[Imnimo]

Yeah, I bet it elicits a whole lot of false confessions. But I also suspect that intelligence agencies are perfectly happy to incorrectly reject a significant portion of applicants if they think it increases the number of malicious applicants they manage to reject. Like they only care about having high recall for detecting spies, even if they have terrible precision.

I'm not saying that makes for an actually effective system. I think it probably does more harm than good in that it leads to people thinking "well this guy passed the polygraph, so I can definitely trust him".

And of course, the calculus is totally different in criminal proceedings, where we absolutely should not be willing to make that recall-precision trade. I can at least understand why someone would think they're a helpful tool for counterintelligence screening, but any use in criminal investigations just strikes me as ludicrous.