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HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Personal Statement of a CIA Analyst
kj4211cash wrote 5 hours 11 min ago:
This rings so true and I only ever took one polygraph test. I was a
nerdy 21 year old and they told me I had failed on the marijuana use
question and encouraged me to think about it and come back and retry. I
remember being very confused. I withdrew my application and never went
back. I wonder how many others gave up on a job opportunity because it
was drug abuse Wednesday or whatever.
varispeed wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
Isn't the whole point to not lie about anything, so that later on it
cannot be used to blackmail you?
knallfrosch wrote 11 hours 34 min ago:
I always thought the workings of polygraphs were common knowledge.
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?
jazzpush2 wrote 11 hours 49 min ago:
I don't get it. The author is 'honest to a fault,' but then lies about
discussing the polygraph with others and posts an anonymous op-ed.
sigwinch wrote 4 hours 41 min ago:
When she started the CIA described her personality as naively honest.
She concludes that the way they treat honest people makes it an
unwise career choice. But, a pathological fantasist might have quite
a different experience and no motivation to write an op-ed.
themafia wrote 15 hours 54 min ago:
> but I wondered why a petty thief thought she could get into the
Agency.
....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.
ineedasername wrote 16 hours 29 min ago:
Whatâs the organizational rationale behind using the polygraph? Its
reliability at detecting deception doesnât on the face of things seem
correct, with âbureaucratic inertiaâ not really enough to explain
its persistence either. Is it something different then? Perhaps when
someoneâs response patterns simply donât match known types or some
other reason?
SteveNuts wrote 16 hours 8 min ago:
Go watch the JCS episode with the Chris Watts interrogation including
his polygraph, youâll see itâs actually extremely effective.
As a scientific tool to literally detect lies itâs completely bunk,
but all the interrogator has to say is âthe machine said you
werenât 100% truthfulâ and humans will 9 times out of 10 start
blabbing.
It absolutely works as an interrogation tool.
HTML [1]: https://youtu.be/nVZhV7M3mNE
snickerbockers wrote 16 hours 39 min ago:
Oh boy, something on the HN front page i have direct personal
experience with (CIA polygraph exams in general not this specific one).
>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.
enneff wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
> 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.
Why would you subject yourself to this?
bigiain wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
Some people clearly do it for their paycheck.
lysace wrote 16 hours 16 min ago:
> 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.
Eh, all the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden)
definitely have extradition treaties with the U.S.
antonvs wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
Has the United States of America ever actually been a serious country?
lisper wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
Parts of it once were, yes.
kryogen1c wrote 18 hours 21 min ago:
> As we walked across the lobby, I thought I was going to faint.
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.
BlueMacaw wrote 17 hours 38 min ago:
Iâm under the impression this was written by a woman. Obviously
could be either gender, but it "fits better" if you read it from a
female perspective.
> 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.
sigwinch wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
I thought that was communicated by the 134 lbs and objection to
pornography.
anonymousiam wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
Been there, done that. It's a good account, but I'm pretty surprised
that the author felt that he could get away with "butt clinching",
which is a form of deception, even when you're using it because you
know the polygraph process is flawed. So he had to have lied to the
investigator about whether or not he was being deceptive, and he never
should have been cleared in the first place.
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.
DANmode wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
> it was just too stressful for them.
Are you sure thatâs the right word?
Maybeâ¦too disrespectful? (Abusive, in your words.)
mrb wrote 19 hours 56 min ago:
"Someone who hated computers so much that she had the secretary print
out her emails so she could read them was interrogated for hours about
hacking into Agency networks [...] there was often a gross mismatch
between a person and the accusations made against them."
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 =:-)
andrewflnr wrote 16 hours 40 min ago:
If someone has that level of opsec, the CIA should be trying to
recruit and turn them even if they're guilty.
greedo wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
Didn't RMS do this with his emails?
fipar wrote 4 hours 35 min ago:
You may be thinking of Don Knuth
yesbabyyes wrote 15 hours 32 min ago:
No, Stallman uses Emacs:
> 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 [1] ) 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. [2] 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.
HTML [1]: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git
HTML [2]: https://stallman.org/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?path=/stallman-c...
