‘Wired’ Article: QVerity’s Phil Houston Was ‘Legendary within the CIA’

The February 2013 issue of Wired features a story by Adam Higginbotham, titled “Deception Is Futile When Big Brother’s Lie Detector Turns Its Eyes on You,” that cites QVerity’s Phil Houston. Here’s an excerpt: 

In fact, most of us lie constantly—ranging from outright cons to minor fibs told to make life run more smoothly. “Some of the best research I’ve seen says we lie as much as 10 times every 24 hours,” says Phil Houston, a soft-spoken former CIA interrogator who is now CEO of QVerity, a company selling lie-detecting techniques in the business world. “There’s some research on college students that says it may be double and triple that. We lie a ton.” And yet, statistically, people can tell whether someone is telling the truth only around 54 percent of the time, barely better than a coin toss. … Experienced polygraph examiners like Phil Houston, legendary within the CIA for his successful interrogations, are careful to point out that the device relies on the skill of the examiner to produce accurate results—the right kind of questions, the experience to know when to press harder and when the mere presence of the device can intimidate a suspect into telling the truth. Without that, a polygraph machine is no more of a lie-detector than a rubber truncheon or a pair of pliers.

Click here to read the full article.