DHS Ensures The Leaks Will Continue By Rolling Out Lie Detectors In Hopes Of Finding Leakers
from the dumb-keeps-getting-dumber dept
If there’s anything guaranteed to increase the number of leaks emanating from an entity, it’s letting people know you’re trying to track down leakers. The public sector knows this. The private sector knows this. And yet, the same thing happens again and again: a deterrent appears and everyone treats it like an instigator.
Even Trump knows this. Or, at least, he should. His first administration was plagued by leaks, resulting in a memo being issued to State Department employees, a few of which apparently leaked it to the press pretty much as soon as they’d finished reading it.
Given this history, we should be expecting many more leaks from the DHS, now that it’s actively engaged in trying to prevent future leaks. How do we know this? It’s right there in Ellen Gilmer’s report for Bloomberg.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warned employees that polygraph tests will be used to help crack down on leaks that agency officials say have foiled immigration enforcement plans.
Noem last week issued an internal directive that all polygraphs the Department of Homeland Security administers must include a question about unauthorized communications with media and nonprofit organizations, according to a memo described to Bloomberg Government by two people without authorization to speak publicly.
There it is: the new deterrent to leaking has been leaked. And what a stupid deterrent it is. Lie detector tests? What is this, the 1970s? Almost no one believes lie detectors are capable of accurately detecting lies at this point in time. The myth that lie detectors work has been busted so often it’s almost as much of a cliché as the one it replaced: some dude strapped to a polygraph, dripping with sweat, and making the needle move like it’s a seismograph and he’s an anthropomorphic San Andreas fault.
What this move will do is (1) encourage more leaks and (2) give Noem’s DHS an easy way to fire people it doesn’t like, whether or not they’re actually engaged in leaking. It’s not like the employees are polygraph experts. Lies can be in the eye of the beholder, especially when the beholder has the machine, the graphs, and whatever interpretation of whatever has been measured proves most useful at that point in time.
Unfortunately, the DHS is doubling down on this stupidity. When reached for a statement on the deployment of extremely dubious tech to suss out leakers, the agency had this to say:
“DHS is a national security agency,” spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an email to Bloomberg Government. “As such, it should and will polygraph personnel.”
As such, it should recognize the tech is unreliable and beatable. And it definitely shouldn’t expect this magic box to discover the sources of leaks with any accuracy or regularity. Finally, the DHS should know that treating every employee like a criminal is only going to generate more leaks, with the most damaging internal stuff being thrown to the nearest source of disinfecting sunlight first.
All that’s really on display here is the paranoia of Trump appointees.
Noem and White House border czar Tom Homan have blamed alleged leaks for disrupting planned immigration enforcement operations in Colorado and California over the past month.
Take that with the largest grains of salt you can ingest, even unsafely. Noem previously claimed the DHS had rooted out the leakers that supposedly compromised ICE raids and is referring their cases to the DOJ for prosecution. But mere days before that, both she and Homan were convinced the leaks were coming from “crooked Deep State agents” working for the “corrupt FBI.”
This is what’s known as “compounding idiocy.” Neither of these dipshits actually knows or cares to know what they’re doing. They just want to score as many points as possible with Trump by finding scapegoats for ICE’s failure to eject hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the nation on a weekly basis while simultaneously humoring the president’s enduring “deep state” fantasies about the federal agencies that aligned so effectively against him that he’s now serving his second term as president. None of these people should be taken seriously. The problem is that they’ve been given massive amounts of power. You can’t fix stupid, but stupid certainly can break anything it touches.
Filed Under: dhs, kristi noem, leaks, lie detector tests, trump administration
Comments on “DHS Ensures The Leaks Will Continue By Rolling Out Lie Detectors In Hopes Of Finding Leakers”
Okay, so… stop calling them “lie detectors”, or at least use scare-quotes.
Anyway, you’re misrepresenting a point which is explained in the very Vox article you link. There’s no valid scientific basis to believe the machines detect lies, but the general public do believe it. We could say the same about religion. They’re tactics for intimidation and control, and they work.
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Only the most credulous of the public still think they work. Too bad there are so many of them.
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Fictional character George Costanza once said, of “lie detectors”: “just remember: it’s not a lie if you believe it”. Viewers treated that as a joke, but it’s basically true, with the darker implication that it selects for sociopathy (as well as those who really do delude themselves).
There’s a good chance the people promoting polygraph tests were themselves able to beat such tests; that this helped them in their rise to power, and they’re pushing the policy in an attempt to keep that power.
There’s a reason polygraphs are inadmissable as evidence
They need to use fMRI.
It’s the only working lie detector.
Stupidity knows no bounds. It’s also contagious.
DHS: Fear people or we’ll be using our biggest weapon known to man: the polygraph!
Perhaps the problem is she had to much koolaid & now can;t accept the reality that there aren’t 42 billion illegal immigrants hiding behind that dumpster.
This will end in the usual way
“Ah, but the strawberries that’s…that’s where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with…geometric logic…that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I’d have produced that key if they hadn’t of pulled the Caine out of action. I, I, I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officers…”
We should probably just be glad she didn’t threaten to start killing puppies until the leaks stop.
What’s wrong with lying? The President does it all the time.
Nomenclature
I don’t know. What do all of you think? What should the polygraph being used to find leakers be called? I’ve got a couple to start us off:
Oh look! Another parallel. Hitler was also obsessed with occult rituals to advance the Reich.
We need a ton more people to leak information. Keep Trump and his cronies super busy trying to find them. You know you’re doing something right when Trump is upset.
i just like it when all the current nazis call each other “the deep state”.
On the plus side, that means they’re breaking out the witch-finder boxes on their own.
Does it matter if they aren't accurate?
While most of us know these are not reliable, there is also some interpretation required (this jump in activity was a lie, this jump in activity was emotional response, etc).
It will give them a pretext to fire anyone they want to, with the polygraph being the ’cause’ to get rid of people who can’t be fired without cause.
Doesn’t matter if they are a leak, if the administration thinks they need to go, this will give them the excuse to do it legally.
Up is down, left is right, and we have always been at war with eastasia…
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More accurately, there is some narrative-creation required: this activity is something the examiner can pretend to be concerned about, to intimidate the subject into revealing things they otherwise wouldn’t.
You’re right about the rest, and people should’ve been very concerned when security clearances started being required. A hundred years ago, there was basically no such concept. Like the polygraph used in granting it, and like airport passenger screening, there’s no evidence it’s ever been useful except as a pretext to exclude people without proper cause. Snowden had a proper clearance, as did every “mole” who leaked such data just for money.
(If only the top few dozen people in the country needed clearance, the government could be much more strict about granting it. But more than 1% of Americans have clearances now. Government hiring is dependent on young people with little history of trustworthiness getting clearances.)
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Yup, I guarantee that the whole point of using a debunked method of spotting lies is to enable them to sack whoever they want to with the pretense of ‘Well the lie detector said they were guilty!’
Well...
Someone was elected based on the false proposition that he is a successful business man… Successful only in that he was portrayed that way on a reality TV show.
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FTFY. YW. 😉
Another rare case where 'If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide' is valid
Here’s a crazy thought: If you don’t like people leaking your plans either stop being such terrible people that those working under you consider it a moral good to let the public know what you’re doing or planning on doing, or only do things that you wouldn’t have a problem having leaked to the public to begin with.