HTML [3]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
fmajid wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
Polygraphs are junk science. I wonder why they havenât graduated to
fMRI. Canât be for lack of funds. My guess is the polygraph
bureaucracy is whatâs known in Washington as a self-licking ice cream
cone.
keepamovin wrote 16 hours 57 min ago:
Perhaps the point is it's "confession theatre". You're put in a
stress position, worried that the "magical machine" can read your
darkest secrets, and told that everything will go easier if you're
just honest, and so that's why you're inclined to spill them. Which
is what they are trying to get you to do.
gbcfghhjj wrote 15 hours 16 min ago:
Yes and also consider they want to assess how well you stand up to
interrogation generally
keepamovin wrote 14 hours 48 min ago:
Hm, what's the relevance for people who don't leave office?
cpncrunch wrote 19 hours 29 min ago:
It isn't really much better, but is a lot more expensive:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMRI_lie_detection
Arainach wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
I applied for an internship with the NSA. My understanding of the
process (years ago, pre-Snowden) was that they did a pass on your
resume (I can't recall if there was even a phone screen), then they
started background checks and if there were N internships the first N
people to pass the security clearance were selected.
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.
coreyburnsdev wrote 15 hours 19 min ago:
really? working with the nsa would probably be very interesting work!
Arainach wrote 14 hours 0 min ago:
You're not wrong. The NSA circa 2008 was probably doing some of the
most algorithmically interesting CS work in the world. That said,
I think that in terms of living with myself, sleeping well at
night, and being able to travel the world without asking
permission, not working there was the right call.
bigiain wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
There are probably interesting jobs at drug cartels and in
organised crime.
keepamovin wrote 16 hours 58 min ago:
At lesat now the IC has dirt on you should you ever step out of line.
DANmode wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
Yeah, âhelp us into Yahoo Mail for a few years - or weâll
anonymously report to your mother the truth about where the coins
came fromâ.
keepamovin wrote 11 hours 3 min ago:
Why stop there? They can just make up whatever they want. Then
say it as loaded questions to everyone they contact for your
âvetting.â
13415 wrote 20 hours 50 min ago:
That's an old classic, should have 2018 in the headline but the site is
much older. Some people hate it because they're afraid that knowing the
site might count as preparation and might make them fail their
polygraph exam.
b00ty4breakfast wrote 21 hours 0 min ago:
I'm always surprised to hear that a government agency administers
polygraph tests in something as serious as hiring but then I remember
the CIA also spent millions of dollars trying to develop telekinetic
assassins and train clairvoyants to spy on the Kremlin.
assaddayinh wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
The main job of every station chief is to sit drunk in bars, listen
to the high tales of the locals and yell "i did that" everytime the
people had enough into the telephone to washington. Secret services
are first and foremost storytellers...
Herring wrote 13 hours 4 min ago:
Actually it sounds more like hazing to me (unethical but not entirely
irrational).
halJordan wrote 16 hours 50 min ago:
If you ever get the opportunity to read what people admit,
unprompted, during these "conversations" then you'll know why they'll
never go away. Stuff like, "yeah i stepped on a kitten's head once,
but i was young... No i don't see why anyone would have a problem
with that."
No one wants that guy working at the cia.
altmanaltman wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
yeah CIA never has a history of doing terrible things and causing
harm to people. Why would they hire pyschopaths?
masfuerte wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
Are you sure? Post 9/11 the CIA decided they needed to be in the
business of kidnapping and torturing. They didn't seem to have any
trouble finding employees to do it.
mmooss wrote 14 hours 4 min ago:
Soldiers need to kill people, but you don't want sociopathic
soldiers - you want the opposite: Someone who can handle their
emotions, not someone who hides from them, runs from them, or
tries to bury or ignore them. The latter are not stable or
reliable under stress.
Der_Einzige wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
Than how do you explain the marine corps? The average enlisted
marine is a sociopath. You have to be to get through the
crucible.
ElProlactin wrote 15 hours 37 min ago:
Yeah, they need people who will do the most inhumane things to
other human beings, not animals.
delichon wrote 20 hours 27 min ago:
The polygraph doesn't have to emit any useful data at all to be very
useful in interrogations. Like a bomb doesn't have to have any
explosive in it to clear a building. Interrogation is a head game and
a complicated box with knobs and buttons and maybe even blinking
lights makes a fine prop.
