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Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

If you are involved in a secret affair without your partner's knowledge or if you're closeted non-hetero sexually, you shouldn't apply for high level security clearances or run for politics.

Competing states can find this information out and potentially blackmail you. U.S. is currently pressuring a Chinese company to sell Grindr, presumably because of potential security risks like these.

I know of people who've gone through the clearance process and it's VERY thorough and personally invasive to minimize the risks of government employees being compromised due to their personal lives.

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It's actually even worse than that. If you're cleared highly enough, "competing states" will actively try to entangle you in these kinds of compromising scenarios, expressly for the purpose of maneuvering you into a position where you can be blackmailed.

One age-old example is the classic espionage "honey trap": https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/03/12/the-history-of-the-hone...

>If you are involved in a secret affair without your partner's knowledge or if you're closeted non-hetero sexually, you shouldn't apply for high level security clearances or run for politics.

Those two things are completely different. The first is an active lie to the person you are supposed to be closest with. It is a demonstration on some level of a lack of character. The second is the omission of not telling people something that it shouldn't be their business to know. LGBTQ folks are under no obligation to be out publicly and refusing to do so is not an indictment on their character.

It has nothing to do with character. If you have a secret you can be extorted with the threat of revealing that secret.

It’s not a moral comparison, it’s recognizing that both could lead to situations where the person in question could prize the propriety of said facts above honest execution of their duties. People in debt aren’t morally bad either, but the same can be said of them as well.

And the same would apply to a political official who refuses to disclose their financial obligations to foreign powers. Except OP didn't call out an individual like that. They didn't call out someone who has substantial debt. They didn't even leave it as "anyone with a secret shouldn't run for political office". They singled out two and only two groups of people and equated them together as both being unfit for political office.

Bucketing LGBTQ individuals in with people who have a moral strike against them is one of the many reasons why some feel pressured into staying in the closet.

You’re attempting to move the goalposts. Nobody bucketed LGBTQ people with them, OP specifically said closeted LGBTQ people, meaning those those people for whom forced disclosure of their orientation could potentially form a basis of leverage. To make it perfectly clear, the issue is not their sexuality, it is private information about them and the lengths they may be coerced into going to maintain that privacy. As another commenter said, any secret that a person values would be at issue.

I am not moving the goalposts and I am not even disagreeing with OP's underlying point. I am simply calling them out for their language. I wouldn't have said anything if their original comment said "any secret that a person values would be at issue". Instead they listed only two groups of people and didn't even hint at that list being incomplete.

People are always going to have affairs, go into debt, or have secrets they want to keep private. But people don't always have to feel shame in revealing their identity or orientation. That is simply a societal problem and one step to fix it is to be more mindful of the language we use.

It could also occur in the instance that a person is of a different religion then their community, or a person who eats meat in a community of vegans, but we don’t enumerate every possible situation in which leverage over other may be obtained. Failure to enumerate every possible instance as opposed to just mentioning the most common instances isn’t intended to slander anyone.

You are still missing the point. The problem was not the idea. The problem was the way that idea was communicated. The problem was not that every potential group was not listed. The problem was that only two groups were listed. The problem was that there was nothing to even insinuate that the same argument applies to anyone outside of those two groups. The problem was that someone readying the original argument can interpret it as belief that closeted LGBTQ people should not hold political office due to some personal flaw. I never would have commented if OP listed more groups to make their reasoning more clear or said their list was not all encompassing.

> You are still missing the point. The problem was not the idea. The problem was the way that idea was communicated.

No, the problem is that you are trying to misrepresent what was actually said and in the process using your misunderstanding to fuel your baseless outrage and moral tirade.

> if you're closeted non-hetero sexually

The only way to misinterpret this is if you want to.

> Bucketing LGBTQ individuals in with people who have a moral strike against them

Your reading compeehension skills are failing you, or you're desperate to be outraged for having read something no one wrote.

I suggest you read parent's comment again to try to understand what was actually said and to acknowledge the real point that was made, and subsequently apologize for the silly insinuations.

I thought it was only TS/SCI that was that thorough?

Those things would exclude you from a basic secret clearance as well, but the investigation isn't quite as thorough, so they might not turn up. For secret, there's a questionnaire, and they check public records, and make a few phone calls. Unless you're doing something egregiously bad, it's unlikely to surface. If something like an ongoing concealed marital affair does come up, though, it'll exclude you.

The thoroughness just increases through the clearance levels. So in a secret clearance investigation they do a cursory check of references, dates, addresses, relatives, etc. but as you go up the ladder to TS and getting cleared for particular programs the investigations become more extensive.

