[liberationtech] Seeing threats, feds target instructors of polygraph-beating methods

[Kyle Maxwell]

[Comment: This has implications for those of us involved in
CryptoParty as well as other security education efforts.]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/16/199590/seeing-threats-feds-target-instructors.html

Doug Williams, a former Oklahoma City police polygrapher, says he can
teach people how to pass lie detector tests. Federal prosecutors and
agents recently targeted him and another instructor in undercover
stings aimed at cracking down on the teaching of polygraph beating
methods. | Handout/MCT

By Marisa Taylor and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. | McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Federal agents have launched a criminal investigation of
instructors who claim they can teach job applicants how to pass lie
detector tests as part of the Obama administration’s unprecedented
crackdown on security violators and leakers.

The criminal inquiry, which hasn’t been acknowledged publicly, is
aimed at discouraging criminals and spies from infiltrating the U.S.
government by using the polygraph-beating techniques, which are said
to include controlled breathing, muscle tensing, tongue biting and
mental arithmetic.

So far, authorities have targeted at least two instructors, one of
whom has pleaded guilty to federal charges, several people familiar
with the investigation told McClatchy. Investigators confiscated
business records from the two men, which included the names of as many
as 5,000 people who’d sought polygraph-beating advice. U.S. agencies
have determined that at least 20 of them applied for government and
federal contracting jobs, and at least half of that group was hired,
including by the National Security Agency.

By attempting to prosecute the instructors, federal officials are
adopting a controversial legal stance that sharing such information
should be treated as a crime and isn’t protected under the First
Amendment in some circumstances.

“Nothing like this has been done before,” John Schwartz, a U.S.
Customs and Border Protection official, said of the legal approach in
a June speech to a professional polygraphers’ conference in Charlotte,
N.C., that a McClatchy reporter attended. “Most certainly our nation’s
security will be enhanced.”

“There are a lot of bad people out there. . . . This will help us
remove some of those pests from society,” he added.

The undercover stings are being cited as the latest examples of the
Obama administration’s emphasis on rooting out “insider threats,” a
catchall phrase meant to describe employees who might become spies,
leak to the news media, commit crimes or become corrupted in some way.

The federal government previously treated such instructors only as
nuisances, partly because the polygraph-beating techniques are
unproven. Instructors have openly advertised and discussed their
techniques online, in books and on national television. As many as 30
people or businesses across the country claim in Web advertisements
that they can teach someone how to beat a polygraph test, according to
U.S. government estimates.

In the last year, authorities have launched stings targeting Doug
Williams, a former Oklahoma City police polygrapher, and Chad Dixon,
an Indiana man who’s said to have been inspired by Williams’ book on
the techniques, people who are familiar with the investigation told
McClatchy. Dixon has pleaded guilty to federal charges of obstructing
an agency proceeding and wire fraud. Prosecutors have indicated that
they plan to ask a federal judge to sentence Dixon to two years in
prison. Williams declined to comment other than to say he’s done
nothing wrong.

While legal experts agree that authorities could pursue the
prosecution, some accused the government of overreaching in the name
of national security.

The federal government polygraphs about 70,000 people a year for
security clearances and jobs, but most courts won’t allow polygraph
results to be submitted as evidence, citing the machines’
unreliability. Scientists question whether polygraphers can identify
liars by interpreting measurements of blood pressure, sweat activity
and respiration. Researchers say the polygraph-beating techniques
can’t be detected with certainty, either.

Citing the scientific skepticism, one attorney compared the
prosecution of polygraph instructors to indicting someone for
practicing voodoo.

“If someone stabs a voodoo doll in the heart with a pin and the victim
they intended to kill drops dead of a heart attack, are they guilty of
murder?” asked Gene Iredale, a California attorney who often
represents federal defendants. “What if the person who dropped dead
believed in voodoo?

“These are the types of questions that are generally debated in law
school, not inside a courtroom. The real question should be: Does the
federal government want to use its resources to pursue this kind of
case? I would argue it does not.”

In his speech in June, Customs official Schwartz acknowledged that
teaching the techniques _ known in polygraph circles as
“countermeasures” _ isn’t always illegal and might be protected under
the First Amendment in some situations.

