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Comment by wyc | Hacker News Reader

Once on an international flight, I overheard some construction workers describe how the US government must fly in US citizenship-holding personnel and US sourced materials in construction of certain foreign projects for security reasons. Does anyone know more about this?

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I worked on a software project that was targeted at the federal government and required all programmers to be US citizens. It didn’t require us to have special security training or anything, though; and there was a different project that required programmers to leave their cell phones in lockers during the day.

I’m convinced that the government doesn’t believe citizens are any more loyal or hard to bribe than other people, but insisting on citizenship would make it easier to charge us with particular crimes if the need arose.

>I’m convinced that the government doesn’t believe citizens are any more loyal or hard to bribe than other people

Seriously? While they have to plan for an inside threat, do you really think that they don't view their own citizens as being more reliable than foreign nationals?

You’re not looking at a random subset but at a self selected group. It’s entirely likely they consider “10 US born volunteers” as much a threat as “10 global volunteers”.

Originally I thought the requirement that we be citizens was naïve because, whether the odds were better or worse, there obviously have been cases where US citizens showed no loyalty to the country. But further thought convinced me that, assuming they get physical custody of the culprit, it’s much easier to charge citizens with crimes than foreign nationals, and it’s generally easier to get other countries to cooperate to turn over physical custody of a US citizen than foreign nationals.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this. The US has a much better chance of getting Assange than Snowden right now. But I believe, in general, the requirement isn’t about avoiding a security breach, but instead about punishing the culprits after the breach is discovered.

If you haven’t watched the Americans, I recommend you do. Often, handlers would extract information from citizens without them even knowing they did anything wrong. I can imagine a lot of more modern day scenarios playing out with this same dynamic.

>I’m convinced that the government doesn’t believe citizens are any more loyal or hard to bribe than other people, but insisting on citizenship would make it easier to charge us with particular crimes if the need arose

Hm.. I definitely feel it's easier to mitigate some risk by using US citizens. One of the goals is to limit possibility of foreign interference via these citizens. By using your own people, you can track their interactions with foreign entities via their trips outside of the US and their self documented contacts with foreign nationals. It'd be a lot harder to track these things when you hire someone from a different country because you're not going to have as meticulous records and all their friends and family are liable to be foreign nationals.

They leave cellphones in lockers because they have cameras. There are corporations that have similar places. I’m sure Apple doesn’t allow cellphones in certain rooms with prototypes.

Audio recording and transmission can also be a threat.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Info...

My non-citizen wife is a web designer for a minor department at the Smithsonian. They had to employ her through the non-profit, non-governmental side because the government side wouldn’t employ a non-citizen.

I'd say requiring own citizens also makes it possible to play eenie meenie among a pool of candidates, to minimize the chance of spies slipping in.

If you're a US citizen, the US government already knows enough about you from just your regular stream of activity that makes its way to them—your taxes, any times you've been arrested, etc. So—even disregarding stuff like Prism—they already have a baseline estimate for how trustworthy you are, without needing to do a background check. (Also, they can rely on other partial background checks you've passed in the past, if they have access to them. If you've ever worked with children, or gotten a NEXUS card, they already have all the information they need to determine whether you can work a government job.)

The same cannot be said of foreign citizens (even ones who are permanent residents); to the government's eyes, they're "opaque"—and even background checks run on them would only turn up what their homeland wants the US to turn up. (A background check that could turn up more, wouldn't really be a "background check" any more, but rather espionage, since they'd need to bypass the "public API" of the other government.)

I didn’t work for the government directly, and I don’t want to sound like I was doing anything covert or especially difficult. Basically, the company I worked for knew the government was one of its biggest customers with some unusual requirements compared to other customers (not “we need to spy on people,” but more like FedRAMP), and we helped other teams implement those feature requests.

But it was the federal government that insisted that we be US citizens. As far as I know, they didn’t require us to pass any special background check. And they didn’t require us to have any special training. But we absolutely had to be citizens (not just “legally able to work in the country”).

It's interesting how broad and disjoint the US Federal government is. I'm a Federal contractor and while many of my coworkers are not US citizens, the government does do a quite thorough (non-clearance) investigation on all of us that involves filling out a rather long form, providing past addresses and contacts for each of those addresses, etc. AFAIK they don't do in person interviews for non-clearance background investigations, but they do send out questionnaires by mail to all of the people you list on the form.

Not really, otherwise they wouldn't bother doing background checks for security clearances. Some of them are extensive. They interview your friends.

A security clearance requires that the government know more about you than just the background-level life events of yours that they passively subscribe to.

All they need to know for a plain-old no-clearance public-servant position is that you're not beholden to a foreign power (e.g. part of a foreign gang, or in debt to a major foreign corporation.)

There's an easy (though imperfect) heuristic for determining whether you're potentially beholden to a foreign power, from the data they already have: the addresses you've lived at, your job history, and your arrest record. Just join that set to the set of organizations they're tracking as catspaws for foreign powers [and their active locations], count the joined rows, and you have a log-probability that you've ever had the opportunity to interact with someone who might have had cause to convince you to work for a foreign power.

This sounds too simplistic. There are other factors, like large debts (domestic, foreign, or otherwise), extra-marital affairs, etc. that could make someone easy to turn in the future.

At this point I think it depends on what type of security clearance you're talking about now. The above sounds more like checks done for a CIA analyst than for a embassy drywall contractor...

Requiring U.S. citizens denies adversaries the ability to use their own without first having to put them through immigration and naturalization in the U.S. That's not nothing. Sure, adversaries can also recruit Americans, but that's harder than recruiting their own citizens.

Does it prevent espionage by Americans? No. But it does make espionage by foreign adversaries at least a bit harder.

It is not always about the security side. There are certain requirements to employ US citizens based on the funding source. The charitable reasoning is ensuring the program can continue to run even if are at war.

(Just FYI I don't know if I could put a source / article on this, but this information was information that Robert Hanssen allegedly leaked to the Russians [Aldrich Ames also leaked similar things and a lot of the same HUMINT sources]. I initially read this in a Robert Hanssen non-fic book a while ago)

Apparently, during the construction of the embassy in (edit: Moscow) -East Berlin-, the construction company (surely at the direction of the KGB / GRU) placed passive bugs in the concrete (they only transmit when blasted with microwaves at the right frequency and would avoid counter-intel sweeps unless active). They built the buildings almost pre-fab style, laying the concrete out then assembiling it. It's then when the bugs were placed.

The west eventually learned about this, if I recall correctly, it was from a Russian defector by the codename of Mother.

It was called Operation Top Hat (that's where i'd start googiling). The US knew the embassy in (edit: Moscow) -East Berlin- was bugged on the first 3 floors by the Russians as well as having secret hollow support columns with clandestine access to the building. The decision was made to just not use the first 3 floors of the embassy for classified discussion. The remaining floors were built by Americans and undoubtedly under FBI/OGA watch.

IIRC there was also a network of tunnels leading from the embassy in West Berlin to under the wall to listening posts.

Edit: my memory is shot apparently. It was in Moscow, not Berlin. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/private-tour-cias-inc... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-07-29-mn-177-st...

I think i screwed up another thing Hanssen revealed and that was a tunnel from West Berlin to East Berlin and under the Soviet embassy.

I have heard that the US embassy in Canberra, Australia is made entirely out of US materials that were shipped there specifically, as well as the first meter or so of topsoil for the whole complex. Unsure if true, but wouldn't surprise me.

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