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.
bigiain wrote 14 hours 15 min ago:
I'd like to say "I'm always surprised to hear that a government
agency administers institutionalized mental abuse". But I'm not
surprised at all.
ACAB, Including being B to other C.
awakeasleep wrote 14 hours 26 min ago:
Everyone repeats this old canard but no one has any evidence even
anecdotes to show that a polygraph machine is better than any other
way to head fake someone in an interrogation
Conan_Kudo wrote 6 hours 35 min ago:
If people believe it, that's enough. It doesn't have to be good,
it just has to mess with people enough.
lazide wrote 11 hours 20 min ago:
Why would it have to be better to still be used?
XorNot wrote 20 hours 39 min ago:
That research was oriented towards making sure it wasn't possible
though.
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.
driverdan wrote 15 hours 37 min ago:
You don't waste resources researching something with no
plausibility or explanation as to how it could exist.
bigiain wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
rapnie wrote 18 hours 32 min ago:
I always wonder when I see one of those hypnosis shows, where
someone from the audience makes themselves a docile fool in front
of a large crowd, whether they are stooges or it is the real deal.
But I wouldn't volunteer to get hypnotised to figure that out, in
fear of being the next person who stands imitating a dog in heat on
such a stage.
gigatree wrote 15 hours 51 min ago:
The few people Iâve asked whoâve been hypnotized said it was
true and had no reason to lie or trick me, and it seems true. But
if the lens is âwe already figured out all biology and physics
so we can ignore the possibility of actual hypnosis (putting
someone in a trance stage) being possibleâ then itâs hard to
see things that thereâs actually immense evidence for (eg the
telepathy tapes).
mrgoldenbrown wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
The telepathy tapes don't have immense evidence in their favor,
unless they've redone everything recently in a controlled way.
ungreased0675 wrote 17 hours 8 min ago:
Thereâs a good book about this called Reality is Plastic. It
may give you a new perspective.
Hikikomori wrote 18 hours 34 min ago:
Was drugging random Americans with LSD also a valid experiment?
Parts of the CIA was just insane back then, maybe still is.
post-it wrote 17 hours 30 min ago:
Yeah absolutely. Figuring out which, if any, drugs can be used to
control people is extremely valuable for defence, not to mention
offence. Same with the fascist Japanese frostbite experiments.
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.
Hikikomori wrote 9 hours 45 min ago:
So you have no idea what they actually did.
b00ty4breakfast wrote 19 hours 11 min ago:
Plenty of things we could be wasting money on if the only criteria
is "how do you know it's not real?", why stop at killing goats
with mind bullets? We could be looking for yetis or Atlantis or
lunar nazi spaceships.
It was a giant waste of time and money and, this being the CIA, it
likely harmed many people.
endominus wrote 20 hours 3 min ago:
> General Brown: So they started doing psy-research because they
thought we were doing psy-research, when in fact we weren't doing
psy-research?
> 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
delichon wrote 21 hours 0 min ago:
I was a security guard at a big ritzy condo with access to all of the
keys when one of the apartments was burgled. Two local detectives
showed up and questioned me with a polygraph. I failed to suspend my
disbelief. It seemed like bullshit from the start. I lied about smoking
weed.
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.
singleshot_ wrote 21 hours 19 min ago:
> but I wondered why a petty thief thought she could get into the
Agency.
Itâs reassuring to know no one at the CIA has ever done anything
wrong, like stealing fifty dollars.
snickerbockers wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
The problem from the CIA's perspective isn't petty theft, it's
getting caught.
xgulfie wrote 17 hours 58 min ago:
I remember hearing you can't even get government clearance if you
admit you have ever smoked weed. Incredible
delichon wrote 20 hours 39 min ago:
Knowing someone had committed petty theft is at least a red flag. I
can't blame an employer for considering it disqualifying when they
have many equally qualified candidates without it. Even for a burger
flipper, let alone a secret agent.
unsnap_biceps wrote 19 hours 57 min ago:
We know nothing about the situation. It's entirely possible that
the person took $50 from their parent's purse as a child.
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?
