Sounds like they are doing their job. Their job is to fuck with you. Just stay calm, relaxed, and board. It’s all a bunch of BS.

Throw away account. I get one every 5 years for my clearances. After having several, I view it as just another BS hoop to jump.

Obviously it does not work as a lie detector, but it’s an excellent tool for interrogation. At least that’s my conclusion.

Just answer yes and no. They’ll say you are almost done, but have an issue with one question, and want you to explain more. Don’t explain anything; just say “I don’t know“ and you are answering truthfully. Just stay relaxed, calm, and bored.

Throwaway as well.

FWIW I would estimate that 85% of my colleagues that discuss their poly experience view it as the same.

It is an interrogation prop masquerading as science. The poly is subjective, as evident by the few times I have failed, re-tested, and passed. If I were lying the first time and did not change any answers, how can I pass the second time?

The author alluded to it in her writing, but all of the test administrators have read up on methods of defeating the polygraph exam. Often, the "I've never heard of it" line is a lie.

Now that I think about it, it probably is useful for initial job screening. More like a psychological test to screen out those that get too riled up over stuff. Though that really has more to do with age. The first one I had took three hours. Years later, the recent one was 1 hour.

The one thing the intel community does want to screen out are rash decision makers. So it’s probably excellent measure of one’s ability to keep cool under pressure.

> More like a psychological test to screen out those that get too riled up over stuff.

If that's is the case, then a nasty side-effect is to weed out the people who as a general principle refuse to put up with abuse as a basic condition of their potential job. Maybe a small deal if you're only hiring James Bond-style spies, but a big deal if you're mainly hiring analysts.

Imagine in a FLOSS project that I force all pull-request makers to read through my recursive, non-deterministic set of makefiles and fix a bug there. How many high-quality pull requests will I accept under such a system vs. simply assessing pull requests on their merit?

Of course that's not a fair comparison. I apologize to polygraph operators for it. :)

It would help me screen out jobs I don't want. Would never want to work somewhere that sees employees that way.