What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)
milk.com
milk.com
> He then got out a blank form and handed it to me, saying ``Here, fill it out again and don't mention that. If you do, I'll make sure that you never get a security clearance.''
It's important to "see like the government" when dealing with the government (pun on "seeing like a bank" by https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ if anyone didn't catch the reference).
Everything fits into bins and categories with checkmarks and such. As an entity it has no "bin" for "investigated as Japanese spy as a joke when was a child". So you have to pick the closest bin that matches. However, that doesn't mean the same government later won't turn around also punish you for not picking the right "bin". Not "realizing" that it's its own fault for not having enough categories i.e. bins for you to pick. And, some may argue, that's a feature not a bug...
So you've come almost full circle!
maybe the government has no bin for "investegated by the FBI for a silly and innocuous reason". but maybe they do, and lying about it slots you into the bin for "lied on their security clearance form".
I have some silly not nearly as interesting infractions and I wrote them out in detail explaining, without any issue in processing background checks. It usually is something that’s asked about in an in person interview at that point.
People of a more autistic orientation here seem to think this is a no-no when in fact it's quite the opposite
The note was investigated. Not the person.
At my bank, I can just send a message in the app, even when it's closed, about whatever I want. Then, when the bank opens, someone reads it, and then either handles it, or transfers it. Then, if its transferreed, that person either handles it or forwards again.
The same triaging of basic issues exists, the same tiers described in the article, but the user interfece is wildly superior. I take 1 minute to write what I need to write, and then a few business hours later, its solved. I don't need to waste my time on hold. I don't need to be instantly available for an undetermined period for a call back. I don't need to explain the same issue repeatedly. If I'm asked a question, I can answer it, and the answer is then attached to the full log that every escalation or transfer has full access to.
This is so much better that I refuse to do business with most businesses that don't offer something like this. I was extremely pissed when a data broker leaked my SSN and I was forced to deal with such institutions to clean up that mess.
The military is unfortunately chock full of functional alcoholics. As long as they don't get caught drunk on the job, seen partying too much, DIU, or admit anything to their doctor, they keep getting renewed their clearance.
Interestingly enough, if there's even the smallest suspicious that you smoke weed, they'll put you through the wringer. I've seen more people lose their clearance for pissing hot, than those with six figure debts or drinking 5 days a week.
When? In the 90s? Biggest pothead I know has had a clearance since '05. For my own form, I straight up admitted I had done it and did not regret it.
If your family and wife know you sometimes sleep with men, that's not necessarily a problem. If nobody knows, that's a problem. Similarly if your wife and boss don't know you owe $50,000 to a bookie or your coke dealer, that's a liability.
Actually would be sort of interesting if your boss did know you owed a bookie $50k and they found a way to use that to make you into a triple agent...
You are missing the foremost consideration - how critical/specialised/irreplacable is this person in their role and can we just ignore the positive test instead.
If you are good enough at what you do and management like you positive tests dont seem to matter if you make the right noises about it being a one off, retesting clean etc.
Welcome to counterintelligence you'll like it here
It’s just “things aren’t right”, and not “here’s what we need to do…”
Well yeah. If it's not affecting your job then what's it matter? If your a closet alcoholic then sure that's something the Russians could hold over you.
There's millions of people with clearances; that's impossible to staff at below market wages and also above average moral(?) standards.
Alcohol lowers inhibitions and alters decision making. Drinking a lot of alcohol more so than casual drinking. Frequently drinking a lot of alcohol has a very high area under the curve of poor decision making.
Functional alcoholism can come with delusions of sobriety where the person believes they’re not too drunk despite being heavily impaired.
So they’ll do things like have a few (or ten) drinks before checking their email. It makes them a better target for everything like fishing attacks, as one example.
It’s not just about enemies holding it against you.
Phishing is not the problem here. Your laptop isn’t getting SIPR emails with links to fake login screens.
Still not as bad as being susceptible to blackmail or bribes
I have to defer to you here since it sounds like my experience is more limited, but this is not my understanding at all. The agencies care a lot about financial indiscretions, as those applicants are most susceptible to compromise. And indeed, if you look at the lists of denials and appeals, you might think that money issues are the only reason anyone is ever denied.
