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Willard conceded that the order would permit the head of any federal agency to require all his employees holding security clearances to submit to lie detectors on a random basis, whenever an unauthorized disclosure of classified information was being investigated. There need not be any reason to suspect the person being tested...
Taken to its logical extreme, this rationale would let police search any home anywhere because police could physically break down any door and most people realize this. In a bitter twist of irony, the majority of the New Jersey Court suggested that random locker searches would be legal if students knew that their lockers could be physically searched. Here, as with the supreme court's condonement of roadblocks searching every car on a given road, we have the new legal doctrine of equal injustice masquerading as equal protection...
...tales or impossibilities. But unknown to most Americans, the Administration has proposed a sweeping plan to monitor the public activities of government officials on a scale unprecedented in our history. Last week, the Senate wisely delayed the implementation of the President's controversial directive to subject federal employees to random lie detector tests and lifelong censorship. The rule (which will now go into effect next April) would have applied to officials cleared for "sensitive compartmented information." According to the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, that category involves 2.5 million individuals, almost half of all federal workers...
Despite these disturbing problems, proponents of random lie-detector tests have likened the procedure to routine blood alcohol tests that spot drunk drivers. But several major differences illustrate the incongruence of the analogy. First, police officers administer the alcohol tests only after a reasonable suspicion of drunk driving (weaving, excessive speed, etc.); under the Reagan plan, employees undergo random tests regardless of criminal suspicion. And second, the precisions of alcohol tests--accurate to several decimal places--provides prima facie evidence of guilt; while results of polygraph tests are haphazard at best. The arbitrary application of lie-detector tests coupled with...
...with security clearances must submit to government censors any writing they mean to publish. The requirement also forced officials to consent to polygraph tests if suspected of unauthorized news releases. Failure to comply with the mandates can result in demotion or reassignment. The new orders proposed last week extend random lie-detector tests to all officials with access to classified information, even if no evidence of security breaches exists...