Lie detectors

[sTeamTraen]

"Terrorists could be forced to take a lie detector test to prove they have reformed and are not planning another attack, the government has announced."

JMFC, as my normally rather proper colleague Carol Nickerson (RIP) would have said. JMFC.

[Seagull]

Can someone link me to reliable information about lie detectors/polygraph tests please? I heard this on the news this morning and subsequently seen mention on the BBC News website and was slightly amazed that there was no caveat/comment included about the efficacy of such tests. I didn't think we used lie detectors in the UK but the BBC says they are currently "only used with sex offenders".

[Ben B]

Unless a lot has changed, they are fairly easy to beat, or at least confuse.

assessments of polygraphy by scientific and government bodies generally suggest that polygraphs are highly inaccurate, may easily be defeated by countermeasures, and are an imperfect or invalid means of assessing truthfulness.[6][7][8] Despite claims of 90% validity by polygraph advocates, the National Research Council has found no evidence of effectiveness.[7][9] The American Psychological Association states "Most psychologists agree that there is little evidence that polygraph tests can accurately detect lies

[Little waster]

JMFC, as my normally rather proper colleague Carol Nickerson (RIP) would have said. JMFC.

While we can all appreciate the
sentiment Shirley an appeals court closer to home would make more sense.

[Little waster]

Putting my cynical hat on for a second*, a flurry of half-baked, populist law'n'order reforms is exactly what I would expect if somebody wanted to push the narrative that crime is all fault of the European High Court and associated Human Rights legislation and now post-brexit we can reap the rewards of having left them.



*who am I kidding I've never taken it off

[lpm]

I've played with one. In one of those exploratory places, I think the Bristol one.

Very easy to control. To get a boost, think for a moment of something sexual. To dim the response, do basic mindfulness. I'd be confident in generating a nervous reaction in the control questions, then generating calm reactions during my lies.

[cvb]

I saw a bit on the BBC news this morning. Lie detectors and more Imans are the way to go apparently. f.ck me. This is surely some elaborate satire.

[tenchboy]

Hmm. Can't find it now, but when I read this story earlier on the BBC News website, there was a note to the effect that polygraphs are less than 100pc reliable and their results are not admissible as evidence in an (?)English/British/_ court.

[Seagull]

The BBC article I read didn't say anything to that effect. The guardian article did say not admissible in court etc.

[cvb]

Hmm. Can't find it now, but when I read this story earlier on the BBC News website, there was a note to the effect that polygraphs are less than 100pc reliable and their results are not admissible as evidence in an (?)English/British/_ court.

I recall it stated 60% but cannot find it now.

General lie detector stuff on BBC

Advocates claim that when carried out by professionals in the right conditions, the accuracy is estimated to be between 80 and 90%.

If a sex offender fails a lie detector test, it is "not conclusive proof that the individual is lying", but it could lead to further investigation or supervision.

[plodder]

Of course the wider context is that it's currently not possible to prevent radical ISIS-inspired angry young men from chopping up our tourist spots, even when we kind of know who they are likely to be.

[cvb]

Of course the wider context is that it's currently not possible to prevent radical ISIS-inspired angry young men from chopping up our tourist spots, even when we kind of know who they are likely to be.

I think it's very hard to stop these attacks at all unless you want massive state surveillance.

[plodder]

We didn't used to have them, and presumably we won't at some point in the future, so they aren't inevitable in that sense. We already have lots of mass surveillance and that doesn't appear to be working.

[lpm]

Not working? The rate has fallen sharply in the last 3/4 years.

[cvb]

Not working? The rate has fallen sharply in the last 3/4 years.

There were not that many to start off with. These are highly publicised but rarely occurring events.

[cvb]

I think this is a very difficult thing to get right.

It's probably impossible to test whether one one has been de-radicalised as one is probably not going to admit to still wanting to kill the infidel. Could lie detectors help even with their dodgy reliability?

[sTeamTraen]

Putting my cynical hat on for a second*, a flurry of half-baked, populist law'n'order reforms is exactly what I would expect if somebody wanted to push the narrative that crime is all fault of the European High Court and associated Human Rights legislation and now post-brexit we can reap the rewards of having left them.

I'm not sure how much of the above is ironic, so for clarity:
- The UK is not leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, membership of which is part of its obligations as a member of the Council of Europe, a 47-state body based in Strasbourg where the 12-star European flag was invented.
- The UK will continue to be subject to the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. Theresa May wanted to get out of this when she was Home Secretary, but it would have been impossible while Britain was in the EU and will probably be very difficult to contemplate until Brexit is fully digested.
- The European Court of Justice, whose jurisdiction the UK might be leaving depending on the shape of a final settlement, deals with the application of EU law and as such has very little involvement in human rights issues.