“I’m teaching about countermeasures right now. The polygraph schools
are supposed to be teaching about countermeasures,” he said.“So
teaching about countermeasures in and of itself certainly is not only
not illegal, it’s protected. You have a right to free speech in this
country.”

But instructors may be prosecuted if they know that the people they’re
teaching plan to lie about crimes during federal polygraphs, he said.

In that scenario, prosecutors may pursue charges of false statements,
wire fraud, obstructing an agency proceeding and “misprision of
felony,” which is defined as having knowledge of serious criminal
conduct and attempting to conceal it.

“When that conspiracy occurs, both parties are guilty,” said Schwartz,
a veteran federal polygrapher who heads Customs’ polygraph program.
“And it makes more sense to me to try to investigate the party that’s
doing the training because when you do that, you eliminate dozens or
hundreds or thousands of people . . . from getting that training.”

Schwartz, who was involved in the federal investigation, cited the
risk of drug traffickers infiltrating his agency as justification for
prosecutors going after instructors. However, he told the crowd of law
enforcement officials from across the country that he wasn’t
discussing a specific case but a “blueprint” of how state and local
officials might pursue a prosecution.

Urging them to join forces with his agency, he declared in a more than
two-hour speech that “evil will always seek ways to hide the truth.”

“When you identify insider threats and you eliminate insider threats,
then that agency is more efficient and more effective,” Schwartz said.

The Obama administration’s Insider Threat Program is intended to deter
what the government condemns as betrayals by “trusted insiders” such
as Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who
revealed the agency’s secret communications data-collection programs.
The administration launched the Insider Threat Program in 2011 after
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of
documents from a classified computer network and sent them to
WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy group.

As part of the program, employees are being urged to report their
co-workers for a wide range of “risky” behaviors, personality traits
and attitudes, McClatchy reported in June. Broad definitions of
insider threats also give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a
range of conduct other than leaking classified information, McClatchy
found.

Customs, which polygraphs about 10,000 applicants a year, has
documented more than 200 polygraph confessions of wrongdoing since
Congress mandated that the agency’s applicants undergo testing more
than two years ago. Many of the applicants who confessed said they
either were directly involved in drug or immigrant smuggling or were
closely associated with traffickers.

Ten Customs applicants were accused of trying to use countermeasures
to pass their polygraphs. All were denied jobs as part of Customs’
crackdown on the methods, dubbed “Operation Lie Busters.”

“Others involved in the conspiracy were successful infiltrators in
other agencies,” Customs said in a memo about the investigation.

Documents in Dixon’s case are filed under seal in federal court, and
prosecutors didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Several people familiar with the investigation said Dixon and Williams
had agreed to meet with undercover agents and teach them how to pass
polygraph tests for a fee. The agents then posed as people connected
to a drug trafficker and as a correctional officer who’d smuggled
drugs into a jail and had received a sexual favor from an underage
girl.

Dixon wouldn’t say how much he was paid, but people familiar with
countermeasures training said others generally charged $1,000 for a
one-on-one session.

Dixon, 34, also declined to provide specifics on his guilty plea but
he said he’d become an instructor because he couldn’t find work as an
electrical contractor. During the investigation, his house went into
foreclosure.

“My wife and I are terrified,” he said. “I stumbled into this. I’m a
Little League coach in Indiana. I don’t have any law enforcement
background.”

Prosecutors plan to ask for prison time even though Dixon has agreed
to cooperate, has no criminal record and has four young children. The
maximum sentence for the two charges is 25 years in prison.

“The emotional and financial burden has been staggering,” Dixon said.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I somehow imagine I was committing a
crime.”

Williams, 67, has openly advertised his teachings for three decades,
even discussing them in detail on “60 Minutes” and other national news
programs. A self-professed “crusader” who’s railed against the use of
polygraph testing, he testified in congressional hearings that led to
the 1988 banning of polygraph testing by most private employers.

