The National Reconnaissance Office is so intent on extracting confessions of personal or illicit behavior that officials have admonished polygraphers who refused to go after them and rewarded those who did, sometimes with cash bonuses, a McClatchy Newspapers investigation found.

The disclosures include a wide range of behavior and private thoughts such as drug use, child abuse, suicide attempts, depression and sexual deviancy. The agency, which oversees the nations spy satellites, records the sessions that were required for security clearances and stores them in a database.

Even though its aggressively collecting the private disclosures, when people confess to serious crimes such as child molestation theyre not always arrested or prosecuted.

Youve got to wonder what the point of all of this is if were not even going after child molesters, said Mark Phillips, a veteran polygrapher who resigned from the agency in late May after, he says, he was retaliated against for resisting abusive techniques. This is bureaucracy run amok. These practices violate the rights of Americans, and its not even for a good reason.

The agency refused to answer McClatchys questions about its practices. However, its acknowledged in internal documents that its not supposed to directly ask more personal questions but says it legally collects the information when people spontaneously confess, often at the beginning of the polygraph test.

After a legal review of Phillipss assertions, the agencys assistant general counsel, Mark Land, concluded in April that it did nothing wrong. My opinion, based on all of the facts, is that managements action is legally supportable and corrective action is not required, he wrote.

But McClatchys review of hundreds of documentsincluding internal policy documents, memos and agency e-mailsindicates that the National Reconnaissance Office is pushing ethical and possibly legal limits by:

n Establishing a system that tracks the number of personal confessions, which then are used in polygraphers annual performance reviews.

n Summoning employees and job applicants for multiple polygraph tests to ask about a wide array of personal behavior.

n Altering results of the tests in what some polygraphers say is an effort to justify more probing of employees and applicants private lives.

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US spy agency accused of illegally collecting personal data