Life scientists who work on sensitive government projects could find themselves hooked-up to polygraph machines in spite of continued criticism of the science behind such lie-detector tests.
"It's everywhere — every three- and four-letter agency you can imagine, including the US Postal Service," said Stephen E. Fienberg, chairman of the statistics department at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Fienberg led a panel appointed by the National Academies of Science to evaluate the worth of polygraphy. Released in October, their report concluded that almost a century of research has produced a pseudoscience good for tricking naive people into blurting out the truth, but not much else.
So Fienberg was surprised to find his panel's report cited in favor of potentially raising the number of lie detector tests the Department of Defense (DOD) is allowed to administer. In the annual report it filed with Congress in January, DOD stated it had administered more ...