Some opponents of polygraph testing, including a Wisconsin police
chief, said they were concerned that the federal government also might
be secretly investigating them, not for helping criminals to lie but
for being critical of the government’s polygraph programs. In his
speech to the American Association of Police Polygraphists, Schwartz
said he thought that those who “protest the loudest and the longest”
against polygraph testing “are the ones that I believe we need to
focus our attention on.”

McClatchy contacted Schwartz about his speech, but he refused to comment.

Some federal officials questioned whether people who taught
countermeasures should be prosecuted.

Although polygraphers, who are known as examiners, are trained to
identify people who are using the techniques with special equipment,
“there’s absolutely nothing that’s codified about countermeasures,”
said one federal security official with polygraph expertise, who asked
not to be named for fear of being retaliated against. “It’s the most
ambiguous thing that people can debate. If you have a guy who’s
nervous about his test, the easiest way out of it for the examiner is
to say it’s countermeasures, when it’s not.”

The security official described Williams as a “gadfly” who’s known for
teaching ineffective methods. Polygraphers assert that one of
Williams’ signature techniques produces erratic respiration patterns
on a polygraph test. Demonstrating their disdain for his methods, many
polygraphers call the pattern the “Bart Simpson.”

“Prosecutors are trying to make an example of him,” the official said.
“It serves to elevate polygraph to something it hasn’t been before,
that teaching countermeasures is akin to teaching bomb making, and
that there’s something inherently disloyal about disseminating this
type of information.”

Federal authorities, meanwhile, have concluded that some of the
applicants who sought advice on countermeasures and were hired didn’t
use the training after all. The list of people who sought out Dixon
and Williams mostly comprises people who bought books or videos but
didn’t hire the men for one-on-one training.

Charles Honts, a psychology professor at Boise State University, said
laboratory studies he’d conducted showed that countermeasures could be
taught in one-on-one sessions to about 25 percent of the people who
were tested. Polygraphers have no reliable way to detect someone who’s
using the techniques, he said. In fact, he concluded that a
significant number of people are wrongfully accused.

Honts, a former government polygraph researcher, attributed the
criminal investigation to “a growing institutional paranoia in the
federal government because they can’t control all their secrets.”

Russell Ehlers, a police chief in Wisconsin, said he wouldn’t be
surprised if federal authorities had scrutinized him. Schwartz cited
an unnamed police chief in the Midwest who was “advertising on the
Internet that he would like to teach people to pass the polygraph” as
an example of someone who should be investigated. In the last several
months, Ehlers said, he’s noticed what appears to be Internet visitors
from the Justice Department checking out his website that advises
applicants on how to get a job at a police department.

In his off-duty hours, Ehlers sold a video that discussed
countermeasures, but he said he’d recently stopped selling it as a
precaution after hearing about the criminal investigation. He said
he’d intended it to help “good” police officer candidates pass the
test because he thought that innocent people were routinely accused of
lying during polygraph tests.

“Imagine you’re a 25-year-old who has dreamed of serving in the field
of law enforcement,” he said. “You finally make it, only to find
yourself booted out of the hiring process, the result of a
false-positive exam result. In my opinion, that’s a real problem, not
the sharing of information on countermeasures.”

George Maschke, a former Army Reserve intelligence officer who’s a
translator and runs a website that’s critical of polygraph testing,
said he also suspected he’d been targeted although he’d done nothing
illegal.

In May, the translator received an unsolicited email in Persian from
someone purporting to be “a member of an Islamic group that seeks to
restore freedom to Iraq.”

“Because the federal police are suspicious of me, they want to do a
lie detector test on me,” the email read.

The emailer asked for a copy of Maschke’s book, which describes
countermeasures, and for Maschke to help “in any other way.”

Maschke said he suspected the email was a ruse by federal agents. He
advised the person “to comply with applicable laws,” according to an
email he showed McClatchy.

Although federal authorities haven’t contacted him, Maschke said he
worried that visitors to his site, AntiPolygraph.org, would be
targeted simply for looking for information about polygraph testing.

"The criminalization of the imparting of information sets a pernicious
precedent,” he said. “It is fundamentally wrong, and bad public
policy, for the government to resort to entrapment to silence speech
that it does not approve of."



-- 
@kylemaxwell