New credibility device fielded                 Mike A. Glasch       Leader Staff

Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are getting a new tool to help them weed out potential terrorists –– the Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System (PCASS), a hand-held device that works much like a polygraph. James Waller, an instructor at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment (DACA), left Sunday for Afghanistan to train troops on how to use it. “Right now, our Soldiers are making life and death decisions: who to let or not let on base; who to release (or) who to keep, based on gut decisions,” Waller said. “This is just one tool to be used in the screening process.” The subject has two wires connected to his fingertips or palm to measure changes in electrical conductivity of the skin. A third wire connected to a finger measures the subject’s intervals between heartbeats. Those wires are connected to a wrist cuff, which in turn is connected via USB to the PCASS. The subject is asked a series of yes/no questions. The interviewer punches in the responses. PCASS then measures the subject’s physiological reactions and uses an algorithm — a computer program that makes the decisions — to determine if the subject is being truthful. “The screen will display either red, green or yellow,” Waller explained. “Red means the subject was dishonest and lying to the security questions; green means they passed the test; yellow means the device did not get enough information to make a call so we need to rerun the test.” Soldiers will use the devices when screening local nationals (it cannot be used on U.S. citizens) applying for jobs at bases in (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and (Operation Enduring Freedom), as well as when looking for suspected roadside bombers. “Let’s say that we had an IED that was set off. A lot of times a patrol will cordon the area off, round up people from the area and question them,” Waller said. “Using the PCASS we can test them to see if they were involved in placing the bomb or actually detonating the bomb.  It’s used for troops in the field to screen out the bad people from good people who are trying to do harm to U.S. forces or our coalition forces.” According to Don Krapohl, special assistant to the director, DACA, three scientific studies were done on the device to determine its reliability. The Army conducted two of those studies; the third was contracted out to the Battelle Memorial Institute. “Our accuracy rate, when you set the inclusives aside, averaged 80 percent,” Krapohl said. Both Krapohl and Waller agree that although PCASS is not 100 percent accurate, it is better than the current options available to Soldiers in the field. “It’s not a silver bullet,” Waller said. “It’s not perfect, but of all the technologies the National Academy of Sciences agrees that the polygraph and this type of technology is the most accurate. It’s better than what the troops do now, which is basically using gut intuition.” “Usually when we say it is less accurate than the polygraph people pay attention to that and say, ‘Why are using it if it is less accurate?’” Krapohl said. “We like to point out that we don’t have enough polygraphers in the entire government to satisfy the requirements over in the theater.  “Gut instinct reliability is chance (50/50) or slightly better. That’s our benchmark. How do we improve about that and make this tool widely available? It (PCASS) gives us incremental validity over what we are doing right now.”