Joshua Swain captions the above video:
Last September, Chad Dixon was sentenced to 8 months in a federal prison for teaching clients counter-measures for polygraph tests. Federal prosecutors charged Dixon with obstructing justice—they view his business as undermining an important tool used to check the credibility of government employees and prosecute criminals.
The information Dixon was selling wasn’t new. Books on beating polygraphs have been around since the machines were invented. So why is the federal government cracking down now?
Justin Peters explored this issue back when Dixon was sentenced:
Polygraph countermeasures are not state secrets, and countermeasure instructors are not evil geniuses. Indeed, Chad Dixon was a Little League coach with no law enforcement background who got into polygraph consulting because he couldn’t get hired as an electrical contractor. According to the Washington Post, Dixon told the judge that “I was so dead set in my mind that this machine was bogus and I think this mind set made me feel that what I was doing wasn’t illegal and wasn’t that bad.” Well, it was illegal, apparently. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing isn’t bogus all the same.
The Dish 