National Reconnaissance Office Illegally Collected Personal Data

One of the nation’s most secretive intelligence agencies is pressuring its polygraphers to obtain intimate details of the private lives of thousands of job applicants and employees, pushing the ethical and legal boundaries of a program that’s designed instead to catch spies and terrorists.

The National Reconnaissance Office is so intent on extracting confessions of personal or illicit behavior that officials have admonished polygraphers who refused to go after them and rewarded those who did, sometimes with cash bonuses, a McClatchy investigation found.

The disclosures include a wide range of behavior and private thoughts such as drug use, child abuse, suicide attempts, depression and sexual deviancy. The agency, which oversees the nation’s spy satellites, records the sessions that were required for security clearances and stores them in a database.

Even though it’s aggressively collecting the private disclosures, when people confess to serious crimes such as child molestation they’re not always arrested or prosecuted.

“You’ve got to wonder what the point of all of this is if we’re not even going after child molesters,” said Mark Phillips, a veteran polygrapher who resigned from the agency in late May after, he says, he was retaliated against for resisting abusive techniques. “This is bureaucracy run amok. These practices violate the rights of Americans, and it’s not even for a good reason.”

The agency refused to answer McClatchy’s questions about its practices. However, it’s acknowledged in internal documents that it’s not supposed to directly ask more personal questions but says it legally collects the information when people spontaneously confess, often at the beginning of the polygraph test.

McClatchy’s review of hundreds of documents – including internal policy documents, memos and agency emails – indicates that the National Reconnaissance Office is pushing ethical and possibly legal limits by:

– Establishing a system that tracks the number of personal confessions, which then are used in polygraphers’ annual performance reviews.

– Summoning employees and job applicants for multiple polygraph tests to ask about a wide array of personal behavior.

– Altering results of the tests in what some polygraphers say is an effort to justify more probing of employees’ and applicants’ private lives.

Various national security experts, including those who support the use of polygraph in general for security screening, said they were disturbed by what McClatchy found, especially considering that the number of polygraph screenings has spiked in the last decade.

“There’s a narrow jurisdiction for a polygraph program, which is to promote security,” said Steven Aftergood, a senior analyst with the Federation of American Scientists, a nonpartisan research center that tracks intelligence policies. “When agencies exceed their authority, they not only violate the privacy of employees, they corrupt the entire process.”

In 2002, the National Academies, the nonprofit institute that includes the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the federal government shouldn’t use polygraph screening because it was too unreliable.

Yet since then, in the Defense Department alone, the number of national-security polygraph tests has increased fivefold, to almost 46,000 annually. Many of those who are required to undergo the tests aren’t just bureaucrats in Washington but also private contractors across the country.

But some national security experts question whether U.S. agencies are striking the appropriate balance between protecting Americans’ privacy rights and the nation’s security interests as agencies are being permitted to ask what could be seen as more intrusive questions.

Last month, the Obama administration announced that federal agencies, including the National Reconnaissance Office, now may ask employees and applicants during polygraph screenings whether they’ve leaked classified information to the news media.

“If a whole program is susceptible to manipulation, then relying on it further is all the more disturbing,” Aftergood said.

The National Reconnaissance Office orders the second highest number of screening polygraphs in the Pentagon, conducting about 8,000 a year at its headquarters in Chantilly, Va., and at locations in Los Angeles and the Silicon Valley area.

The agency’s is among eight Pentagon polygraph programs that under Defense Department policy can directly ask only about national security issues in what’s known as the counterintelligence scope polygraph.

The test was designed to catch spies and terrorists who are trying to infiltrate the government without encroaching unnecessarily on the private lives of government employees and military personnel. Polygraphers are allowed to ask about espionage, terrorism, sabotage and the unauthorized sharing of classified information.

But about five years ago, the National Reconnaissance Office began pressuring polygraphers to pursue information outside those limits in what amounted to an unwritten policy, said a group of polygraphers who agreed to describe the practices to McClatchy. The polygraphers include Phillips, a former Marine who worked for a number of intelligence agencies over two decades, and a former National Reconnaissance Office colleague, Chuck Hinshaw.

Both agreed to be named because they think the agency’s practices violate Defense Department policies and should be stopped.

Other polygraphers backed their accounts, but they asked to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation. “I was coached to go after this stuff,” one of the polygraphers said. “It blew my mind. They were asking me to elicit information that I’m not permitted to ask about, and I told them I wasn’t going to do it.”

