The Lie Detector: The Twisted History of the Polygraph
From Wonder Woman's Creator to the CIA's Favorite Tool

About this book:

It begins with a Harvard psychologist who lived in a polyamorous triad, invented Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth, and swore his blood-pressure cuff could eradicate lying forever. It ends with the CIA, the Lavender Scare, and a multi-billion-dollar security apparatus still strapping citizens to a machine the National Academy of Sciences calls little more than a "theater of coercion." *The Lie Detector* is the stranger-than-fiction biography of the polygraph: a device born from feminist utopian fantasy and repurposed into the blunt instrument of American empire.

From the smoke-filled crime labs of Prohibition-era Chicago to the windowless interrogation rooms of Langley, Amit Katwala traces how a "parlor trick" barred from federal courtrooms in 1923 became the gatekeeper of the nuclear state. You’ll meet the Berkeley cop who dreamed of scientific policing, the showman who put the machine in a mahogany briefcase, and the traitors—Aldrich Ames, Karl Koecher—who sailed past its sensors while innocent lives were ruined by a jagged ink line. It is a pageant of junk science weaponized: purging gay civil servants, terrorizing corporate employees, and extracting confessions through the Reid Technique’s psychological vise.

Yet the machine refuses to die. Even after the Employee Polygraph Protection Act and repeated scientific debunkings, it persists in parole hearings, security clearances, and the high-stakes theater of modern policing. Now, as Silicon Valley sells AI "truth-tellers" built on facial micro-expressions and fMRI scans, *The Lie Detector* offers a vital warning: we have been here before. This is a gripping, darkly comic, and urgently relevant history of our dangerous obsession with technological certainty—and the terrible price we pay when we let a box decide who is human.