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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

This is surprising because it's the exact wrong thing to do. Past drug use will not disqualify you from a clearance, but lying absolutely will. Depending on the clearance level they will interview a number of people, including second degree connections. I know someone who used to be an investigator, and it surprised me when they told me how often first degree connections would say bad things about their 'friend'.

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Yeah. My father didn't do secure work, but he was an immigrant to the country where I was born. As part of the immigration process, he was asked whether he had ever been arrested (maybe it was charged, I don't recall and he's long gone so I can't ask). He said "no". In fact, he had been arrested as a pre-teen for stealing an idling tractor and joyriding in rural post-war England. Immigration authorities don't care that a teen went for a joyride on a tractor. They care that he lied. Took a bunch of lawyering and paperwork to resolve the issue.

I guess fundamentally the distinction is "if they can catch you, tell the truth, and if they can't, make yourself look good", but I guess it can be hard to know.

On the other hand, you can answer this too truthfully and just screw yourself up for no reason. Example: I know Afghan former translators/employees for ISAF projects who have been arrested by Pakistani "authorities", local police in various cities just for the purpose of shaking them down for bribes/money.

I can guarantee you that no record of any such arrest exists in paper or electronic form anywhere in a database that can be queried in Pakistan, even if US immigration authorities had a way to get cooperation from Pakistani federal police authorities without involving very high-level diplomatic contacts. Answering truthfully on a question like that will just fuck up your own case.

Is it still being legitimately arrested if you've been detained unlawfully for a shakedown by corrupt police? The same happens in many developing nations. It's actually more like being kidnapped.

Some of the process of using other data sources to verify that what a person has said is truthful/factually accurate only works if you're dealing with people coming from places with non-corrupted legitimate record keeping and bureaucratic processes.

I don't think any consular officer would hold it against someone if they truthfully tell "yes, I've been arrested", even if the documentation doesn't confirm it. During an interview they would most likely ask about the circumstances (whenever they know no record of it exists or not), and telling them "I was arrested for [cite the reason if there was any or say "an unexplained reason"], they openly told me they wanted my money, but still it is being detained by some formal authorities (or someone pretending to be such) so I had to answer truthfully" is very unlikely to be a problem. They'd tell the truth, and it's not like they did something wrong.

I mean, immigration is extremely stressful process (been there, done that, currently repeating for my spouse), consular staff are demigods who literally rule over people lives, and people have a lot of superstitions, but I highly doubt it's going to be an issue.

I had a late passport renewal, which is considered an administrative infraction where I've lived. I have no idea how this translates to "have you been arrested or convicted of any offense or crime" on DS-260, so ticked the box just in case. Naturally, I was asked about it - I've explained that I don't know if this counts but that's what happened, and that I'd rather mistakenly mention this than fail to disclose. And everything went perfectly fine.

I've seen immigration officers go on power trips before, and it ain't pretty. That much discretion with little if any opportunity for the potential victims to retaliate goes to some people's heads. And then they just need an excuse.

Well, if they decide they don't want you to pass - I suspect they'll find their excuse then, no matter what. With power tripping people, I believe, it's typically not about someone's file but if they arbitrarily like you as a person or not.

I had one tell me, a US citizen presenting with valid passport, he had the authority to prevent me from entering the united states.

I told him he had no such authority, unlike with the room full of Mexicans around me he was used to harrassing, and even if I didn't answer his (non-citizenship related) questions he'd still have to let me in.

By god did that piss him off, and I spent many hours detained, but in I went. After hearing his irate and false claims that my passport would be revoked, not allowed in, etc etc.

Reminding CBP/ICE of something like that in a confident way is a good way to get a thorough anal cavity search and/or all the carpets and upholstery in your car destroyed.

Indeed. They have to (eventually) let you in, but they don't have to put your car back together after they tear it apart.

I see you've read my other accounts of experiences with CBP lol.

I got put on CBPs shit list many years before that because I helped some people in a scary country which made some dumb uninformed government worker sad face. They do that stuff no matter how nice I am. Finally I learned they will treat me like shit and break my things even when I am nice so I should at least be assertive about my rights in the process.

The same happens in many developing nations.

