A major report released Tuesday is stirring skepticism about the effectiveness of polygraphs in employment screening. The polygraph created quite a stir when it was introduced in the early 1900's, and while the questionable contraption could easily have been dismissed as a novelty, it instead gained a mythical reputation for "detecting lies" and went into commercial production in 1921.

Not surprising then that world governments, in their never-ending quests to tap into the minds of their subjects, have had a long love affair with the alleged lie detector. One cannot get a job in government intelligence without taking a polygraph, often riddled with highly personal queries - the NSA and CIA are notorious for asking pointed questions about sexual habits and youthful indiscretions.

Researchers have been learning for decades, however, that the polygraph is a flawed instrument. A nervous examinee can appear to be lying, while other subjects can easily lie without being detected. Even more fundamentally, the relevance of common polygraph questions is uncertain. Can any question really weed out a double-agent, or predict a nervous breakdown?

Polygraph "victims," who have lost or been denied jobs after "failing" an examination, have been key to making the case against electronic lie-detection. One of the most vocal, George Maschke, founded antipolygraph.org in response to his experience. The site has successfully exposed the injustices which come from reliance on the lie detector.

So Maschke and others had cause for celebration on Tuesday, when the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) finally issued a report that polygraphs are an inaccurate method of screening employees for sensitive jobs. The report declares that the polygraph's "accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies."

The Department of Energy (DOE), who ordered the report entitled The Polygraph and Lie Detection, would not yet comment on its findings. The DOE is a heavy user of polygraphs, and has become the subject of sharp criticism by scores of workers at Sandia National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who were demoted or fired after failing polygraphs.

The NRC is a non-governmental organization. It is unclear what effect its report will have on the DOE or other government agencies, but its findings will undoubtedly lend new legitimacy to the anti-polygraph argument.