"Too Hot of a Potato: A Citizen Soldier's Encounter With the Polygraph" is a personal account of the life-changing consequences of wrongly failing an FBI polygraph examination -- and of a soldier's exercising his First Amendment right to speak publicly on polygraph policy. George Maschke was a soldier with a security clearance in the interrogations program. He served in the first Gulf War, was an Arab translator at interrogations and then had an opportunity to work with federal prosecutors on the World Trade Center bombing case. He decided to apply to the FBI to become an agent. Then the nightmare began:

On Monday, 15 May 1995, FBI polygrapher Jack Trimarco met me for the first time in his life and within three hours concluded that I am a spy, drug dealer, and drug abuser.

The FBI rejected my application to become an FBI special agent and entered my polygraph examiner's false accusations of deception into my permanent FBI Headquarters file. The FBI's accusations have had life-changing consequences for me, and I am telling my story to help hasten the day that our government ends its misplaced reliance on the pseudoscience of polygraphy, a practice it has with good reason prohibited the private sector from employing.

In 2000, Mr. Maschke and Gino Scalabrini co-founded AntiPolygraph.org and published The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, a free e-book with chapters on polygraph validity, policy, procedure, and countermeasures.

We included information on countermeasures not to help liars beat the system, but to provide the truthful with a means of protecting themselves against the random error associated with an invalid test.