Comment by former_govt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by former_govt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

They want to know deeply personal details about your life, show up at your neighbour's and friends doors to question them, have explicit control over where you can travel on your vacation, deeply care about what you do in your free time, and mishandled all of it -- all in the vague guise of preventing blackmail and sabotage.

The blackmail and sabotage argument, as near as I can tell, is a farce because our enemies and "friends" are engaged in massive corporate espionage. If it were a real concern to them than they would use thier powers to require the same level of scrutiny on the private sector.

In addition to that they say be truthful so you don't have anything to hide to prevent possible blackmail by foreign powers, but in reality it's the truthful ones who don't make it through the process.

I've come to the conclusion that it's really just about having an excuse deny employment to "people not like us."

Its pretty backwards if you think about it, if the places you go or people you know or mistakes you make, can easily make you lose your security clearance and therefore your career could be ruined, it makes you much easier to blackmail than under a system that was more laissez-faire

Hmmm... If that were true we'd have lots of empirical evidence, so I'd like to see some link to that.

> we'd have lots of empirical evidence

That assumes there would be many attempts at this kind of blackmail, and that any attempts that did occur were discovered and documented.

> I'd like to see some link to that.

Even if the conditions above were satisfied (which I find highly unlikely), this assumes that we (the public) have access to the documentation.

I think the idea is more like if you are able to pass those clearances , you are less likely to find yourself in a future position that would compromise them. Similar to the belief that a high credit score shows that you're more likely to pay your bills and not abuse your credit - because you haven't so far.

Man, and I though Snow Crash's portrayal of the feds was wildly exaggerated.

Guess it was significantly less exaggerated that I thought.

> show up at your neighbour's and friends doors to question them

I think there's a lot of people that would like the associated intrigue that would come with this, it may be a cheaper way of hiring good developers that have a bit of a vanity streak.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com