What Not To Write On Your Security Clearance Form
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That sentence perfectly sums up my experience with the security clearance process and demonstrates clearly how broken it is.
What has happened is that the security officer simply knows how the system is set up. It cannot handle 'ridiculous' spy stories. It can handle 'no spy stories' or it can handle 'real spy stories' -- ridiculous coincidences don't fit it. So he basically had forced his guy to lie because his story fit better into 'no spy story' bin.
I'm not sure it's entirely fair to consider it that way. Bureaucracy work on Binary options because that generally makes things a lot easier. It's a hack. It might not be perfect for every individual to answer questions - but it makes organisation a lot smoother.
The officer was happy with the answer to his question about spying; so he decided it was not relevant to include it.
To me that sounds like bureaucracy working a little bit :)
It is when it goes wrong that it goes really wrong...
(It's like the gender question; if I ever have to ask for gender, which is infrequent, now I will consistently ask "what reproductive organs do you have?"))
This helps cater for aneuploid people, as well as people who have underwent gender changes.
Note also the author is an example of "oh, that's easy" WRT to the programming required to fix the real problem. I can well believe it was worth their while trying to get him to change his official race instead of trying to modify a program when no one on their IT staff was familiar with it and he was the only exception (so far).
Note WRT to Linus Pauling, a) he was indeed an inspiring chemist (his books are still very useful) and is considered to be the best of the 20th century. b) He was also willing Communist/Soviet tool.
Extremely bad idea. Cue cautionary tale; a friend of mine (here in the UK) wrote something similar on his form (that he'd been ticked off for smoking weed). They didn't refuse him but he has consistently had random drugs tests for the last 3 years (at a rate of about one every 2 months).
The fact of it is if you tick "yes" to any of those questions you're setting yourself up for a fall. The review officer is extremely happy if you ticked no - because he can just run the default checks and not have to interview you :)
I was an ordinary programmer in the Air Force, however I obtained a top secret clearance. Basically ticked "no" to all the boxes, however one of my friends and probably a few of my past teachers were interviewed. Someone once told me his interviewer knew he had thrown a dead squirrel at a girl in kindergarten.
Sorry; it was a lie, I was replying to the poster above who said it might be suspicious to admit to nothing, even if it is true.
I don't get that. Why blackmail? I would assume that they feel people with financial issues are more susceptible to bribes to make their financial woes go away. Blackmail is just odd though. I wouldn't necessarily broadcast my financial woes to the world, but "Steal some Top Secret documents or we'll tell the world that you're in massive debt" wouldn't have any leverage with me (and I assume this is the same for most people).
The world knowing that you're in debt is probably too small of a carrot to have someone take the risk of leaking documents/information.
http://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html
"The lesson was clear: if you want a clearance in a hurry, put something on your history form that will make the investigators suspicious but that is not damning. They get so many dull backgrounds to check that they relish the possibility of actually nailing someone. By being a bit provocative, you draw priority attention and quicker service."
For example, say John has a drug addiction, but he failed to disclose this on his application. He is eventually granted the clearance, but now he has to keep this secret for the rest of his life. Someone could easily blackmail him for secret government information. If he is caught lying, his clearance will be revoked and he will lose his job, and more than likely he will never be hired for a position that requires a clearance ever again (many US gov't jobs require a clearance).
Honesty is a sign of your loyalty to the U.S. Depending on the type of clearance, you are sometimes required to take multiple polygraph tests, and you will more than likely be caught lying.
Author did the right thing by being truthful.
See http://www.rjhresearch.com/ADR/index.htm for more information.
Do you answer, yes - the bags have been unattended in the cupboard for most of the year, and on the incoming flight and my company gave me this laptop to carry on?
Incidentally if you fly El-Al they do ask you if you were given a new laptop for this trip and even if it has been out for repair since you knew you were taking this trip.
The market is clearly not efficient.
And I'd be surprised if the pay is much better in the private sector for equivalent IT jobs; I've never heard any programmer with a clearance being upset with pay or not being able to live the lifestyle he liked (well, as long as it was average American suburban).
"Fucking up" is pretty easy to avoid; you can talk about the technology you're using (e.g. Suns/UNIX, .NET, Java (the CIA was a 100% Java shop in the middle of the last decade), just not about the domain. Which is often true in the civilian market, it's just that the penalties are higher.
Clearly they aren't necessarily top-end Silicon Valley salaries, but people working with security clearances can still make respectable salaries.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Bank-of-America-Vice-Preside...
The top end of "Senior Developer" at Lockheed is around $100k. The top end for the same job at BofA (with an impressive-sounding but meaningless title) is $200k. And you don't have to lie about being investigated by the FBI. And if you get bored, you can just jump ship to their competitors across the street.
Dunno, but I'm not convinced that anyone should worry about security clearance unless they are completely unable to write even the simplest computer program.
Additionally, Lockheed built (among other things) the SR-71 and the F22. Its probably a safe bet to say that writing the control systems for those machines took more skill than "the simplest computer program."
(BofA has since purchase MER, long after I left.)
The government is a great place for mediocre people to work.
Still astounds me how you can have such an eclectic mix of brilliant and less than mediocre people working on the same projects. I guess that's everywhere though.
That, or wanting to live in the DC area. Some very large percentage of the jobs there are either government or government contractors.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N...
That being said, private sector work is usually for more fulfilling and less frustrating.
Working a private sector job, with a clearance (and the pay bump that brings) making software for the government, now that's not a bad way to burn through a work week.
