Thank God for McClatchy. They truly are the one western news outlet that is actually engaged in serious reporting. Their newest investigation has to do with the National Reconnaissance Office’s collection of personal information through polygraph tests. The NRO is in charge of maintaining the United States spy satellites. An exhaustive investigation by McClatchy has revealed that NRO polygraphers have been obtaining “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.” This desire to catch spy’s is so great within the NRO, that cash bonuses are handed out to polygraphers who ask personal questions, known as Code 55 admissions. This is all illegal. The NRO has no jurisdiction or authority to ask personal questions such as, have you ever used marijuana, has you attempted suicide, do you suffer from depression. Several whistle blowers from with in the NRO have come forward to expose what has been going on. Of course the NRO has denied any wrongdoing with how they conduct polygraph tests. Here are two wonderful gems from the McClatchy article. Both of these examples demonstrate how ridiculous the NRO’s poygraph testing is. They also show how unconcerned they are over real criminal conduct.
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.
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.When National Reconnaissance Office polygraphers asked supervisors in a meeting last summer why people weren’t being arrested on the spot after such confessions, they were told that the allegations were referred to the appropriate authorities, Phillips and Hinshaw said.
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.”
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