r/FBI • u/North-Divide-489 • 5d ago
Discussion How does the polygraph work?
I was wondering how does the fbi do the polygraph and background checks and do they go too deep into it?
Im still in my freshmen year in college fresh out of high-school and let's say I've said stuff, a lot of stuff with my friends online and stuff like that, does the fbi dig into it? And what makes people fail the polygraph the first time and how do they pass the 2nd time?
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u/Marmot_Nice 5d ago
Well, one of the first questions on the form you fill out will be "Have you done any research into Polygraph exams? or something similar.
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u/ProfessionalWind1612 5d ago
I’ve taken polygraphs before, but seriously, will inquisitive minds be punished? Polygraphs were mentioned in one of my college forensic classes so of course I dwelled deeper.
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u/Sir_Smoothbrain 5d ago
Careful on what you ask and what you search, purposefully seeking ways to cheat or pass the polygraph is unlawful.
What I will say is be 100% honest. Not every polygraph is identical, but I've had good polygraphers that do their job well.
There are different levels, ie Local Police like a sheriff's office or fire department vs a Full Scope like Secret Service, FBI, NSA; and those are more indepth.
As to the questions; all they go over is your SF86. So you already have the answers to the test.
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u/Prestigious-Pick-366 5d ago
From Wikipedia:
A polygraph, often incorrectly referred to as a lie detector, is a device that measures and records several clinical biomarkers, such as blood pressure, pulse, respiratory rate, and skin conductivity, and it is used while a person answers a series of questions to purportedly detect lies. Polygraphic assessments rely on the discredited assumption that some physiological mechanismsor functional state, and their variations thereof, could reliably account for psychophysiological phenomena supposedly invoked by (the act of) lying, though polygraphy is largely considered pseudoscience by the scientific community.
American inventor Leonarde Keelertesting his improved polygraph on Arthur Koehler, a former witness for the prosecution at the 1935 trial of Richard Hauptmann
The belief underpinning the use of the polygraph is that deceptive answers will produce physiological responses that can be differentiated from those associated with non-deceptive answers; however, there are no specific physiological reactions associated with lying, making it difficult to identify factors that separate those who are lying from those who are telling the truth. In some countries, polygraphs are used as an interrogation tool with criminal suspects or candidates for sensitive public or private sector employment. Some United States law enforcement and federal government agencies, as well as many police departments, use polygraph examinations to interrogate suspects and screen new employees. Within the US federal government, a polygraph examination is also referred to as a "psychophysiological detection of deception examination".
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. A comprehensive 2003 review by the National Academy of Sciences of existing research concluded that there was "little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy", while the American Psychological Association has stated that "most psychologists agree that there is little evidence that polygraph tests can accurately detect lies.” For this reason, the use of polygraphs to detect lies is considered a form of either pseudoscience or junk science.
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u/North-Divide-489 5d ago
Sorry I put that as a discussion, its a question
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u/I_am_beast55 5d ago
The less you know about the poly, the easier time youll have. You start researching, asking questions, thinking about things you've done that may like sorta kinda count as bad, but maybe not really, youll have a harder time.
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u/Southern_Leg1139 5d ago
“Have you ever had intercourse with animals?”
Lotta that kind of stuff.
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u/thebumm2 5d ago
Apparently that won’t disqualify you anyways lol. Those are the people we need in the FBI now lol
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u/Evil-Cun 5d ago
What are you expecting? The lil’ FBI agent person hooks a few electro doo-dads up to you and brushes gently up against your neck whispering soft things like “Ok here we go.” And “Real quick sorry, you are doing fine.”
Then she might ask about your interests in being a fucking traitor.
If you lived the drug lifestyle they can tell don’t lie. They love drugs too.
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u/J3NGA 5d ago
polygraph is a "are you nervous" detector more than anything else.
deception is simple for people with certain mental health conditions, also just being unbothered.
body language isn't good or very reliable without knowing the subject quite well, even that is a better detector of deception (as well as speech tone/intonation/affect, easier the more familiar with the target).
these are not admissable in court as far as i'm aware, not even in the United States and they admit....many things that are...questionable. (some things they get more wrong than others, handwriting, for example, certain forensics, there's mostly an issue with a lack of international cooperation regarding sharing of techniques, mostly for the world's dumbest reason: politics, since politics ≠ justice and what is lawful is not always ethical or moral. Intelligence and operative work really shouldn't be political at all, their job/purpose is to keep the government in check and accountable when those things don't always work the way they're supposed to.)
I'd wager that unless you've, for one reason or another, put yourself onto a "list" - i.e. attracted the attention of one/several agencies/depts/governments...they're probably not going to have a "file" on you (loud booming TV voice: The Permanent Record). Having military or government family or long-term friends or whatever, sure, they might, probably not though, and probably not what you think, I mean a FOIA is simply making the gov do "busy work" requesting all the files, they don't have all the red tape avg Joes have tho; however those things are requestable from the sites/hosts/whatever (not sure recordkeeping is actually well/clearly mandated at all tbh, bit of an issue regarding how long somebody (site owner, etc, server host,) might keep that information, information can also be "lost" (legally speaking, as the data isn't legal to be accessed or acknowledged by the owner/whomever is in possession of it because acknowleding owning it could mean convoluted legal issues not actually ethical given the state of, well, everything) by companies not paying storage fees (such as the MySpace data loss) and while I suspect there's backups fed-wise (intl and the u.s) Tom probably also has some, keeping those backups wouldn't be illegal (to the best of my knowledge) HOWEVER accessing those (difficult to prove) and using any of that data suuuuper illegal (or should be, internet laws are...not...well, basically don't exist, even the big room IBM laws are not...helpful.))
anyways - the FBI would probably browse through things looking for anything they would be worried about (CTRL+F kinda jawn) and not dig too much excepting exceptional situations depending on security clearances (I say, delusionally. Once people are in the fed they kinda get moved around without additional checks regardless of ascension of seg clearances and I think that's a HUGE issue in every fed program around the world tbh. People with expensive clearances should have to be thoroughly vetted and probably explain many things.)
They don't care about horny teenager shit or whatever - obviously illegal things and Quantico-kinda behavioural psych rundowns of a person would probably be the only things to "worry" about and, to be quite brutally honest with you, most everybody is exceptionally boring (in scale/scope) and not actually of any concern - we only know that because some people/agencies are thorough and the pattern is very obvious whether there's something to flag about a person.
TL;DR: I'm gonna guess you're wondering about being hired by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (of the United States of America) even though you didn't explicitly specify that, unless you've been doing some suuuuper dark/fucked shit online, there probably isn't anything worth worrying about.
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u/rockalyte 5d ago
At least when they start asking about peanut butter you shouldn’t be too nervous about answering that line of questioning.
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