For my sins, I sometimes switch on Radio 5 for the news headlines. This morning I heard part of an item about these damned gadgets. Harrow Council has been using them to detect benefit fraud, and their spokesman proudly named the large sum they’d saved as a result. The interviewer (an intensely irritating, facetious idiot called Nicky Campbell) pointed out that some people wouldn’t speak English, expressing amazement at the idea of, as he put it, “A Gujerati lie detector”. Clearly he’s one of those who think lie detectors literally read your thoughts.
The main news bulletin informed us that more of these things are to be used by councils. The annoying thing is, they’ll get some results, for exactly the same reason as fringe therapy patients “feel better”, because they’ll believe the machines do work.
Now, lie detector evidence is not accepted in US courts, I believe. Is it here, can someone tell me? If not, surely demanding that someone take a test infringes their legal rights. A reasonably sensible newspaper (perhaps the Indie?) should mount a campaign telling people to refuse such tests. I might write to them.
A thought: I hope this won’t bring you-know-who out of the woodwork to say that the councils are to be applauded!
This is bad news for genuine claimants who will get nervous when they're informed that they're being monitored and great news for benefit cheats who know that this technology just doesn't work: false negatives will serve to protect them from being investigated.
Despite being promoted as 'just another tool' to help against benefit fraud, I'm sure their results will be given more credence than is warranted.
They have been piloted and the government claim that of those who have been picked up as 'a risk' by these voice stress analysers some have subsequently been found to be guilty of benefit fraud.
That may seem as being justification for spending money on them but I'd be interested to know whether if a random-number generator had been used to select claimants for investigation the results would have been much, if any, different.
Normal polygraphs are ~70% accurate and these voice stress analysers are said to be less accurate. They're not exactly a great help if they're hardly more accurate than the 50% accuracy of flipping a coin!
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I do not have a correct reference, but I do remember when the lie detector first was developed in the United States, they decided to test it on a person who had admitted murder.
He passed the test with flying colours, when asked how he'd managed to do so, his response was "Easy...I lied"
(It was on one episode of QI)
There's a good article here:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/...bumps_f_1.html
I hadn't realised these were not standard polygraphs, but that doesn't make much difference, because as far as I can see the voice thingies are equally unreliable.
As the author of the article points out, huge sums are unclaimed. We never see headlines in the tabloids about that though, do we?
in the police force lie detectors are used more as an interrogation tool as opposed to a actual lie detector, working on the person they are interrogating believes they can tell when they are lying. but if you tell them you know how the machines work before hand then they likely wont bother as the desired effect will be gone. voice detectors suffer the same set back, and are completely useless over a phone as an interviewer has absolutely no way to determine what factors are causing the "stress" triggers in the callers voice, say having just stubbed your toe or whatnot but will work on the same principal to trick people into thinking that they will know when your lying.
so stop giving the game away, if you tell people about it you'll ruin it all and those millions will be down the drain
I haven't seen anything written about just how easy these things are too fool.
They seem to get their baseline measurement by talking to the person on the phone and recording them and then comparing their voice recorded then to it later on when the person is answering questions about their circumstances.
The idea being that when we lie, the pitch of our voice rises etc.
To fool this thing, all you'd have to do is tense yourself up whenever you're on the phone to them (the buttock clenching technique would probably do) and when you're answering questions about your claim, relax yourself.
How long will it take for those people who are in the benefit culture (and who routinely make false claims) to learn about how to fool this thing?
As I said earlier in the thread, if you are a benefit cheat, this move by the government will actually help you defraud the system.
I wonder if John Hutton MP has heard of the Doctrine of Unintended Consequences.
They're not too big on evidence-based thinking New Labour, are they?
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Have you ever met a compulsive liar? I have, and I suspect there are quite a few of them about. Will they show stress when lying, or do they temporarily believe what they’re saying? It’s not quite the same thing, but there are also lots of people whose brains virtually block out unwelcome information. The world must be the way they want it to be, and to an extent they convince themselves that it is. They’d fool the machine and its operator, because they fool themselves.
Here's another thing - suppose the subject is Chinese or Japanese. We use tone for expression, don't we? But in Chinese tone functions differently. What seems to us the same word can be another word, if spoken with another tone. There aren't I suppose, all that many Chinese speakers, percentage wise, in our lovely country, but still...
My great expertise in this field is based on viewing many crazy Hong Kong films!
Good point. Even though Chinese speakers don't make up a particularly large group in Britain, there are pleny of other people who speak other languages as their native language. Even various different English dialects have very different tones of voice. I really can't see this being in any way useful.Originally Posted by SKIRRID5
but the thing is that even in the areas where a poly graph is still used it is not used to determine if a person is telling the truth or not, its used merly as an aide, the people that use them know they can't tell didly squat about if the person is telling the truth and so the information supplied by it is never relied upon. I think you'll find the only people who think its reliable are the people on Trisha.
I'm not quite with you, I'm afraid. Operators know it doesn't work, but it's used as an aid? How does it aid them if it doesn't work? Few people think it reliable? In fact I'd guess vast numbers of "ordinary people" believe the things work, and they take a refusal by a suspect to take the test, as a virtual admission of guilt.but the thing is that even in the areas where a poly graph is still used it is not used to determine if a person is telling the truth or not, its used merly as an aide, the people that use them know they can't tell didly squat about if the person is telling the truth and so the information supplied by it is never relied upon. I think you'll find the only people who think its reliable are the people on Trisha.
as said in american polygraph is inadmissable as evidense, and is much the same over here. its basically just used to increase the stress levels of the suspect, to make them slip up, along the same lines as when you work harder because your boss is watching you, or any other interogation technique. but apparently it can tend to end up that if they get the results they wanted then they will use them as supporting eviedense, but if they don't then its ignored, it carries no weight on its own but a confession brought about in part by a polygraph is still a confession. of course if you know its bunk then you won't be intimidated by it.
"If they get the results they wanted". I don't like the sound of that. Surely the result they should want is the truth. And that phrase about increasing stress levels, I like even less. Once the law allows that, we're on a slippery slope. How is such a procedure different from the absurd attempt to con Colin Stagg into a confession? A confession to a crime which, we now know, he didn't commit.
Surely we have to remember that in a civilised country you are supposedly innocent until proved guilty. The burden of proof is on the police. That does not, or should not, mean that they start with a belief that such-and-such is the case, and then use underhanded methods to make their belief sound plausible.
well since it can't really be used in court then they can only use it to try and get a confession, wouldn't be any point in telling them the polygraph shows their telling the truth, as you said its innocent until proven guilty, so why would they bother building a case proving their innocents, what would be the point?
and all integration/interview techniques are design to stress, confuse or intimidate the suspect, even down to the old good cop/bad cop cliché. how exactly do you think they can get a confession or information out of someone who is guilty? what kind of a slope is it your imagining here? the Rachel Nickell murder case shows that even a confession alone won't guarantee a guilty verdict, so where is this slope?
the innocent until proven guilty system is set up so that even if the cop thinks their guilty, they still have to prove it first. and lie detectors are about as effective as the good cop/bad cop bit, its just that fewer people are currently aware of the lie detector technique.
Regarding the Nickell case, it's not that simple. The "confession" wasn't sufficient, not because no confession would be, but because this one was thrown out on account of the way it was obtained. Anyway, he didn't actually confess, did he? The lady cop (who ought to be deeply ashamed of herself) tried to make him say he killed Nickell, but he wouldn't. If he had made a regular statement at the outset, saying he did the murder, I assume that would count.
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