Other people work for the government directly, and most of these people (that I've known) also have security clearances, although there are some government jobs that probably don't require one. Why people work directly for the government I have no idea -- good pension plan, I guess? Doesn't appeal to me in the slightest.
But government contracting can be good work and good money IMO. There's more paperwork and overhead than straight commercial work, but you sometimes get to solve weird/unique problems too.
In some areas (DC) there is a big pay difference depending on what level of security clearance you have. Someone with TS/SCI can expect to make very good money, on top of whatever their experience and education would dictate, as a result of holding the clearance. This is because there are some projects which require people with those clearances, and for the highest clearances it's a relatively small pool of people (they're expensive).
However I'll agree with you on the market being inefficient. The labor market very rarely is, however. The natural tendency of people to not want to move around all the time ensures a certain amount of inefficiency, before you even involve the government.
I would say that knowing how to lie well is a big factor in the clearance process. Being too honest can hurt you as we read in the article.
> Honesty is a sign of your loyalty to US.
That is why one should appear to be honest if they want to appear to be loyal.
As far as polygraph tests -- they only work if those who administer convince you that they work.
Have you ever used or abused <<giant list of drugs, chemicals, and substances that goes on for a good 2 inch tall paragraph in small type>>, or glue?
Right there at the end… glue. I had to confess that I not only used glue on a regular basis, but I had just showed my preschool daughter how to use glue and we had a grand time using glue together.
In a decision to pain logicians everywhere the agent deemed that my "use of glue" was not "use of glue".
We almost went there again with arabic Americans after 9/11 via census data.
Does anybody know where I can learn more?
When the US kidnaps and murders thousands, it's no big deal. When North Korea kidnapped 12 Japanese, it comes up in the news once a week for decades. I don't understand it.
I guess when North Korea starts buying their bonds...
The last bit is kind of important.
Wikipedia says 20,000 served in the military, mostly in the European Theater for obvious reasons, and I hope you all know of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd_Infantry_Regiment_%28Unit...) which earned a serious reputation and was the subject of a very favorable movie in 1951 (i.e. before the US was particularly enlightened). 7 Presidential Unit Citations (fine in one month, probably for the Vosges mountains rescue operation, that whole campaign was very tough and fought in terrain that has favored defenders for millennia (http://www.amazon.com/When-Odds-Were-Even-1944-January/dp/03...), 21 Medals of Honor, 41 net DCS, 560 Silver Stars all the way down to 9,486 Purple Hearts for a unit of 3,000 men....
Anyway, the point of all of the above is that this was complicated. The simplistic trope of "we threw them in concentration camps like Nazis" just doesn't hold up to even casual examination.
Why not use internment instead?
There were also "camps" with barbed wire and towers to watch for people trying to escape so they could be shot.
They interviewed a living survivor of a camp like that on History Detectives where he had painted scenes from the camp on the back of cut up posters.
I am sure there were ranges of camps where more elite families got better treatment.
People also lost their homes/land, their way of life. This was a very bad way to treat anyone, let alone innocent American civilians.
Revisionist history that "it wasn't so bad" is insane.
Once something is deemed bad, the most extremely anti-that things are accepted as truth, for no other reason than the complete opposite of wrong MUST be right. Most of the time, it's wrong again, because, as grand parent poster said, things are complicated.
"It's complicated" is about the best explanation I've ever heard.
Internment deeply effected Dave ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Suzuki to the point he checked his newborn child to see if the eyes had eyelids. Did they look Japanese?
"Concentration camp" is the most controversial descriptor of the camps. This term is criticized for suggesting that the Japanese American experience was analogous to the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camps.[90] For this reason, National Park Service officials have attempted to avoid the term.[88] Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes each referred to the American camps as "concentration camps," at the time.[91] When the nature of the Nazi concentration camps became clear to the world, and the phrase "concentration camp" came to signify a Nazi death camp, most historians turned to other terms to describe Japanese internment.
Note that seizing the property that they were forced to abandon has been said to be another motivation.
Concentration "prison" is more accurate. Try leaving and see what happens.
They were most certainly camps. A camp is basically just a temporary shelter.
That would be within the last 6-8 years if you are curious.
Unfortunately, that window in the middle is when the talking really needs to happen and when the most revisionism can occur.
Looks like the pre-9/11 folks didn't hear about it so much.
If you don't trust the government with the census, it would seem more logical to just lie on the very first paper form that they send you. Chances are (very, very good chances) that they'll never send a human being out to check and thus will never know that you lied about whatever question you're uncomfortable answering.
It's one thing to noisily refuse to answer some question in order to raise awareness of some issue you have with the census, but if you think there's a conspiracy or that the government might use the information to round you up in the future, it doesn't make sense to attract any notice. Better to lie low, if you think that's a risk.
http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/liesmyteachertoldme.php
Worthy read.
Can you source this, please? I don't recall this being suggested by anyone serious.
Yes, and none of that implies general roundups, which is what original person asserted.
So, either you're trying to bully the guy who asked because you realize that there were no such suggestions and you don't want to admit it or you didn't understand the question.
What do you think the Maher Arar case was about? And that was just the tip of the iceberg. As a nation we have decided that lawlessness and torture are alright if they are inflicted on suspected terrorists. The continued public silence on this issue does not speak well of the moral qualities of the average american.
In the real world that doesn't much happen.
"These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects. "
That 40,000 number is just SWAT deployments, it doesn't care if they didn't do anything, or if in fact the deployment was correct.
The map only counts cases where the deployment caused a problem or was incorrect (innocent or wrong party).