DANmode wrote 12 hours 34 min ago:
Since you asked: How old of a child?
lazide wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
37. (/s)
Aeolun wrote 18 hours 32 min ago:
If you donât at least mention that damning fact on your
polygraph, of course it is!
JCattheATM wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
> Knowing someone had committed petty theft is at least 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.
ddtaylor wrote 21 hours 45 min ago:
I watched at Derbycon multiple times someone that could make a
polygraph test do whatever he wanted, otherwise he was a murderer that
murdered himself and it all happened before he was born. The test was
being administered by a long time veteran polygraph operator who had
recently retired.
tptacek wrote 21 hours 18 min ago:
I don't know what that means, because a polygraph by design tells the
polygrapher whatever they want it to.
wedog6 wrote 17 hours 48 min ago:
I believe it was the subject of the test who could make the
polygraph reading show whatever they wanted, even though it was
being administered by an experienced operator.
the_af wrote 15 hours 55 min ago:
I think the point is that, since polygraph readings are
pseudoscience, it's always the interrogator who picks what they
"mean". If this is true, a smart test subject cannot mislead
them, since there's nothing to mislead, as the polygraph is just
a pressure technique and it means whatever the interrogator needs
it to mean.
c22 wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
If the demonstration was performed in some blinded protocol then
perhaps there was more room for ambiguity in the results than
usual.
Animats wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
I went through national-security polygraph exams twice, and they were
no big deal. Filling out SF-86 (which used to start "List all
residences from birth"), now that's a hassle.
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.
AndrewStephens wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
> I was put through the mill of getting higher level security
clearances so I could be assigned to classified projects.
Fortunately, I never was.
Sure was lucky you didnât work on any of those classified projects
-
Animats wrote 20 hours 15 min ago:
The company had decided to move networking R&D to Colorado Springs,
where they supported USAF facilities, and I didn't want to leave
Silicon Valley for that.
kirubakaran wrote 17 hours 22 min ago:
Sure
jMyles wrote 21 hours 29 min ago:
I'm curious about how "residence" is defined for this purpose (and
for many purposes). Often it's just presumed that people will know
what a "residence" is, but I've lived many years of my life
houseless, including on a skoolie.
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?
relaxing wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
90 days living there is the threshold.
You wouldnât make a good candidate for a national security job,
not that it sounds like you want to be. Investigators would want to
know who youâd 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 youâd
be unhireable for the job you were going after.)
dghlsakjg wrote 16 hours 44 min ago:
The paradigm of a residence is much more fluid than many people
think.
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.
jMyles wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
...I think I'd make a great candidate for a national security
job, if the job meant the security of the nation rather than the
security of the state.
But I take your point of course. :-)
marxisttemp wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
The guy trying to work for the psychological torture club got
psychologically tortured a little? My heart bleeds for him
tptacek wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
What do the people writing these kinds of comments think the CIA is?
There are mustache-twirling villains there, in greater proportion
than in other government organizations, but the median CIA employee
sits at a desk and translates cables from Farsi to English and back
again, or keeps track of the rainfall in Azerbaijan. A very small
fraction of the agency does anything more "interesting" than that,
and the majority of people there perform functions that every
government in the world also performs.
wedog6 wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
It's not about mustache twirling villains though is it. There are
also a large number of people there who sit at desks and handle the
logistics of moving people who are entitled either to be treated as
PoWs or to a fair trial, into countries where they can be tortured
while preserving a facade of it not being done by the agency
itself.
tptacek wrote 17 hours 10 min ago:
Just have the courage of your convictions and extend this logic
of culpability to everybody who works for the United States
Government. Otherwise, it just sounds like you don't understand
that a huge fraction of the work of intelligence is preventing
wars.
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.
Herring wrote 16 hours 1 min ago:
Thatâs true of every criminal org. Enforcers are usually a
small percentage of the population, because they are
fundamentally businesses. Violence is "expensive" in terms of
heat from law enforcement, lost revenue, lower internal
stability, etc.
You donât 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.
the_af wrote 16 hours 3 min ago:
It's very hard to understand what you're arguing though.
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.
shevy-java wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
> countermeasures such as butt-clenching
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 ( [1] ).
