Lying on control questions is not advisable. A polygraph would be conducted inside of a larger investigation which would, among other things, fact-check your claims by other means. These data would be considered in the interpretation of your polygraph results. Whether or not you live in Chicago is very easy to check; when they see that you are lying on control questions they will consider everything else suspect.
In the contexts in which polygraphs are applied (i.e. security clearance, witch hunts within security services), simply being suspicious in this way is enough to cause the negative outcome (i.e. not getting the clearance, getting fired), so even if it might muddy the evaluation of your response to, i.e. "Are you a Russian spy?" it would still cause the negative outcome.
It has no bearing on criminal prosecution, because polygraphs are already inadmissible.
I wonder if polygraphs are there as a cover for refusing clearance due to secret evidence. If you know bob is a Soviet spy because your agents in Russia say so, you don't want to blow their cover, so you need an arbitrary reason to refuse clearance.
IANASpy, but my understanding is that even someone with clearance can't just look at whatever she wants. So we probably want to give a mole an arbitrarily high clearance, and just make sure she looks at top secret fake documents we've cooked up for her.
IANASpy either, but I've worked on some cleared projects. Clearance (and need to know) _is_ what we use to determine what someone can look at. If a co-worker needs a document, I verify that he's cleared for it, then I give it to him. There is no alternate system where I can look up: "Bob has a Top Secret Clearance, but also a spy so don't share anything with him."
There is a popular misunderstanding that having a top secret clearance means you automatically have access to all top secret information. When in fact it just means that it might not be illegal to give you access to particular documents.
Parent is getting at the fact that it is entirely possible to have a Top Secret clearance and never be granted access to any interesting information.
It's an intriguing possibility, but my imagination is unequal to the task. If they didn't mind showing us all this evil crap, what horrific secrets are they actually hiding? Secret pacts with Cthulhu? Hitler was actually a USA agent? Nothing big enough seems plausible.
Well, it could be cold war thinking, a line from Dr Strangelove gives one plausible reason.
"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, Eh?"
Benway's panopticon only functions if the inmates think they are watched. The secret might be that they cannot actually process all the data and are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of it, in which case the surveillance is more useful if people think they can.
If you lie on a question that is easily fact-checked, and the polygraph shows that you told the truth, doesn't that just prove that the polygraph doesn't work?
To my mind that is a simple test that disproves the effectiveness of the tool. It should cause a reasonable person to conclude that the tool doesn't work and should not be used.
The people who run these tests for a living probably have techniques to explain their way around stuff like that. They might say it just shows the subject was deceptive about the whole test.
In the contexts in which polygraphs are applied (i.e. security clearance, witch hunts within security services), simply being suspicious in this way is enough to cause the negative outcome (i.e. not getting the clearance, getting fired), so even if it might muddy the evaluation of your response to, i.e. "Are you a Russian spy?" it would still cause the negative outcome.
It has no bearing on criminal prosecution, because polygraphs are already inadmissible.