The same happens in the US. We've just given authorities leeway to institutionalize stops and arrests and even convictions that would otherwise be considered illegal - especially if they were ever to be put under scrutiny and scrubbed of the blank check that is given to avoid gumming up the works with accountability. And these incidents do affect employability and eligibility for aid, at much lower levels than applying for a clearance or a visa. It's just something to keep in mind.

But what if you said you were kidnapped by people in police uniforms and forced to pay a ransom?

'have you ever been kidnapped' is a different question than 'have you ever been arrested', I suppose.

So in context, they ask if you've been arrested, you say no. But this is because you characterize an incident as unlawful, while others characterize it as a lawful arrest.

Surely the answer for the example is "I was falsely arrested because I refused to pay a bribe". Since paying bribes is illegal in most countries, that shouldn't be an issue and you can't be accused of concealing it if it came up later.

Yea, sounds like terrible advice. I tried pot a couple of times in college, honestly really disliked what it did to my memory, and disclosed it on my EPSQ 2.2 clearance paperwork. I had absolutely no problems. The background check folks never even asked me about it.

The main reasons people betray their country are MICE (Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego). Drugs might be expensive (money), might themselves be a secret you hold (coercion/blackmail) or might cause you to do dumb blackmailable things (e.g. fall into a honey trap). So, that's what background check folks are looking for w.r.t. drugs.

Hiding drug use makes it look like maybe it could be used to blackmail you, and suggests that maybe you're hiding other things.

Also, they're looking for people who follow the rules, won't bring classified material home, won't try to impress people by revealing classified info, etc.

The "MICE" model of understanding behavior like Robert Hanssen, etc has also been extended to RASCLS:

http://dustinkmacdonald.com/recruiting-intelligence-assets-w...

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=RASCLS+in...

If two US presidents in a row (and probably more) can bring classified information home, who are they to request me not to?

The US is safer if you don't bring home classified information. You don't have control over what the president does. It's in your rational self-interest to not bring home classified information. Your perception of fairness has nothing to do with it, and if you can't get over that, you shouldn't be handling classified information.

Also, guarding the houses of a few high officials is much easier than guarding the houses of everyone with a security clearance.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

There are lots of dumb rules, but keeping classified documents inside secure areas is not one of them. Once, I was working as a contractor, and there was a NATO classified document I needed for my work. I just needed to be a citizen of a NATO country and have a clearance from that country (check and check). The hitch was that I needed someone in my company to read me the paperwork/walk me through the PowerPoint presentation that I'd go to prison if I shared the info, etc., etc. and watch me sign on the dotted line. There was nobody at my employer who was certified to give me that presentation. (There was someone who was signed up to get the training to walk people through the NATO paperwork, but that was going to be 3 months later.) Someone at my client was certified to give that presentation, but (for accountability reasons) it needed to be someone at my employer who gave me the "you will go to prison if you share this NATO information" presentation. So, what we did is have my friend sit down across from me with the document. I'd ask her questions, she'd read the documents, and mentally redact the information by giving me wide ranges of frequencies, bitrates, etc. I then wrote my computer models, and if they needed higher fidelity, someone at the client later came back and patched the estimated values I used. It was a bit of a pain and a bit silly, but you follow the procedures. If you can't do your job while following the procedures, then you escalate and escalate until you can do your job while still following the procedures.

It takes a certain level of tolerance for BS to work with classified information and stay within the rules, but that's a valuable skill that carries a good amount of financial reward.

Yeah, that’s not for me. My tolerance for that kind of BS is way too low. It’d no doubt take less than a week before I started to follow the spirit of the rules, rather than the letter.

Only one was a president.

Yeah but that was the one claiming he could retroactively make it okay so now that Biden is president I guess by that logic it's retroactively okay as well.

If the President does it, it's not illegal.

That's been my impression with myself and several friends going through the process. The defense establishment is looking for honest people without drug abuse problems, not people who've never tried a joint. But I understand the opposite is true when applying for a job in law enforcement.

To reiterate half of what you've said, but maybe in a slightly different way, the defense security clearance process is designed to determine how likely you are to be incentivized or coerced into revealing classified information.

