Hacker News Reader

Comment by atlgator | Hacker News Reader

The pool of Americans that can qualify for a clearance is very small. You'd be surprised how many people have poor credit, bad debt, foreclosures, foreign connections, drug use and/or arrest history. It's not a fair comparison to the applicant pool available to your typical industry business. When I got my TS out of college, the OPM agent went to my old frat house and interviewed people at random, then went to my girlfriend's sorority house and interviewed random people there. It can be brutal.

View on HN

If you are a citizen but your spouse is not a US citizen, does that count as an out? I hard a while ago that having a spouse from China could ruin your chances of getting security clearance, but I’m not sure if naturalizing solves that problem or not.

Yes, it will make a huge impact during the investigation and adjudication process. For TS and TS/SCI, even with naturalization the chances for approval will be slim and naturalization likely won't help, especially if they have family in China. For the government, it's all about calculating risk of someones loyalty, character and having things that can be exploited by financial issues (debt is the biggest disqualifier), foreign contacts or family, and anything they'd want to keep secret that could be used for blackmail.

> debt is the biggest disqualifier

If they have a good candidate and the only problem is debt, they should offer to pay it off. They have no qualms printing billions to save some broken banks.

Someone with lots of debt likely has some aspirations of foreign travel to risky locales, regardless of what they say… so it makes sense why that would be a disqualifier.

Why would having a lot of debt make that person have “… some aspirations of foreign travel to risky locales…”?

Plenty of people get into debt just doing normal shit at their homes

High risk behaviors correlate… It’s not a foolproof assumption, but it probably will be true more than half the time.

If we’re going to be that ridiculous about risk management but not other ones that , I at least believe, are in the same tier i.e. alcohol abuse, then we might as well go full bore and have the government pay an extremely generous, generational wealth paying position.

That’s the only way you’re going to get people with self control and willing to live the life of ascetic monks for the duration of time to both learn how to build these systems and then actually build them

Your first paragraph is incoherent… can you try to write out the actual argument legibly?

I think they do try to keep people with substance abuse problems from getting clearance. (Unless they are friends with then President or something like that).

I'm not sure how that's relevant. The goal is to assess the individual's susceptibility to coercion. Maintaining safety from kidnapping while traveling can certainly be a concern when you hold a clearance, but simply taking your family on a vacation overseas is not among the high concerns. If you have bad debt where you are drowning financially, or if you have strong foreign ties or connections, or other behavioral risks, they make you susceptible to coercion. Selling secrets to adversaries to repay loan sharks, being extorted using threats against overseas family members, getting drunk or high and divulging secrets, secrets in exchange for drugs, etc.

None of those disqualify you, necessarily. They are first and foremost concerned about 2 things: can you be honest with them, and can you keep secrets.

Even if both of those were false in the past, you could still pass.

past drug use does not preclude a clearance (edited)

It absolutely can. Depends on the drug and when it was last used, if you had any drug-related incidents or court ordered rehabilitation.

That’s going beyond simple use. The two year lookback is real but nobody is going to fail a basic clearance over college pot use.

I didn’t say anything about pot. I said drug. That’s any illicit drug or controlled substance including prescription misuse. The look back for declaration is 7 years, not 2, and generally you are auto denied if use was within the last 12 months, college or not.

>I didn’t say anything about pot. I said drug. That’s any illicit drug or controlled substance including prescription misuse.

Pot is still illegal at the federal level where a clearance would be taking place.

It can, but not necessarily.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com