aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, April 24, 2005

Driveway moment

We had to return the tables that we had borrowed for the party and on the way back were listening to This American Life. This week, Backed Into A Corner, “Stories about people who end up making choices they’d rather not make.” Act 3 (listen via Real Player, about 40 minutes in) was so good we sat in the driveway and listened:

Confessions of a Not-So-Dangerous Mind. How NOT to get a job in U.S. intelligence: Admit to being a pervert during your job interview. Somehow, though, that’s exactly what happened to a perfectly normal, nice guy who we’re calling Matt for the purposes of this story. On paper, Matt was a perfect candidate to be an analyst for the National Security Agency. He was bright, ambitious, spoke Chinese. But he was also a little neurotic. So somewhere in the midst of his final round of testing for the NSA job, he started to worry about this riddle: What if I’ve done something bad, but I don’t know I’ve done it? Am I still guilty? This, it turns out, is not the best way to approach a lie detector test. Brian Montopolis, Matt’s friend, interviewed him about what happened.

He is gay and admits to looking at kiddie porn even though he never had. False confessions are a serious problem. “Matt” didn’t get a job, others end up in jail or worse. I am familiar with the topic in an all too personal way. Here’s a Washington Post series on the issue.