The point of the deep dive is not to prove you've always been an upstanding citizen, but to look for factors that make you an easier target for foreign intelligence services such as:

1. Do you have any financial problems that could make you easier to buy off? (Bad credit, gambling problems)

2. Do you have any (real or perceived) addictions that might impair your judgement or can be leveraged against you? (drugs and DUIs)

3. Are you currently attempting to hide any criminal activity that you could be blackmailed with?

4. Do you have any sensitive foreign connections or other possible allegiances?

Police typically have a 5 year period they want for zero drug involvement. The military is more dependent on the position and clearance level, but the max limit numbers are arbitrarily set. They set the numbers high enough to make recruiting possible, but it isn’t based off of any science.

I meant that lying was more acceptable on police applications because police, in the course of their duties, often have to lie whether its telling a suspect that you have proof of their guilt and they just need to confess or using boilerplate language like "there was a strong smell of marijuana" to justify a search in the paperwork whether you smelled anything or not.

This is absolutely not the case. Law enforcement background checks are more intense than clearance, and drug use policies are very black-white.

The general principle is that you must be unimpeachable such that your testimony is valid in court.

In what country is this the case that police have unimpeachable history?

I’m mostly referring to federal law enforcement, I’m not familiar with local police suitability (but I’m guessing it’s not nearly as well resourced as the feds).

I wish my experiences with federal LEO in CBP could reflect that. I've lived some corrupt ass places but federal CBP officers take the cake.

What do you mean "have to lie"? Such lies really should be illegal for police...

I would also expect lying to be a bigger red flag compared to past drug use, and while it seems these stories invalidate such an idea, I believe they actually validate it: these are stories of people who did get security clearance and they were honest, the ripping up part is more like a symbolic gesture from the system "let's both pretend none of that happened".

These stories don't mean the person would have past when immediately denying the past offense...

While growing up, and during my studies I had often considered job roles where security clearances would presumably be required, but I decided to stay away from that world for multiple reasons:

1. when a sector is heavily propagandized / advertised in media (books, films, ...) then usually it's to attract more talent who wouldn't spontaneously apply. lots of people get disillusioned in armies etc around the world, which is why the experience is artificially inflated in movies etc...

2. I understand that in some situations people in certain job roles need to sacrifice some of their personal freedoms in order to protect the freedoms of the population at large, think for example freedom of expression vs secrecy, and the need of secrecy say among the Polish, French, British, ... in the context of the cracking of the Enigma coding system. To join and apply for security clearance entails signing away certain rights and freedoms. The mere thought that the only way to find out if that's a good decision or not is by taking that decision for life is nauseating to me. Even if I were to become an employee and the practical experience would be that the organization and the individual that signed up agree on the need for secrecy 99% of the time (which sounds very optimistic), I would balk at that 1% or more of the time where I disagree, where I might be convinced the secrecy is creating more problems than solutions. That thought seems unbearable to me, so I'd rather have no security clearance at all and feel ... free.

That's my understanding as well. Lying on a clearance application is far worse than admitting to many criminal acts.

The thought is that someone could blackmail you into revealing secrets by threatening to expose your lie, thus causing you to losing your clearance, job or worse.

> Lying on a clearance application is far worse than admitting to many criminal acts.

For one thing, admitting to past criminal acts doesn’t add a new criminal act with the statute of limitations clock at 0, whereas lying in any official government process, like a security clearance application, does.

Right after high school a friend of mine went into the military and needed a clearance for his assigned job on a nuclear missile submarine. Investigators came around and asked his friends back home about him, we all lied a little in his favor. I remember explicitly thinking at the time "Of course people's friends are going to lie a little for them. What's the point in asking these questions?"

Then I realized the real red flag would be if you weren't stable enough to have friends who would help you out a bit.

A friend of mine has the same experience. They answered yes to the marijuana question and still got clearance.

Another friend lied and said no (this was for a college internship so I knew a couple people working there) and got rejected once their story didn't check out with their personal references.

The interview/form is looking for potential blackmail or tendency to lie or obscure facts. If you are honest, that's fine, although they sometimes ask that you are currently using as well and that is a strike against you.

I was talking to an NSA recruiter last year, though, and they told me they routinely report applicants to the FBI for confessing to crimes during a polygraph. So damned if you do, damned if you don’t…

(For a recruiter he did an uncanny job at convincing me never to work for the NSA)

I mean, that might be true if someone confesses to heinous/violent crimes (and shouldn't they?) but its definitely not true for things like minor drug use/sale etc.

But if the crimes that you confess to are skilled hacking crimes and the NSA hires you anyways, then the FBI never finds out ? Thus making the NSA judge & jury.