Another longtime polygrapher said the National Reconnaissance Office had established an off-the-books policy that encouraged going after prohibited information.


“The organization says in writing that they’re not supposed to be asking about this information, when in fact behind closed doors they are pushing (polygraphers) to actively pursue it,” the polygrapher said.

Hinshaw, who said he’d witnessed the improper practices as a former acting supervisor, accused the agency of becoming so cavalier about following the rules that the polygraph branch chief, Michael McMahon, pressured him to change the results of the agency director’s polygraph if he failed the test. In the end, director Bruce Carlson passed, but Hinshaw said the incident demonstrated how the agency’s use of polygraph was arbitrary and wasn’t about protecting the country.

“There’s a line you have to draw,” said Hinshaw, who worked in the program from 2005 until earlier this year. “The original idea for using polygraph to clear people was to ferret out moles and spies. Now it’s morphing into an ambiguous exam where anything’s possible.”

The National Reconnaissance Office, meanwhile, has branded Phillips and Hinshaw troubled employees. Before Phillips resigned, the agency suspended him for three days, saying he was insubordinate, among other complaints, and it revoked Hinshaw’s security clearance earlier this year, citing his foreclosure on his family home.

Both men said they thought the agency had retaliated against them for trying to resist the polygraph practices, and records show that they’d voiced their concerns before the agency took action against them. The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating Phillips’ complaint.

But even if the agency were found to be violating Pentagon policies, the laws that limit the government’s use of polygraph in screening aren’t specific on what constitutes an illegal abuse. The Privacy Act of 1974 requires that the government collect only personal information that’s necessary and relevant, and a 1981 presidential directive calls for “the least intrusive collection techniques feasible.”

Much of the interpretation of what that means has been left to the federal departments that run the polygraph programs.

“Some polygraph programs have been getting away with all sorts of abuses for years,” said Mark Zaid, an attorney for Phillips who’s been handling national security cases for 20 years. “It’s very difficult to hold them accountable.”

Why is the National Reconnaissance Office interested in such private details? In internal documents and emails, supervisors told polygraphers they felt pressure from the officials known as adjudicators, who make the final decisions on national security clearances.

The agency’s motives, however, are more complicated, some of the polygraphers said.

The Pentagon’s test is so restricted to counterintelligence issues that it’s notorious among polygraphers for compelling admissions of mundane and ultimately harmless infractions. One of the most common confessions involves harried bureaucrats who admit to taking classified documents home by mistake. By collecting confessions to repulsive or criminal behavior, officials can justify using polygraph screenings to their bosses, Congress and a skeptical public despite questions about the test’s reliability, the polygraphers said.

As a result, the National Reconnaissance Office closely tracked how many personal confessions it collected. The agency called them “Code 55 admissions,” the records show.

In fiscal year 2011, almost 50 percent of the 757 confessions the agency collected were of the personal nature that the rules said shouldn’t be directly pursued, the agency’s statistics show. Of 33 polygraphers, one-third collected more confessions related to personal behavior than to national security violations.

Other polygraph programs, such as those in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, also conduct limited national-security polygraph screenings, but in an entire year their polygraphers may not encounter any confessions that are outside the limits of the test. It’s a rare occasion when someone blurts it out without prompting, officials said.

“If an agency is getting a big portion of its confessions that are outside the limits, it’s an indication that they’re going on fishing expeditions,” said John Sullivan, a former CIA polygrapher of 30 years. “And if they’re doing that, it’s wrong and being done under false pretenses.”

Phillips and Hinshaw accused the polygraph program’s branch chief, McMahon, of encouraging improper practices.

Within the intelligence world, only the CIA and the National Security Agency are permitted to directly ask about drug use, unreported crimes and falsification of the forms filled out for national security clearances, which require a wide array of personal information. The tests are known as lifestyle polygraphs.

Late last year, the Pentagon discovered that the National Reconnaissance Office had ordered five of the lifestyle tests in violation of Defense Department policies, according to an internal report obtained by McClatchy. The agency then claimed to have the legal authority to do so, when it was supposed to be asking only national security questions designed to catch spies and terrorists, the report said. The Pentagon concluded that the program was in “full compliance” because the agency said it was a mistake.

Polygraphers, however, say the agency’s pursuit of the off-limits information is much more widespread than the Pentagon’s report noted. Records show that the agency ordered at least one more lifestyle test after it was told to stop.