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
keepamovin wrote 16 hours 55 min ago:
This is because the vagus nerve interfaces with the parasympathetic
nervous system, the responses of which are what the instrument
measures. And the vagus nerve terminates in the...you know. And so
that's one way that you can get control over the metrics.
snickerbockers wrote 17 hours 23 min ago:
I got yelled at for inadvertently "closing my sphincter" (the
examiner's exact words) the one time I tried to take a polygraph at
the CIA, they do actually care about that.
BoredPositron wrote 22 hours 6 min ago:
It's not butt clenching it's Kegels you just say butt clenching
because it's funny.
joecool1029 wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
HTML [1]: https://archive.ph/0gJFG
Cider9986 wrote 21 hours 10 min ago:
It is not paywalled....
joecool1029 wrote 18 hours 0 min ago:
I posted it because the site was overloaded and would not load at
the timeâ¦
FergusArgyll wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
I don't get it, I thought it's settled science that polygraphs don't
work. Why are these agencies still using them?
constantcrying wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
>I thought it's settled science that polygraphs don't work
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.
sonofhans wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
They do work. Their purpose is intimidation. Theyâre not truth
machines, theyâre pressure cookers.
keepamovin wrote 16 hours 52 min ago:
Right. And I don't think the abuse of the vetting people is by
accident. I think it's a vulnerability, where people in positions
of "collecting dirt" on others, often end up fabricating the dirt,
and doing other very bad things because the power imbalance of
asymmetric information corrupts.
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.
the_gipsy wrote 19 hours 49 min ago:
They have only filter out the morons, though.
influx wrote 20 hours 52 min ago:
Exactly, the whole point is to put someone into an interrogation
scenario for hours or days, where you control whether nor not they
"passed". Unfortunately, it probably has zero effect on
psychopaths.
spatley wrote 18 hours 27 min ago:
Unfortunately psychopathy may be the most desirable trait.
apical_dendrite wrote 21 hours 16 min ago:
There's an old interview on C-SPAN's BookTV with a CIA polygrapher.
He seems to genuinely believe in the validity of the polygraph, but
watching the interview, I was convinced that the only value comes
from intimidation and stress.
(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
HTML [1]: https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/gatekeeper/180053
knallfrosch wrote 8 hours 46 min ago:
That's the point though. The testers wouldn't actually abuse
their victims without the conviction of doing something
righteous. Or they would, accidentally or intentionally, spill
the secrets.
But if you make even the instruction material lie, then there is
nothing that could be leaked and "expose" the system.
Stevvo wrote 20 hours 54 min ago:
It sounds like religion; it only works if people believe in it.
lucketone wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
Or like currency.
prewett wrote 13 hours 34 min ago:
Maybe Reformation religions require belief, but the paganism
was a set of rituals known to work (by virtue of having worked
before), sort of a like a spiritual experimental science.
Belief was not required.
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).
sigwinch wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
Reminds me of Julius Caesar describing the druids. Part of
his political career meant precisely performing important
orthopraxy. He probably didnât meet a druid, but amazingly
described them playing the same role he did as Pontifex
Maximus.
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 doesnât
even acknowledge any.
bizzletk wrote 10 hours 42 min ago:
Would you mind expanding on the scientific-ness of paganism?
That sounds really interesting!
lucketone wrote 4 hours 35 min ago:
Charitable read, would suggest slight touch of tongue in a
cheek.
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 canât be proof.
ifh-hn wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
I've no idea why I read to the end of that, seems like a long ramble, I
kept expecting something to happen and it never did.
BlobberSnobber wrote 18 hours 53 min ago:
It made me cringe at how boot-licking the author, and apparently a
lot of people at the CIA, are (like defending the âpetty thiefâ
not getting the job).
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.
ElProlactin wrote 15 hours 37 min ago:
And they were the happiest years of her life!
BlobberSnobber wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
Fond memories of planning the assassination of a politician in
South America and creating popular unrest through a
disinformation campaign in China :,)
tokenless wrote 20 hours 38 min ago:
He is a good writer. I also read to end and my attention span isn't
good! I think the switching between what happened, what he felt and
just the plain "daily WTF" rediculousness of the situations is what
kept me locked in.
BlueMacaw wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
>He is a good writer.
I assumed the author was a sheâ¦
assaddayinh wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
Every person i inhabitate his or her views in writting becomes a
copy of me so she is a he for the time of me reading.
