Whew...it seems like we are getting pretty far afield from physics and
education here...but let me throw in a few comments about "government".
I've worked at times for the federal government, and I teach at a state
university courtesy of the hard-working taxpayers of California. In my
experience, most of the people who work for the government try hard to do a
good job. Sometimes they do not always provide the public with all the
"facts" for a variety of reasons including national security issues
(sometimes well-founded and occasionally not), lack of complete knowledge,
etc., etc. Nevertheless, thanks to the founding fathers development of a
system with checks and balances, the U.S. government works better than most.
Somebody once said that you can tell a lot about a country by looking at how
many people are trying to get into it as opposed to how many are trying to
get out of it. Since day 1 many more folks have been trying to get into the
U.S. than trying to leave. In fact, the present legal immigration quota for
the U.S. exceeds the sum of the legal immigration quotas for all the other
countries in the world.
What does all of this have to do with polygraphs. Well, it would be nice if
we didn't need to have a military or a nuclear weapons program, but that
isn't the real world. At present, no one is forced to join the military or
apply for a job that requires a security clearance. Those who choose to
generally do so with the understanding that those jobs have requirements
that can be stringent and not everyone will meet them. But the same holds
true for many other jobs. If you want to join a police force, or become an
armored car driver, etc., you can expect that your employers will want to
look into your background. I don't see anything wrong with that.