The agency also pursues the information in its routine counterintelligence tests, polygraphers said. In one instance last year, Phillips’ supervisors told him to “assess” the mental health of an applicant during a polygraph test, records show. Phillips said he’d refused to do it.

As a result of its efforts, the agency ends up with a vast accumulation of personal details of questionable national-security significance, polygraphers said.

Last September, a woman who’d held a clearance for more than 15 years and already had passed a national security polygraph was interrogated for more than four hours over two additional polygraph sessions, said Hinshaw, who said he’d been ordered to do it. Hinshaw’s supervisors launched the aggressive inquiry because they suspected that the woman had smoked pot more than the one time years before that she’d admitted to, records show. In the end, however, the only other information the National Reconnaissance Office extracted from her was that she’d been molested at age 16.

Hinshaw said he’d received thousands of dollars in bonuses over several years in part because he’d collected a high number of confessions, including the more personal ones.

Phillips, on the other hand, had a much lower collection rate and received negative performance reviews. His supervisors cited his reluctance to collect the Code 55 information as part of the reason for their dissatisfaction with him.

“There are ways of leading people into making these admissions even though you’re not supposed to,” Phillips said. “By setting up a system that gives polygraphers an incentive to go after the information, the agency is pressuring them to collect it.”

Despite the agency’s interest in criminal behavior, those who confess to serious offenses aren’t always criminally prosecuted even when child molestation is involved, McClatchy found.

In one case, a contractor who was a former Escondido, Calif., substitute teacher admitted to molesting a third-grade student in 2005 during outside tutoring sessions paid for by the girl’s immigrant parents. In a 2010 polygraph session, the man said that if he were asked, “ ‘Have you ever molested a 9-year-old?’ I’d have to say yes.”

The Escondido Police Department and school district where he’d been employed weren’t notified of the incident. After being contacted by McClatchy, the school district called the Escondido Police Department to file a report.

The agency refused to answer McClatchy’s questions about the molestation confession, saying in a statement only that its polygraph program “is in compliance with the law.”

NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE STATEMENT ON ITS POLYGRAPH PROGRAM

“The National Reconnaissance Office directs, manages and oversees appropriate investigative inquiries, including polygraph, for the purposes of rendering informed security access determinations. Such inquiries and determinations are in full compliance with the law and provide the security compliance required to best protect and further Intelligence Community program activities and objectives.

“If adverse information is disclosed during the administration of a polygraph examination the information is evaluated and forwarded to the appropriate authorities. For Privacy Act purposes the NRO has a policy of not commenting on specific cases.

“The National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA), Quality Assurance Program (QAP), conducted an on-site inspection of the NRO Polygraph Program on November 15-17, 2011. During the QAP inspection, 118 criteria in nine primary areas were reviewed. Upon conclusion of the inspection, the NRO Polygraph program was found to be in full compliance with their policies and procedures and met or exceeded all standards required of a federal government polygraph program.”

Via: "McClatchy Newspapers"

Polygraph Nation

Lie Detectors Won't Stop Top-Secret Leaks, But They Reinforce Uncle Sam's Aura Of Omniscience.

By PHILIP GIRALDI
July 3, 2012
Courtesy Of "The American Conservative"

It is being reported that the United States government will begin to use polygraph machines more extensively in an attempt to prevent leaks to the media. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has ordered polygraphs to be administered whenever classified information is leaked, and the tests will apply to everyone who has had access to the information.

The Tennessee Bureau of Criminal Identification / http://www.tennesseelawman.com/

The new policy is in response to leaks last month in two stories detailing President Barack Obama’s Tuesday morning meetings with his intelligence and security chiefs to determine who might be subject to death by drone, and the exposure of the U.S. role in the development of the Stuxnet and Flame computer viruses.

The polygraph, more commonly known as a lie detector, is an interrogation tool that has been used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies since the 1920s. It is based on the principle that people exhibit symptoms of stress when they are lying, including rapid breathing, increase in pulse rate and blood pressure, and sweating. The machine consists of a band that is strapped above the subject’s esophagus, a blood pressure cuff, and fingertip sensors to measure galvanic response.

The results are sent to a recorder that produces a chart which shows the responses to the specific questions. The FBI uses the polygraph in its investigations while both CIA and NSA use it in their hiring to determine if applicants are telling the truth when detailing their background histories. Several other U.S. intelligence agencies use the machines more selectively.