Der_Einzige wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
You should. Men drop their guards in front of women, especially
old women. I expect a lot of active agents in the field look
like/are grandmas for this reason.
itishappy wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
The title is "A CIA Analyst Shares Her Polygraph Experience" so
it appears you are correct. I'd assumed incorrectly, so
appreciate the discussion!
Drupon wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
"One of the most evil organizations in the world responsible for
untold human misery treats its employees and applicants badly :( :(
:("
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.
UncleOxidant wrote 22 hours 14 min ago:
tl;dr: polygraphs aren't reliable and can be misused?
tokenless wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
And they are performed interrogation style but cannot be refused
without risking your career.
OTOH, someone arrested can (probably should?) refuse.
breve wrote 21 hours 37 min ago:
It's not that they're unreliable, they simply don't work in the
first place.
The misuse is that they're used at all.
Spooky23 wrote 18 hours 6 min ago:
Itâs a prop to conduct an adversarial interrogation without the
same stigma.
alansaber wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
This was how I felt about reading War and Peace
stego-tech wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
Adding my POV from a former National Security perspective:
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.
kj4211cash wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
This is so interesting. I guess I was a dipshit in this scenario?
Because I just accepted that the reviewer thought I was lying. Began
to question my own memory. And just gave up on the idea of working at
that place. In hindsight, I should have protested and not given up.
But I was a meek 21 year old and didn't know anything. Seems like a
strange filter to apply.
stego-tech wrote 4 hours 20 min ago:
Nah, the dipshits are the ones who take the polygrapher at their
word that they can be trusted/"this is a safe space" and blab about
the crimes they've committed.
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.
wrp wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
This comment or something like it should be at the top, because it's
the main point about polygraphing. It's the process, not the answers
that matter.
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.
fudged71 wrote 22 hours 23 min ago:
There's two kinds of sociopaths, the uncontrollable ones and the
controllable ones. The CIA only wants the latter.
rconti wrote 22 hours 36 min ago:
This was all so weird to read about. I guess I just assumed the
polygraph was of marginal utility, and you either passed, or you
didn't. I didn't realize it was part of a combative interrogation
process, even for regular employees.
knallfrosch wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
From the viewpoint of a security clearance, the employee is the
enemy.
mzajc wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
(2018)
Paracompact wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
Am I a bad person if the picture of someone in the CIA crying is funny
to me? Not out of malice or anything. It's just something I didn't know
they did.
Do they also have little "Hang in there!" posters on the wall, too?
bitwize wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
The movie Spy (2015) is probably the most accurate, realistic version
of the CIA in cinema, replete with celebratory cakes for supervisors'
birthdays and crumbling infrastructure due to insufficient funding.
Paracompact wrote 21 hours 4 min ago:
How do you know it's realistic?
SpaceL10n wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
I would use this information to reflect.
Paracompact wrote 21 hours 5 min ago:
How do you mean? I don't look down on anyone.
airstrike wrote 22 hours 51 min ago:
Not a bad person, just lacking in wisdom.
marxisttemp wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
Not really
stego-tech wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
Not bad, just as misinformed as most folks out there about the
process and requirements.
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.
Paracompact wrote 21 hours 6 min ago:
It would seem there's a spectrum of beliefs regarding the people in
the CIA, the FBI, in politics, etc. ranging from "They're just like
us!" to "They're lizard people (for better or for worse)." In other
words, is it the situation or is it the person/self-selection? I
self-identify as uninformed about the bigger picture, but my
experience working in a federally adjacent sector where all my
colleagues are perfectly normal, and yet there is always above us
the stench of lizardry in the decisions being made, has me
believing in the hypothesis that every bureaucracy is largely
staffed with normal people doing the legwork (sometimes very high
level, high paying, and highly consequential legwork), and lizards
controlling the brain at the management and director levels.
> 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.
stego-tech wrote 16 hours 59 min ago:
In my experience, 99.9% of the federal bureaucracy is regular
normies just trying to make a living, pay the bills, and eke out
a pension if they're lucky.
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.
the_af wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
Your experience of "lizard people" vs "bureaucracy of normal
people doing the legwork" seems to match Arendt's banality of
evil, right?
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.
eru wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
It's a bureaucracy like any other.
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