> it's VERY thorough and personally invasive to minimize the risks

And yet, near completely useless as shown by cases known to wide public.

If you think blackmail is the only thing that can compromise a man, you have a lot to learn about life.

History: some of most baffling espionage cases were "walk ins"

I think, it is the type of personality that services all around the world seek – somebody brilliant, but easy to guide, and motivateable with BS pretenses, that itself makes such people to seek to play with fire.

This guy is the textbook case for clearance exclusion: lots of personal debt that he couldn't manage. It's the number one reason people are rejected or have their clearance revoked. While the article doesn't state it, I assume he had already stolen the information prior to losing his clearance, and that they were no longer monitoring his finances (nor could they know he had the information stashed away). It does show some premeditation, though; the fact that he saved information tells me he was always planning to use it if the opportunity arose.

Well, that's a textbook case for sure...

And it is one more reason against having intelligence activities being ran by civilians as in USA.

A CIA case officer isn't exactly a normal civilian. I'm also not sure why you think being in the military would make any difference here. For all we know, he was recruited out of the military. There's nothing magically special about non-civilians that makes them more or less likely to commit espionage.

In fact in the article it states that he spent time in the army before joining the CIA, so there you go...

> There's nothing magically special about non-civilians that makes them more or less likely to commit espionage.

There is quite a lot...

Who else would you suggest ?

> And yet, near completely useless as shown by cases known to wide public.

How do you know that? A few public failures says nothing about how many successes there are or aren't. Any system involving hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people is going to have some failures, no matter how good the system might be.

> And yet, near completely useless as shown by cases known to wide public.

Just because a system isn't foolproof, doesn't mean it's useless. There are certainly many improvements that can be made to how we protect secrets and conduct investigations into individuals but what we have in place now is far from useless.

> When he received a LinkedIn message from a Chinese headhunter.

At the beginning I wondered how can the Chinese know who to contact.. On LinkedIn! Then a glimpse at the OPM data breach made my realise that the system might not be useless, but certainly dated and suitable to a very different threat model.

It's not easy to update your operating procedures to an information asymmetry at your disadvantage, after decades of advantage in info gathering.

Realising that, the top comment starts to make a lot more sense, even if at first sight it's potentially unrelated to the topic: they need to be much more careful about all sorts of things.

Because people who worked for the CIA have resumes too. Do you think they all have cover jobs? Sure, some do, but most people don't. I've worked for a number of defense intelligence agencies. In my case, indirectly via commercial entities, but it's not hard to read between the lines. We dealt with classified information, but the fact that I worked for them isn't classified, and the nature of the projects isn't classified. I put this all on my resume, and so does almost everyone else who works in intelligence. It's just another career.

That's the point. The US has a loose approach. China is aggressive and takes advantage of every weakness. This is not an isolated case, as you will be well aware.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/state-department-employee-arr... https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/using-china-... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spie...

> "the country’s extensive security apparatus makes it exceptionally hard for Western spy services to develop sources there"

That's why I wrote it's an asymmetry.

>Just because a system isn't foolproof, doesn't mean it's useless.

I think this is... a common mistake people make. It's a common mistake I make, really, to look at a system for preventing a bad thing, see a hole, and then argue that system is worthless.

All systems have holes, and just 'cause a system has a hole you can see, that doesn't mean the system doesn't have value.A system that prevents 80% of the bad things it was designed to prevent can be really useful.

Just because a system isn't foolproof, doesn't mean it's useless.

It's just like network security - you take every precaution you reasonably can to prevent breaches, but you also plan for when measures fail. Locks on the doors don't mean you can skip drive encryption, managed antivirus doesn't mean you skip monitoring for ransomware activity or exfiltration, RAID doesn't mean you skip backups.

You want not just the belt and suspenders but also properly fitted pants and underwear so no single point of failure leaves your secrets visible to the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_spying

I don't think anybody here believes that blackmail is the only thing that can motivate somebody to spy.

Yeah sure, because all the politicians are "clean", right? And they don't do dirty stuff while they are in office either, right?

If there is something to be learnt from politics it's that it doesn't matter what you've done or what you do but what your electorate wants to hear.

Morality is luxury and as such most of the people can't afford it. Simply they don't care.

As far as national security is concerned you could say that any big foreign company could be considered a national security threat if it kills its US competitiors regardless of the industry. We already had steel, telecom, social media and cars. What's the next security threat? Corn? What happened to free trade?

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