The CIA has used the polygraph extensively in vetting the veracity of its recruited agents.  The exam is referred to as a “swirl” and is administered to virtually all sources that provide information that might be fabricated or contrived. Among foreign intelligence agencies, Israel’s Mossad and Military Intelligence as well as her domestic security agency Shin Beth rely on the polygraph. Most other European and Asian services employ it only when its use appears to be warranted.

It is perhaps characteristic that the United States would engage most heavily in developing machines that can tell whether someone is lying or not. The CIA and FBI have also been working with voice-stress analysis that they believe promises to become the next generation polygraph.

A polygraph test is not generally admissible in court because it does not really indicate guilt or innocence, only whether someone is reacting to the machine or to the questions being asked.

Skilled polygraph examiners conduct pre- and post-exam interviews based on a subject’s profile and the test results and, if there appears to be a serious issue, they hope to obtain a confession. During my time at CIA, one job applicant actually confessed to murder after a polygraph exam.

The common-sense approach to controlling leaks would be to carefully restrict the ability to obtain truly sensitive intelligence, but in a government where information equals access and status, that is difficult to do.

The president’s Tuesday morning meeting to draw up death lists reportedly involves as many as 100 participants both live in the White House conference room and by satellite or phone. Take each of those participants and include his or her senior staff that would be privy to the information and the number involved approaches 1000 who might have leaked the story.

Will they all be investigated or polygraphed?

It might also help if the administration were not embarking on so many questionable policies that it is trying to conceal, but that is a tale to be explored another day.

Then there is the government authorized leak. Will anyone seriously attempt to identify the leaker? In intelligence circles, most believe that the recent leaks that are now apparently being investigated by two U.S. attorneys were deliberate, designed to demonstrate that the White House is tough about ensuring America’s security and aggressive in dealing with Iran. If that is the case, Attorney General Eric Holder will make sure that the investigation goes nowhere.

The problem with using the polygraph to determine guilt or innocence is that it frequently does not work very well and once someone has demonstrated “no deception” on an exam he is certified as clean, which might well not be the case.

False results can actually provide cover for spies and criminals. Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer recruited by the Soviets, passed three lie detector tests without any indication of lying and was thereby allowed to continue to have access to top secret information in spite of other indications that there was something wrong with him. There is even a website that teaches how to defeat the exam (antipolygraph.org).

Some people are extraordinarily good liars who can beat the test consistently while others have used drugs or alcohol to deaden their physical responses. In CIA it was well known that certain national groups were difficult to polygraph. Some ethnic groups, including Arabs, were particularly hard to examine due to an ability to separate, in their own minds, lying to the examiner from any real personal dishonesty. Catholics frequently react to questions dealing with sex even if they are not lying.

The Soviet spy service successfully trained their double agents to beat the exam by making themselves physically uncomfortable during exams, sometimes inserting a pebble in a shoe and pressing hard on it to cause pain, so all the responses would show some stress. Another trick was focusing on something external, like a lamp shade in the corner of the room or a wart on the end of the examiner’s nose.

Soviet handlers instructed Ames to have a good night’s sleep and go to the exam so relaxed that it would be possible to avoid reacting to anything. In the 1980s, the entire CIA stable of 19 Cuban agents turned out to consist of double agents, all of whom had beaten the poly, some more than once, by concentrating on their inner machismo.  Lying to the Yankee examiner was the manly thing to do.

Turning the whole question of what to do to protect genuine secrets that are truly in the national interest on its head, it might be useful to ask why so many technologically advanced nations do not use the lie-detector machine. There is, of course, the question surrounding its reliability, but most intelligence and police services recognize traditional investigative and interrogation methods actually produce superior results.

In the United States there is the tendency to seek a quick fix for a problem, and if an impartial machine can somehow be inserted in the process, so much the better. It is a replay of the argument for and against enhanced interrogation, which was intended to produce intelligence of some kind fast and in production-line fashion even if the results were usually bad.

Unfortunately, once it is accepted by the public that a machine can separate truth from falsehood and can do so “legally,” it will be the new yardstick for interaction between government and the governed in a republic that is increasingly taking on the attributes of a police state.

Far better to nip the tendency in the bud now by recognizing that a machine cannot guarantee either guilt or innocence and should instead be shipped off to some government warehouse to be placed on a shelf and forgotten.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.