A large subset of Leave voters are going to go full Hulk when the UK loses its first judgement at the ECtHR after Brexit and they discover that the main reason that many of them voted Leave ("Yooman rights? What about the victim's yooman rights? Tommy is right, hang the Muslim paedos!") was never on the table.

[sTeamTraen]

It's probably impossible to test whether one one has been de-radicalised as one is probably not going to admit to still wanting to kill the infidel. Could lie detectors help even with their dodgy reliability?

It's even simpler than that. Just ask yourself, who makes these machines? I'm guessing that you can't buy one from Philips Medical Equipment or Siemens Life Sciences or General Electric, all of whom also do not make homeopathy dilution equipment or hospital-grade tinfoil hats. What peer-reviewed psychophysics principles are they based on?

Similarly, who is giving the training to the operators? There are apparently a few people with PhDs who believe in them, but basically it's not far above those machines that detect "geopathic stress". I believe the Scientologists basically use the same technology in their whatever-its-called machinery that detects if you are an Operating System Kretan Level 42 or something.

[plodder]

I’d imagine that, psychologically and physiologically, it’s easier to lie to the infidel. Perhaps they’ll train imans to operate them.

[OneOffDave]

It also depends how the question is asked. From a certain viewpoint it would be possible to answer the question "are you thinking of murdering people?" with a "no" if you see the killing as part of some holy work or self defence. This was the logic behind the "not guilty" plea to murder of the individuals who killed Lee Rigby

[Little waster]

Putting my cynical hat on for a second*, a flurry of half-baked, populist law'n'order reforms is exactly what I would expect if somebody wanted to push the narrative that crime is all fault of the European High Court and associated Human Rights legislation and now post-brexit we can reap the rewards of having left them.

I'm not sure how much of the above is ironic, so for clarity:
- The UK is not leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, membership of which is part of its obligations as a member of the Council of Europe, a 47-state body based in Strasbourg where the 12-star European flag was invented.
- The UK will continue to be subject to the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. Theresa May wanted to get out of this when she was Home Secretary, but it would have been impossible while Britain was in the EU and will probably be very difficult to contemplate until Brexit is fully digested.
- The European Court of Justice, whose jurisdiction the UK might be leaving depending on the shape of a final settlement, deals with the application of EU law and as such has very little involvement in human rights issues.

A large subset of Leave voters are going to go full Hulk when the UK loses its first judgement at the ECtHR after Brexit and they discover that the main reason that many of them voted Leave ("Yooman rights? What about the victim's yooman rights? Tommy is right, hang the Muslim paedos!") was never on the table.

There can only ever be imaginary freedoms from imaginary oppression.

[GeenDienst]

A large subset of Leave voters are going to go full Hulk when the UK loses its first judgement at the ECtHR after Brexit and they discover that the main reason that many of them voted Leave ("Yooman rights? What about the victim's yooman rights? Tommy is right, hang the Muslim paedos!") was never on the table.

At that point, the UK leaves the ECHR. They've been muttering about repealing/replacing the Human Rights Act for some time. And their new angry northerner supporters will be delighted.

[Pucksoppet]

I’d imagine that, psychologically and physiologically, it’s easier to lie to the infidel. Perhaps they’ll train imans to operate them.

For some* followers of Islam, especially if they firmly believe they are participants in a jihad against 'westerners', the ideas around Taqiyya and Tawriya might make it psychologically easier to lie to interrogators. Note that these concepts are controversial, and I have tried to link to relatively impartial descriptions.

My understanding of the theory of lie detectors is that they enable a trained user to interpret certain physiological signs as evidence of psychological stress, such as stress of maintaining an untruth. Lie detector/polygraph operators claim to be able to detect psychopaths in lies to a higt degree of certainty - so it may well be that lie detector/polygraph operators will claim that recidivist terrorists can be detected.


*which may be a vanishingly small 'some', but still non-zero. Most, if not all, human populations have extreme outliers who cause problems for the mainstream.

[plodder]

And their new angry northerner supporters will be delighted.

Did you have anything against angry northerners when they voted labour?

[sTeamTraen]

This just in from a UK-based senior psychologist friend:

... the lie detector program was approved and developed by well-informed psychologists including some of my colleagues. It's a bogus pipeline - they are using the lie detector to get more truthful self-reports (The Wire, S5E1). Of course they cannot widely publicise this, so it looks like they are using pseudoscience.

... the bogus pipeline is where people are more truthful when they *think* they are hooked up to an effective lie detector so that is what this UK "lie detector" programme is about but they can't let it be widely known that the lie detector is no more effective per se than the wired-up photocopier the police use to extract a confession in that episode of the wire

... they are not trying to fool other professionals, just the people subjected to the tests

So it will work fabulously well until the prison grapevine or the jihadi video networks tell people "BTW it's all fake, just don't crack and confess because you're impressed by the scary machine".