Information Leak Detection and Scare Theory

One of the alleged new uses of the lie detector is the identification (without the participation of the Ministry of Justice) of those people in the government who are guilty of unauthorized disclosure of classified information. To date, all such investigations have been considered criminal. But if the proposal of the Reagan administration in 1983 had been accepted, the unauthorized disclosure of information would have been considered only as an “administrative” matter since then. And the head of any government organization who suspected his employee of information leakage could ask him to pass a detector test. However, it is unclear if this would apply to all who have access to the leaked information (in this case, the base lie rate would be very low and, accordingly, the level of errors is very high), or only those whom the preliminary investigation recognized as suspects.
Conclusion BTO indicates that no research in the field of application of the detector in cases of detection of information leakage, was not conducted at all. True, the FBI has data on 26 cases of successful use of the detector over the past four years, successful in the sense that most of the workers who did not pass the tests on the detector made important admissions after this ^[169] .
But the use of the detector in the FBI is very different from that provided by the new regulations. The FBI does not check anyone who could disclose secret information (such a procedure in professional jargon is called nonsense), but investigates only a small group of suspects established by the preliminary investigation, so the base lie rate is high and the possibility of errors is small. The FBI rules prohibit the use of detectors "in the" nonsense technique "with respect to a large number of workers or as a substitute for logical investigation by this visibility of the measures taken" ^[170] . The new rules of 1983 would allow nonsense.
With an administrative test on the detector, its content, conduct, and the subjects themselves are undoubtedly different from those who are being tested in the investigation of criminal offenses. And the outrage here can be very strong, because in case of refusal of testing, the employee may lose access to secret documents. However, the NSA says on this occasion that its employees recognize such tests as fair. Maybe this is true, but only if the survey on this subject was conducted anonymously, for otherwise those who disagreed with the use of the detector could simply not admit it. And it is hard for me to believe that government officials of other organizations consider it fair to use a detector to detect information leaks, especially if the purpose of such tests is to conceal facts relating not to national security, but rather to the administration itself.
Assistant Attorney General Willard, who himself passed the detector test before the congress (albeit on a completely different occasion), justifies its use: “The additional benefit of using a lie detector is included in its intimidating effect on those who commit official misconduct detection by other methods. Knowing that you can be asked to pass a detector test at any time can sometimes keep you from committing such offenses. ” ^[171]
However, this postulate does not work as well as it seems. When the suspects are not employees of intelligence agencies, a detector test conducted due to the detection of information leakage can give a very large number of errors, because deterrence does not work. The detector works only when the majority of the subjects believe in it. In short, the use of a detector to detect illegal disclosure of information can equally frighten and annoy both the innocent and the guilty.
I think it is possible to prove that, regardless of whether a test brings any result or not, the effect of intimidation for a certain type of people is always present anyway, and therefore it is undesirable to punish the failed, because otherwise there is an ethical dilemma of punishing lies honest people. However, if the consequences of recognizing a person as a liar with a detector will be so insignificant, if it is known, no punishment awaits the failed, then the tests on it seem to lose their meaning, and the very effect of intimidation will be in great doubt.