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Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

Yes polygraphs are bollocks, but, rules are rules.

The issue is, if exceptions are made, what's stopping other breaking the rules?

I don't care if he's a dem, rep or maga, rules are rules.

The rule has always been that this can be waived at the discretion of specific senior officials. It isn't done for average Federal employees, and not always for political positions, but it is a thing that exists.

Rules are only words on paper unless they are enforced, especially to constrain the actions of the powerful.

Once they are consistently broken, the rules only matter for the powerless.

There have always been stupid rules, and legitimate reasons to break them. But “I am an unqualified appointee and this unqualified person is my friend” is not a legitimate reason.

So many things we thought were rules or laws or regulations were never actually anything but customs, traditions, and gentlemens' agreements.

Which works great as long as the people in command are sane and ethical. When you have an FBI director who spells his name with a dollar sign, well...

> Yes polygraphs are bollocks, but, rules are rules.

> The issue is, if exceptions are made, ...

Except that "exceptions are made" can also be a stage of phasing out useless or counter-productive rules - as social acceptance grows that Astrology, Polygraphs, and Tarot have no place in security screening.

Procedure has to evolve, but the point I was trying to get across is that making arbitrary changes to let powerful people do what ever they want is bad.

If the rules are bad, then work with the whole team to change them. Don't just ad-hoc fiddle, that makes procedural debt.

Yes - in a high-functioning, professional outfit that'd be quite true. Vs. this item is about a huge US Gov't security organization. Try searching on a few phrases like "FBI incompetence scandal". Or similar for "CIA", or "NSA", or ...

The best that we can realistically hope for is that they'll muddle toward being better, as older managers retire and the org's social consensus drifts away from "Competence Theater is good enough", "CYA is SOP", and "Phrenology works".

</sad cynicism>

When I was in college they did an audit to see if I could graduate and it was flagged that I had been allowed to skip the Introduction to Computer Science class because I got a 5 on the AP Comp Sci test. The problem was that I took the test while it was administered in C++ and it had later switched to Java.

The school decided they were not going to recognize the test results and instead would only credit me with an elective class for it, I would still have ot pass the introductory class. This is in spite of pass all the later comptuer science classwork.

I escalated it to the dean, who told me that while he recognized this made no sense, "rules are rules and if we didn't follow them they wouldn't be rules".

If you'd passed their Intro CS class when it was C++, and they'd later switch to Java, would you have had to re-take the Intro class? I'd bet "no". Even though there'd be no difference - except that they'd collected your tuition $$$ for the class, and the bad optics.

My general experience with colleges is that "rules" are mostly for the little people. And pretty much all of them become negotiable the moment that serious money, prestige, or scandal avoidance are on the table.

(BTW - University of Michigan? I know several people who got similar crap from their CS Dept.)

But the "rule" in this case is that political appointees can have the polygraph waived at some senior leader's discretion, up to the president.

I would have lawyered up. But the experience seems to have turned you into a mindless rule follower.

Quite the contrary, it solidified for me how silly the 'rules are rules' thinking is.

Not the same

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