Witchhunt at LLNL
Polygraph under fire
By Donna McFadden
Life is not easy these days for workers at the Lawrence Livermore
National Lab and the other national laboratories. Recent policy
changes in response to possible security breaches at Los Alamos
National Laboratory have created an uncomfortable atmosphere
of fear, suspicion, and distrust.
The national labs are the largest employers in this area.
Many students, staff members, and their families are, in one
way or another, associated with the labs, so this national controversy
affects us here.
The new security measures instigated by the Department of
Energy call for the unprecedented administration of polygraph
testing, without the right of legal counsel or representation,
to thousands of National Lab workers.
The introduction of polygraph screening, new regulations regarding
intimate relationships, and concerns with regard to ethnic bias
and how it may affect the results of testing performed on foreign
nationals working at the lab have led LLNL employees to express
their considerable concerns.
In a Sept. 14 public hearing held at LLNL between the DOE
and lab employees, the DOE proposed regulations for the use of
polygraph examinations while many employees voiced their opposition
to the new policy and concerns regarding the accuracy and validity
of the polygraph tests.
One of the main responsibilities of the scientists working
at the lab is to safeguard our country against the use of nuclear
weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and to improve
and develop techniques for combating the use of biological and
chemical weapons. Dr. Douglass Post, Associate Division Director
for Computational Physics at LLNL expressed his concern that
polygraph screening will pose significant problems in retaining
and recruiting the highly trained staff required for the work.
“This has every signature of a witchhunt,” said
LLNL scientist William Tong at the meeting. “A crisis occurs,
the public demands a culprit, the government searches for a scapegoat
and brands him a spy.” Tong called the polygraph screening
“an invasion of privacy, a search without a warrant and
an interrogation without a cause.”
At the heart of the controversy is lack of faith in the polygraph,
a 30-year-old testing device which has been shown to be highly
unreliable in that it cannot always discriminate between a liar
and someone who is nervous about having his honesty questioned.
The results of a polygraph are considered so unreliable that
they are generally inadmissible in a court of law, and there
is some question as to whether regulations barring an individual
from having legal counsel present during an interrogation that
could lead to loss of livelihood would be able to withstand a
court challenge.
| |
I don’t know how the polygraph works; I don’t know
if it works. I know it scares the hell out of people and that’s
why I like to use it.
— President Richard M. Nixon, Oval Office tapes, 1971
|
Manuel Garcia, a physicist at LLNL, spoke of the polygraph
test as being a “personally invasive, pseudoscientific inquisition,”
and said of the DOE’s policy of not allowing legal counsel
to be present during the test, “Interrogation without representation
is fascism.””If there is nothing to hide, why will
the DOE not accept professional monitoring to guarantee that
all tests are administered equally, and that some tests will
not be more equal?” asked David Dearborn, a physicist at
LLNL.
“My colleagues and I produce the secrets that you come
here claiming to protect,” Dearborn told DOE representatives
at the meeting. “We worked hard to wrestle them from nature,
and we recognize their value.” You “want us to ‘volunteer’
for an even deeper intrusion into our constitutional right to
privacy by using a flawed procedure that effectively gives the
DOE a free hand to terminate any employee who speaks his or her
conscience. If you choose to implement this astrology surrogate,
and to treat us with such deep disrespect, do not confuse our
contempt for arrogance.”
Thomas Thompson, a weapons designer at LLNL, said, “Let
us be clear as to what the real issue is today. It is not about
espionage nor about polygraph machines nor about nuclear secrets.
It is about political control.”
“Racial Profiling”
Asian-American scientists, particularly Chinese-Americans,
feel that the emphasis has been placed, unfairly, on them. Tong
says that he fits the same profile as the only known suspect,
Wen Ho Lee, who was fired from the Los Alamos National Lab, but
was not charged with espionage because there was not enough evidence.
“I frequently travel to China,” Tong said. “I
have relatives in China. I’m not a spy. I’m a loyal
American.”
Researchers have voiced fears that investigators may view
Chinese American scientists as “more Chinese than American.”
Chinese American scientist Joel Wong, who works on chemical safety,
finds that an insult to his patriotism.
“Just as the Italian Americans are not necessarily Mafia
and the Irish Americans are not necessarily IRA members, the
Chinese Americans are not by any means disloyal to this country,”
he said.
According to John Belluardo, Director of Public Affairs, Oakland
DOE, however, the DOE has not given additional focus to Asian
Americans.
In a letter to the editor of the LLNL newsletter, Society
of Professional Scientists and Engineers (SPSE), an Italian foreign
national, Giulia Galli, described the outcome of a meeting held
on April 2, 1999 at LLNL for the foreign nationals to discuss
upcoming changes. When they returned to their offices, their
desks had been “ethnically cleansed” of their computers,
Galli said. Foreign nationals have been denied access to all
supercomputers since the April 2 meeting.
“Trying to accomplish respectable scientific goalsÉhas
become humiliating and insulting,” Galli said, suggesting
that protection of the lab would be better served with the use
of “robust technology instead of xenophobia.”
Kiss and Tell
Under another new policy announced by the Department of Energy,
scientists at the national labs must report any romantic liaison
with a foreigner, unless it’s a one-night stand.
The new policy requires all DOE employees who hold security
clearances to report any “close and continuing contacts”
with foreigners from so-called sensitive countries, including
China, Russia, India, Israel, and Pakistan. Any sexual or intimate
relationship, sharing of living quarters, or business or financial
relationship with a foreigner from a sensitive country must be
reported to counterintelligence officials within five days.
“Reporting also applies if it’s a friendship or
conversations with a person who happens to be a neighbor who
is foreign,” said scientist William O’Connell. “I
think that’s overdoing the scrutiny of contact with people
outside the work area.”
The policy notes that conversations on the Internet can be
considered “close and continuing contacts” because
foreign intelligence often uses cyberspace “as a valid way
to conduct business.”
Feelings of resentment, anger, and frustration are causing
a backlash among workers at Lawrence Livermore, and other national
labs. Many are comparing the polygraph tests to the era of McCarthyism
of the 1950s.
“Here we are again facing the 1950s ‘loyalty oath
question’ wrapped in a security shell as polygraph testing,”
says Steve Patenaude, scientist at LLNL.
“Our counter-intelligence operation needs to be brought
in out of the cold war,” said Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher.
“We need to be developing state of the art systems that
will detect any attempt to transfer classified information out
of the labs.”
In a letter to the editor of the SPSE newsletter at the lab,
Betty Gunther, an employee at Los Alamos National Lab, writes
“The current hunting season on the Labs could easily cause
their destruction. Now I believe we should ask ourselves whose
best interest would be served by destroying the labs? Our enemies
wouldn’t mind.”
About Polygraphs …
“1) The polygraph has a built-in bias
against a truthful person. 2) It is certainly not capable
of determining truth or deception. 3) It can be beaten rather
easily.”
— Doug Williams, author of How to Sting the Polygraph
“The diagnostic value of this type of
testing is no more than that of astrology or tea-leaf reading
… there is virtually no probability of catching a spy with
the polygraph.”
— Dr. Drew Campbell, Supervisor Special Agent of the
FBI
“Straight-arrow types are the most vulnerable
because they are unaccustomed to having their veracity challenged.”
— David Lykken, Psychology Professor, University of
Minnesota
|