HOW-TO: Spot a Liar

If you're involved in investigations or ever have need to know if someone is deceiving you, then learning to spot a liar and their "tells" is paramount to your success.  "Tells" are those things in which we all do when telling a lie. Deception was man's first camouflage against other human enemies.  Just like camoflage, deception can be detected if you know what you're looking for.  I HIGHLY recommend watching the video below by Pamela Meyer, a lie detection expert.

According to her site, "Pamela Meyer is founder and CEO of Simpatico Networks, a leading private label social networking company that owns and operates online social networks. She holds an MBA from Harvard, an MA in Public Policy from Claremont Graduate School, and is a Certified Fraud Examiner. She has extensive training in the use of visual clues and psychology to detect deception."

Judging from this video, when they say a woman's intuition is almost always spot-on, I'm inclined to believe they may not be too off.

Click here to obtain a copy of her latest book - Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect.

HOW-TO: Build and Beat a Polygraph

During Defcon 2010, a talk was given on how to build a lie detector and "beat" it.  I've been enthralled by the idea of lie detectors for some time.  My curiosity has always been whether the simple notion of having a scientific manner of detecting deception is psycho-semantic enough to arouse certain deception "indicators" that can be picked up by the machine.  In plain English, I'm curious to whether people fail these tests purely because they know a machine is actively looking for any signs of deception and there is no way to know what questions may be asked so they unconsciously allow themselves to be caught by it.  If anyone has any ideas, feel free to shoot them my way.