Lying about having smoked weed is another story.
And yeah, I said something like "I smoked a couple times in college but not anymore". This was about two years after college. I wonder if quantifying your joints raised a flag lol.
It also seems like a fairly smart way to do graft. If you're bribing someone and they drink up or smoke all the evidence then they can't prove how much or how often you bribed them. Which would make alcoholics a good target especially if you can get your hands on fancy liquor.
Check your news sources…
If you auto-reject the people who admit to something sub-criminal like cheating on their spouse, that means no applicant will ever admit to it, so you'll end up with more people hid it. In the long run, that means a higher proportion of employees who have something an adversary can use for blackmail, and the blackmail is more-effective because the repercussions are large.
Thank you for the digging that up and sharing.
When converting from a traditional process to an electronic one, half my job is twisting people's arms and playing mind reader trying to determine what they ACTUALLY do day-to-day instead of the hypothetical offical, documented, process.
Some of the workarounds that people do instead of updating the process are damn right unhinged.
edit: Otoh, my boss is kinda giving up on automating another group's process, because he seems to be getting a lot of 'it depends' answers.
So what ultimately winds up happening is, you'll roll out the process according to the official way, and then it is drip-drip-drip of changes as you find out the real-world version.
We need waste as much as we need investment. The trick is to find the value in between. I think the sweet spot will be augmenting work, not necessarily optimizing it.
The two things that matter, housing and food, are way way up.
Housing is weird because it just sucks up whatever leftover money people have. We all have to eventually spend all our income on something so it's impossible for everything to get cheaper in the long term. That doesn't mean we won't be able to afford stuff, just that we'll spend all our money just like we always have done.
Food would be encheapened by labour-free production just like products.
If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.
I have some experience doing automation work in small and large scale factories. When automating manufacturing work you almost always discover some flaws in the product or process that humans have been covering up as part of their job. These problems surface during the automation phase and get prioritized for fixes.
You might think you could accomplish the same thing by directly asking the people doing the work what could be improved, but in my experience they either don’t notice it any more because it’s part of their job or, in extreme cases, they like that the inefficiency exists because they think it provides extra job security.
And the system is always broken. Reality is messy, systems are rigid, there always has to be a permissive layer somewhere in the interface.
I generally don't complain/review, and just learn the workarounds/shortcuts, but I very much welcome the increased (albeit perhaps less skilled) workforce leverage, because I think in a year or so we'll see steady improvements accumulating.
Sometimes when you reveal extensive noncompliance with dumb requirements, the requirements get less dumb. Other times, the organisation doubles down and starts punishing the noncompliance.
My employer's official security policies say everyone should kensington lock their laptop to their desk at all times, even though the office is behind two guards and three security doors. Nobody does. But if someone made a load of noise about it, there's no guarantee they'd remove the widely ignored rule; they might instead start enforcing it.
[0]: "Computer Says No" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU
There is nothing morally wrong in felonies like this, just don't get caught.
Highly debatable. If you believe in a categorical imperative that to intentionally deceive another person is wrong, then lying by omission is still an immoral act. A Christian might also interpret the words of Jesus “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” as an imperative to comply fully with the law of the land.
I don't think it's all that debatable to say that deceiving people is categorically wrong, nor is it to say that it's immoral not to follow the laws of the land -- both are obviously untrue as absolute statements.
For extreme examples, would it be immoral to lie to the Gestapo about harboring Jews? Were people illegally helping slaves escape the American South being immoral?
> For extreme examples, would it be immoral to lie to the Gestapo about harboring Jews? Were people illegally helping slaves escape the American South being immoral?
If you believe in that categorical imperative, then yes. I’m not saying I believe in it or that Kantian philosophy is the only correct one. There are endless belief systems and philosophical schools of thought that can be used to answer that question, and they will have different answers for different reasons.
This is something that first/second year philosophy students do debate.
They are not debating it.
If Jesus (assuming he existed, even, regardless of any sort of divinity) tells us that following the law is always the moral thing to do, then he was wrong.
