Doug Williams faces up to 100 years in jail for coaching people to beat the controversial test that is still used by federal agencies to screen employees

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

In surreptitious recordings by federal agents, former Oklahoma City detective Doug G Williams had the salty vocabulary of a long-time officer, even if his convictions contradicted those of his law enforcement peers.

Where most cops embraced lie detectors, Williams detested them. Even if he did elicit a few confessions while he had a suspect hooked to the device, he viewed them as “Orwellian instruments of torture.”

Ten years into his tenure, Williams quit the Oklahoma City force and started a business teaching people – among them would-be federal employees – to beat lie detector tests.

For more than three decades, Williams offered these services but in November 2014, he was charged with fraud and witness tampering by Customs and Border Protection agents who allege that he conspired to conceal federal applicants’ lies.

His case, which has horrified polygraph detractors and raised questions about CBP’s privacy protections, goes to trial on Tuesday. If convicted, Williams faces up to 100 years in prison and $1.25m in fines.

Operation Lie Busters

Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents undertook a sting to take Williams out of the business, part of an investigation called Operation Lie Busters. The investigation into Williams was intended to root out “insider threats”, on the basis that Williams could be training would-be leakers to slip past polygraph screenings. Lie Busters was CBP’s response to the overarching federal initiative to stop leakers pushed by Barack Obama following the Snowden leaks.

In the fall of 2012 and winter of 2013, two undercover CBP agents told Williams they intended to lie in their polygraph exams, as part of the sting operation. They said they had slept with underage girls and smuggled drugs across the border but wanted jobs as federal agents.

At one point, an undercover agent told Williams he was worried about “the drug question” during the polygraph. “I don’t give a damn if you’re the biggest heroin dealer in the fucking United States,” Williams responded.

According to his indictment, he had told the undercover agent earlier, “It doesn’t matter whether you’re lying, whether you’re telling the truth, whether you intend to lie, whether you don’t know a lie from the truth or whether you’re a psychopath or what, any of that shit, OK?”

That’s where Williams’s protected speech verged into conspiracy, according to federal prosecutors.

Williams told them not to tell him what they’d done wrong or whether they intended to lie, and continued to coax the edgy applicants through the polygraph instruction.

Vocal critic

There’s little scientific evidence supporting the polygraph’s usefulness in detecting lies. Detractors often point out that the biometric measurements taken by the machine – pulse, sweating, breathing, blood pressure – are indicators not just of lying but many other emotions, including nervousness, anger, misplaced guilt.

The devices were long ago banned from federal courtrooms and many states’ criminal proceedings. Private employers can no longer force candidates to take a polygraph.

Federal agencies, however, cling to the devices to screen prospective employees. A variety of so-called “alphabet agencies” (CBP, FBI, NSA) in the federal government quiz spies and officers alike about their sympathies for other governments or whether they intend to leak secrets. At CBP, any agent you see at a checkpoint took a polygraph.

CBP began polygraph screenings for applicants in February 2008, the agency told the Guardian. Since that time, CBP has conducted more than 15,000 polygraph examinations and “has worked diligently to grow the agency’s polygraph screening program”. The agency also conducts recurring checks of its officers throughout their careers and upon assignment to “sensitive positions”.

Williams has been a vocal critic of this practice for decades. News outlets sought out his expertise as a former polygrapher, as a counterpoint to lie detector proponents’ claims.



He even appeared on a 1986 episode of 60 Minutes, where he was critical of the polygraph as an investigative device. Williams and others have published multiple manuals, videos and essays on the subjects. Williams would have been well-known to authorities.

“My idea of retirement is to work until I die, or until I’m successful in completely banning this insidious Orwellian instrument of torture, whichever comes first,” Williams told the Guardian.



Williams’s indictment has horrified polygraph detractors, who say they are now concerned they too could be prosecuted.

“I was indeed [surprised] when I first learned of the Operation Lie Busters, surprised because Doug Williams has been giving the instruction he offers since 1979 without any legal difficulties,” said George Maschke, operator of AntiPolygraph.org, advocates against the screenings.

Maschke has been an outspoken critic of the screenings since the FBI accused him of being a spy (as a result of a polygraph examination) while in the final stages of his screening to become an agent in 1995.

“What was the grounds for even starting this investigation in the first place? What justified sending agents undercover to make a legal case against Doug Williams?” said Maschke.

The instrument, and the government’s use of it in hiring practices, has long been looked upon dubiously.

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Though there is no conclusive scientific evidence that polygraphs can detect deception, it is equally difficult to prove that “countermeasures” like Williams’s are effective.

The Department of Energy even convened a National Academies task force to review the effectiveness of polygraph tests. The committee concluded that, “polygraph testing is too flawed for security screening”.

“National security is too important to be left to such a blunt instrument,” said the committee chairman, Stephen E Fienberg, in 2002, when the report was released. “The polygraph’s serious limitations in employee security screening underscores the need to look more broadly for effective, alternative methods.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, in a 1998 US supreme court decision that would ultimately bar the tests from federal courtrooms, wrote that, “To this day, the scientific community remains extremely polarized about the reliability of polygraph techniques.”



Operation Lie Busters has itself come under fire.

The internal affairs division that spearheaded the operation has been criticized for privacy violations, according to McClatchy DC. After Williams’s business was raided, CBP shared his business’s database of nearly 5,000 customers, including their social security numbers and addresses, with 30 other federal agencies.

In a similar potential privacy violation, the same division ran the social security numbers of 60,000 CBP employees through a Treasury Department database daily, checking for suspicious transactions.

According to McClatchy, “The division also is being investigated on suspicion of falsifying documents, intentionally misplacing employee complaints and bungling misconduct reports to mask its failure to curb employee wrongdoing.” The head of the division, James Tomsheck, was pushed out of his position in the summer of 2014. He claims he was scapegoated.

Another CBP employee, John Schwartz, told a professional gathering of polygraphers that he believed those “who protest the loudest and longest”, should be “the ones that I believe we need to focus our attention on”, according to McClatchyDC.

Williams’s case is believed by anti-polygraph activists to be the first of its kind to go to court. Only one other person is known to have been charged with distributing anti-polygraph information. That man is Chad Dixon, an electrician from Indiana who was 34 years old when he was sentenced to eight months in federal prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud. Unlike Williams’s case, Dixon never went to trial.

Williams said he feels as if, “I have awakened in an alternate universe where George Orwell’s 1984 is alive and well, and the ministry of truth is going to prosecute me for thought crimes.”