the nation's nuclear weapons labs. About 16,000 people in jobs with possible access to sensitive material were selected for security evaluations utilizing polygraph tests.
But the results of those tests have not been what Congress intended. Rather than flushing out spies in our midst, they have demoralized staff with false positive results and driven top scientists from our nuclear weapons program. Now, a study by the National Research Council suggests that polygraph tests are practically useless for security screening.
The 245-page report indicates that polygraph tests, which measure physiological changes of subjects as they are questioned, have little actual science backing up their validity. This reliability problem has always dogged the tests, which are not admissible in court except in rare instances. Even so, they continue to be widely used as an investigative technique.
The report's findings would be little more than an interesting note if lie detector tests weren't so damaging. In criminal investigations, they can create a rush to judgment. Police may abandon other leads and focus on making the evidence fit a certain suspect who failed a lie detector test, when in fact the results may be a false positive. Polygraph tests used as an employment screening device can harm morale, while offering little in the way of enhanced security.
The report, authored by a 14-person panel of experts, points to a chart that gives the hypothetical example of 10,000 government employees within which 10 spies are operating. In order to calibrate the polygraph test to catch 80 percent of the disloyal employees, another 1,598 employees would also have to fail. Those falsely suspected employees would be marked as potential traitors, possibly sabotaging their career advancement.
The Energy Department is in the process of redesigning its polygraph program and will take the results of this study into account. There is no secret as to what it should do: Dump the polygraph tests. The results are simply too unreliable.