The coverup is always worse than the original sin.
But maybe if the thing you're revealing is "I myself was suspected to be a spy," that changes the calculus a bit.
You can guarantee the many people who work for intelligence agencies of US allies aren't admitting to that when they travel to the US.
It's all a bit of a game.
Quite.
Maybe to deport you for espionage requires a jury trial, but to revoke status for misleading answers on an immigration form is administrative and so is deportation for lack of status.
I seem to recall some extraordinary cases where untruthful answers on immigration forms were used to justify denaturalization.
People born in the 90s wouldn’t have a chance to be old enough to belong to any group other than a preschool before the collapse of the Soviet and Soviet aligned regimes.
For those who were adults before 1990, while they may have been party members for reasons unrelated to political ideology, it wasn’t as common: in the late 80s, only ~10% of adults in Warsaw pact countries were communist party members. Far from “everyone”.
And even if you check that in the DS-160 visa application form, you are allowed to add an explanation. Consular visa officers are very well familiar with the political situation at the countries they are stationed in, and can grant visa even if the box is checked.
He made a cypher with a school friend, which cypher was handed by a stranger to the FBI and investigated. That one possible outcome of the investigation might be 'the subject is a Japanese spy' doesn't mean _he_ was suspected of that; not by the FBI at least.
If he said, "I made a cypher in school", then likely the form would have been considered fine? Presumably his record clearly showed the FBI incident, so I'm surprised that lying in the second form didn't cause concern sufficient to question him. But there you go; I've never had any associations with TLAs, what would I know.
In Navy boot camp the person reviewing my security clearance application (which was filled out weeks before) was very helpful in the way he asked the critical question. “It says here you tried marijuana once. Is that true?”
It's likely that answering yes to that question meant an instant rejection for the clearance AND summer job. The FBI was probably not inclined to spend money looking into such an obviously trivial matter just so some kid could get some work experience. "Sorry, try the McDonald's down the street."
That security officer did the author an incredibly big favor.
He had no obligation to put that on security clearance form whatsoever.
These days I don’t think that happens with digital records. Omitting that incident would almost certainly cause more issues than not now as I’m sure they’d turn up in the investigation. If not included on your sf86 you’d likely be grilled about it.
Investigators are usually reasonable in my experience. If you omitted it because you earnestly forgot because it happened when you were 12, they’d likely understand if you were forthcoming about it during your interview. Investigators are human though so it depends on how they feel.
What they really care about is stuff to try to purposely hide.
The right answer was: the FBI was investigating the note.
About a year later I learned that one of my users hacked an airport. At the time a few of my users would set their computers to dial random numbers and find modems answering. One of the numbers was a very strange system with no password. The story I heard was that they didn't know what the system was, because it had no identifying information. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/doj-charges-...
> The attack on the branch of an unidentified major pharmacy chain occurred on four separate occasions from January through March of last year. The hacker acquired the names, contact information, and prescriptions for the pharmacy's customers
I think the story you heard was a watered down version of what they were doing. You can’t do things like exfiltrate data from a pharmacy database and not know what the system you’re attacking is for.
They didn't tell me about the pharmacy! Remember, these were teenagers who were curious (and naive to the implications of their actions.)
In the case of the airport, they didn't know it was an airport or even what kind of system they were in. What happened was that one of them found a reboot command, and ran it, not knowing the consequences. (Remember, when a computer controls a "thing," there is often a complicated startup procedure when it reboots.)
So don't just blame foolish kids; whoever thought it was a good idea to allow modem access to an air traffic control program without a password was the bigger fool. I had stronger security on my dial-up BBS than an airport.
From an OG computer scientist [0], about antics at age 12 which might strike some of us as familiar :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20231021140222/https://web.stanf...
Also the server header is "lactoserv"
The real flex would be for AI.com to have nothing to do with AI whatsoever.
Really fascinating and quirky guy as you can probably infer from the site.
You've got to actually use a trademark-adjacent domain in good faith though, otherwise you might get the rug pulled from under you.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69634055/75-million-dolla...
Apple Intelligence?
Talk about missing the low hanging fruit!
