Finding Truth in a Vendor's Pitch

Why you need third-party references to check out technology products that sound, and look, great.

By Lew McCreary

May 01, 2006 — CSO —

There might be no more pitiable predicament in life than being pitched a product that may not work very well by a salesman who works very well indeed.

This is never more true than when the thing being sold is technology that claims for itself nearly wizardly capabilities, as many do. For example, the ability to peer into human hearts and minds to discern malicious motives and intentions.

Who wouldn't want something that could do that?

Thus the Media Room at Boston's Logan Airport was packed on Feb. 6, with eager law enforcement and transportation minions on hand to see a demonstration of layered voice analysis (LVA) software, ably shown off by Richard D. Parton, CEO of V Worldwide, the Chicago-based U.S. distributor of software developed in Israel by Nemesysco. (Israel has such a luminous aura of security competency that if something was invented there, that fact alone endows it with added credibility. I know that doesn't make rational sense, but there you have it: The adoption of Israeli-made security technology is clearly a best practice!)

Almost any technology is mysterious to those of us who are not software engineers or creators of elegant algorithms. And no group of products has inspired more heated debate than those whose purpose is to reliably unveil deception. Legions of hostiles gather on websites dedicated to the proposition that polygraphs and other machine-based detection solutions are an unvarnished evil, capable of entrapping the innocent and sparing the guilty. Judging by the posts on sites such as www.antipolygraph.org, the participants are resistant to persuasion by even the strongest positive proof. They swarm like piranhas around anyone nervy enough to offer even a tepid defense.

But there is little conclusive affirmative research and plenty of solid debunking for most of the deception-detection approaches so far introduced. (As for LVA, there is nothing scientifically rigorous yet, either up or down, according to Parton—though he says the Department of Defense has research in progress.) It may be that some of these tools help investigators as a form of validation; but the science suggests they wouldn't save an inept Inspector Clousseau from himself.

Over the years, at this and other magazines my company has produced, I've sat through many hundreds of vendor meetings. Almost all are similarly architected to include a PowerPoint presentation followed by a demo of the technology at hand and a few minutes of questions and answers. A small percentage of such meetings are fascinating; many more include lively conversations about this or that marketplace and are far from a waste of time. But I'd say that roughly a third are either numbingly boring or else drag me out into deep water where the complex material overwhelms my small powers of understanding.