There are leakers in the Department of Homeland Security, and Kristi Noem, Secretary of DHS, wants to stop them, so she’s implementing lie detector tests:
The directive comes after some high-profile raids fell embarrassingly flat—namely one in Colorado that sought to arrest ‘hundreds’ of Venezuelan gang members but, despite deploying 400 agents, yielded the arrest of just a single alleged gangbanger.
Noem’s polygraph plans were first reported by Bloomberg Government in what appears to have been yet another leak from Noem’s department, which includes border patrol, ICE, TSA, and more.
The use of lie detector tests has long been controversial: their results are sometimes unreliable, and they generally can’t be used in an American court of law. More than that, there are serious issues about whether the metrics accurately indicate if a person is lying or telling the truth:
‘There’s no unique physiological sign of deception. And there’s no evidence whatsoever that the things the polygraph measures — heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, and breathing — are linked to whether you’re telling the truth or not,’ says Leonard Saxe, a psychologist at Brandeis University who’s conducted research into polygraphs. In an exhaustive report, the National Research Council concluded, ‘Almost a century of research in scientific psychology and physiology provides little basis for the expectation that a polygraph test could have extremely high accuracy.’
But in looking at information leaks in the federal government, there are larger issues that should also be considered—what defines a leak and what defines whistle blowing:
The classic definition of a leak is the intentional and illegal disclosure of classified information without authorization. There are laws and sanctions that are meant to prevent leaking. There are also informal social norms within government that are meant to supplement the formal disciplinary procedures for dealing with leakers.
It is crucial to distinguish leaking from whistle blowing, which involves the good faith disclosure through authorized procedures of information about serious wrongdoing within government, and which qualifies the whistle blower for protection against retaliation.
In the case of Kristi Noem and the DHS, these leaks are not about whistle blowing. They are political actions intended to defy the actions of DHS and the government by alerting criminal illegal aliens that they are about to be rounded up. The willingness of the leakers to endanger citizens by notifying these criminals is baffling.
Still, there are benefits to using the lie detector tests. Employees who are leaking are being put on notice that they can no longer leak information to hamstring the raids without possible detection. They will be subject to a lie detector test, and if the results are questionable, they will probably be considered suspicious, whether or not they are responsible.
These leakers need to understand that this leaking is not a frivolous exercise. It is serious business, and lives are at stake:
Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan was particularly peeved that the Colorado raid—ordered in hopes of rooting out Tren De Aragua gang members in Aurora —was foiled by an alleged leak.
‘This isn’t a game,’ Homan raged to the Associated Press. ‘We know that TDA is dangerous. Everybody can agree to that, but when they get a heads-up that we are coming, it’s only a matter of time before our officers are ambushed. Their job is dangerous enough. So we are going to address this very seriously.’
Leakers at DHS are now on notice that leaking will not be tolerated. Will agency employees take this warning to heart?
Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr, unaltered.