SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
Science is awesome, right? A scientific recruiting company's going to be totally bad-ass at
finding you the right person, using the science of hiring-ology, and their science lab must
have a bunch of Ph.D. hire-ologists. But you've heard that the polygraph is, you know, kind
of sketchy. Does it really work?
“Oh, sure,” the consultants tell you. “Not perfectly, of course. But nothing's perfect. Polygraphs,
though, sometimes tell you when someone is lying, and isn't that better than nothing?”
(The correct answer is “probably not.” Flipping a coin or sacrificing a goat would “sometimes”
tell you if someone was lying, if you had enough lies and enough goats and you did
it for long enough.)
Now, imagine you're a section chief at the FBI. You got your job by passing a lie detector
test. You'd been wired up, you'd been asked if you were a secret communist islamofascist
terrorist dope-fiend. You'd said “no,” and the machine agreed. It works! Now, some people
out there say that the machine's a piece of crap, but what do they know? After all, it not
only worked on you, it worked on everyone you work with!
(Of course, everyone it didn't work on wasn't hired, or was hired even though they're snorting
lines of meth through rolled up pages of The Communist Manifesto while they strap on
their suicide bombs.)
The world is full of science-y crap. You probably know someone who wears a copper
bracelet to “help with arthritis.” They might as well burn a witch or cover themselves in blue
mud and dance widdershins under a full moon. There's a chance either of those things
will make them feel better, because of the placebo effect (when your brain convinces itself
to stop feeling bad), but there are an alarming number of people who insist that because
something “works” it must not be a placebo, it must be “real.”
These guys wanted to wire me up to a lie detector and sacrifice a goat and figure out if I'd
lied to them. They were big and tough and rich, they were faster than I was and infinitely
better armed, but they'd let a witch doctor sell them a magical lie-catching talisman, and
so I was going to absolutely pwn them.
-..-
They were total dicks about it, too. They watched me enter my password on my computer,
making a show of recording it with yet another black rubber tactical gizmo (it was like these
guys had an infinite supply of grown-up Tonka toys): a webcam with a white LED that lit
my fingers with harsh, uncompromising light as I entered it. They watched as I fired up
TrueCrypt and brought up my hidden partition, watched as I did a directory listing and
showed them the files, watched as I nuked them.
“Okay, that's fine. But what about your backups, Marcus?”
Maybe they weren't totally stupid.
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