;)
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5526903/domain-name-val...
It's also a very good filter for high openness and creativity, ensuring that the most sensitive works attracts the most brilliant creative geniuses. Truly these nations know how to develop their advantages in the best way.
I was doing my mandatory update coincidental with the roll-out and when I got to the question, "mother a US citizen" I had to check the "no" box and the immediate pop-up was "date of first contact?" which actually got me thinking along existential lines for a moment.
The core social problem with drug addiction and alcoholicism is this concept of telling people what you think they want to hear from you, not telling them the truth.
One reason for all these questions is really to determine if someone can be blackmailed, and thus a security risk. (Big reason they look at your financials and why debt can cause you to lose clearance) But the letter of the law trumps the spirit. A common lie these days is about weed usage. You may get or entirely rejected for having smoked in the past even if you don't today (e.g. you tried it once in college but didn't like it). So everyone lies and it creates a system where people are even told to and encouraged to lie, like in TFA. The irony being that this is exactly what creates the situation for blackmail! Now you can get blackmailed for having that past thing cause you to lose your job as well as lying on your clearance form.
Honestly it seems smarter to let the skeletons out of the closet. Spill your secrets to the gov. Sure, maybe the gov can blackmail you but a foreign government can't blackmail you for something that the gov already knows. You can still have filters but the dynamic really needs to change. Bureaucracy creates its own downfall. To reference another comment, I'd rather a functional alcoholic have a clearance and the gov know about it than a functional alcoholic have a security clearance and the gov not know about it (or pretend to not know). We've somehow turned clearance checks into security risks. What an idiotic thing to do
Some security officers are really touchy on these kinds of things and will tell you to exclude or lie but investigators pretty much never care what you did as long as it is obvious you don't plan on doing those types of things again or being an active problem.
They just want it for their records and they want you to be an open book such that they don't feel you are concealing anything problematic.
> Some security officers are really touchy on these kinds of things and will tell you to exclude or lie
In fact, I remember Comey saying something about it too. But the rule as I know it is not having smoked in the last 3 years. While that is probably fine for most people, it does seem to have a bias when you're considering people fresh out of college. Considering that college is frequently where people try weed, along with a lot of other things (not even drugs, just new activities, dress styles, and so on) as they find themselves.
What exactly happened to your friend? It is not in the domain of possibility that they were explicitly informed “you are being rejected for X reason”, so everything they do say is pure speculation. Probably, they lied about something and got caught.
I'm really surprised at how they would rather ignore or silence all and report that they is strictly no problem among their pool of employees, to say they have the best employees and good KPIs
It doesn't look like a winning strategy indeed.
I myself refused to do government jobs as the table in which you had to list foreigners in your friend list was just so small. They prefer you to say you don't know nobody.
Also yeah, I agree with you. These forms are straight out of the 1950s when more liberal habits have been coming since the 60s. And we're straight up declining anyone who is outspoken about his habits while he knows the true boundaries of the laws.
The government is just selecting applicants who do the sharia or some straight up vague "you have to be a good guy" menaces that completely opens them to blackmail
> imagine curing alcoholics and drug dependant ppl who work for you ?
It seems like a poor strategy for high security topics, like you say. If anything, I want these people to have zero fear of opening up about their addictions. Be it gained unintentionally or through bad decisions. Reason being that 1) it reduces the risk of blackmail and 2) giving them a pathway to help also reduces their chance of blackmail. We don't even need to mention the fact that these are people and should be treated with kindness, we have entirely selfish reasons to be selfless.
> I myself refused to do government jobs as the table in which you had to list foreigners in your friend list was just so small.
Personally I've avoided getting a clearance because I just don't see the value. It is a lot of work to put together, forces you to be more quiet about what you work on, means you need to be more careful/vigilant in every day things and especially when traveling, and all for what? Low pay and not even that cool of work? I mean if it was working on alien technologies and cool sci-fi shit, sign me up! But the reality is that most of the work isn't very exciting. I'd rather have more freedom, more pay, and work on more interesting things. Maybe their work can have more purpose and more impact, but I am also not convinced that's true for the majority of things you need clearance for (even as a person in STEM).
The bigger problem is when people fib about their usage. Saying you only used it in college when you’ve used it more recently is something people do fairly often, and seemingly are encouraged to fib about.
(And arrested, but presumably you were not).
They sent me a questionnaire asking to fill personal details in a Word file while their email signature said not to disclose personal details over email.
Security clearance business is rotten to the core.
I kind of get that the agent is looking out for the applicant in this story. You have no idea what’s going to happen when you do a security clearance thing and they ask about this and that. How serious is the wrong answer.
Excepting my favorite question which something like “have you ever tried to topple the government?”
The system is messed up when screening for honesty encourages people to lie.
What not to write on your security clearance form (1988) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34437937 - Jan 2023 (545 comments)
What Not To Write On Your Security Clearance Form - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444653 - June 2010 (98 comments)
Wheel of Fortune gives you several consonants, order matters less, and both lists share n r and t.
So I was given the form to fill in and read the question: Since you were 16, or in the last 7 seven years, have you ever smoked weed?
So I thought, I guess I better think back to when I was 8!
Presumably this is the famous (?) story of him listing his race as “mongrel” whenever asked?
It occurred to them. They like to test their apparatus out anyways.
> (To me, $8 represented 40 round trips to the beach by streetcar, or 80 admission fees to the movies.)
Glasses being a ripoff scam goes back that far?!
I have to know this now...
"When I was 12 years old, I exchanged encrypted messages with friends. The FBI found a code and briefly thought I was a spy."
Or, if there was even less space:
“As child, used encryption for fun. FBI found code & investigated.”
I would want to avoid lying at all costs, even if a superior instructed me to. Who knows what could happen.
What was the immediate government spending on Japanese American internment, where there was no evidence or investigation into the ~120k people whose lives were disrupted, and who were transported, housed, fed and guarded for multiple years?
Arguably, spending thousands on investigating something specific is less wasteful than the alternatives the government was willing to take at that time.
Maybe the individual investigator in the story is excepted considering it seems he took it seriously, perhaps, but yes, a lot of money is intentionally thrown into these organizations for security theater, jobs programs, and padding the pockets of political friends and cronies.
What we should be worried about is how many legitimate threats fly under the radar because time and again these organizations have been proven to be highly ineffective at actually preventing what their charters mandate, but they can appear to be very visibly effective by incarcerating thousands of innocent people.
I think that’s what makes this story so funny- the FBI was acting appropriately and rationally, but ended up with a relatively absurd result.
You can’t have it both ways… (not specifically directed at you.)
These are the same kind of incompetents who want the pay but not the responsibility of the position. Who think that building a giant haystack of all of the data is the solution so they can illogically claim to have prevented something that because you had that needle in there somewhere! Except you never found it in time because you were too busy building the tower of Babel out of hay! It is just utterly idiotic double-think. (Cough, cough NSA!)
If it's true that security is only as strong as the weakest link, and they grant people like Jared Kushner top security clearance, then it's all theater at this point.
;-)
it's like insurance claim - precise wording matters more than facts
Anyone else did that during the war or only horrible Hitler and humane Americans?
Come think of it, I wonder what would happen to all the immigrants if full-on war ensues.
During the Second World War, the British government interned several different groups of people, including German, Austrian and Italian nationals.
However, following Nazi Germany’s military successes in France, Belgium and the Netherlands in the spring and summer of 1940, there was increasing concern that ‘enemy aliens’ in Britain would form a ‘ fifth column ’.
These concerns were amplified by the British press. As a result of this growing fear, the British government interned approximately 27,000 ‘enemy aliens’, including those assessed as low risk, supposedly in the interests of national security. Those interned were predominantly men between the ages of 16 and 60, but 4000 women and children were also interned.
In Australia: https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection/immigration-and-ci...
In India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years_in_Tibet
Technically Heinrich Harrer was not a civilian as he held the "honorary" rank of a Nazi sergeant in the SS, kind of an early PR stunt rank given due to his status as a world famous mountaineer .. still it points to the internment of Germans and Austrians in India and references an interesting book