> 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.''
That sentence perfectly sums up my experience with the security clearance process and demonstrates clearly how broken it is.
In all fairness this was a particularly special case. And from a long time ago, way past the time anyone would be worried if he really had been a spy for Imperial Japan.
This happened in the 50s probably so it was after the war. Also the fact that he was 12 at the time obviously meant it was just a ridiculous coincidence. If he really was suspected of being a spy, the security officer wouldn't have torn up form and would have actually made him never be able to get a clearance again.
What has happened is that the security officer simply knows how the system is set up. It cannot handle 'ridiculous' spy stories. It can handle 'no spy stories' or it can handle 'real spy stories' -- ridiculous coincidences don't fit it. So he basically had forced his guy to lie because his story fit better into 'no spy story' bin.
This is true of bureaucracies in general. They each have a number of pigeonholes they want to put people in, and the trick of dealing with them is to decide what pigeonholes they have, decide what you want to be regarded as, and taylor your answers accordingly.
> They each have a number of pigeonholes they want to put people in
I'm not sure it's entirely fair to consider it that way. Bureaucracy work on Binary options because that generally makes things a lot easier. It's a hack. It might not be perfect for every individual to answer questions - but it makes organisation a lot smoother.
The officer was happy with the answer to his question about spying; so he decided it was not relevant to include it.
To me that sounds like bureaucracy working a little bit :)
It is when it goes wrong that it goes really wrong...
(It's like the gender question; if I ever have to ask for gender, which is infrequent, now I will consistently ask "what reproductive organs do you have?"))
It may be better to pigeonhole people depending on which sex chromosomes they have (and how many of each), rather than what reproductive organs they have.
This helps cater for aneuploid people, as well as people who have underwent gender changes.
Les Earnest's anecdotes have been a real inspiration for me over the years. His Japanese Spy story is pretty good. But if you want a real laugh, read his Mongrel Race stories: http://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html
Also well worth reading is his "My analog to digital conversion" (http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/digital.pdf), which despite its title is actually a bildungsroman about some terrifying engineering errors in 1950s military technology.
NOT the best way to vouch for someone: "'Yes, we just celebrated Guy Fawkes Day together.'"
Note also the author is an example of "oh, that's easy" WRT to the programming required to fix the real problem. I can well believe it was worth their while trying to get him to change his official race instead of trying to modify a program when no one on their IT staff was familiar with it and he was the only exception (so far).
Note WRT to Linus Pauling, a) he was indeed an inspiring chemist (his books are still very useful) and is considered to be the best of the 20th century. b) He was also willing Communist/Soviet tool.
"The lesson was clear: if you want a clearance in a hurry, put something on your history form that will make the investigators suspicious but that is not damning. They get so many dull backgrounds to check that they relish the possibility of actually nailing someone. By being a bit provocative, you draw priority attention and quicker service."
There was another one of these stories saying that it looks suspicious if you've never been convicted of a crime or done anything illegal, so if that's the case just say you tried weed once.
Extremely bad idea. Cue cautionary tale; a friend of mine (here in the UK) wrote something similar on his form (that he'd been ticked off for smoking weed). They didn't refuse him but he has consistently had random drugs tests for the last 3 years (at a rate of about one every 2 months).
The fact of it is if you tick "yes" to any of those questions you're setting yourself up for a fall. The review officer is extremely happy if you ticked no - because he can just run the default checks and not have to interview you :)
Better to admit to it than get caught lying. Also any financial/credit problems in history will probably ruin your chances (more susceptible to blackmail I was told).
I was an ordinary programmer in the Air Force, however I obtained a top secret clearance. Basically ticked "no" to all the boxes, however one of my friends and probably a few of my past teachers were interviewed. Someone once told me his interviewer knew he had thrown a dead squirrel at a girl in kindergarten.
> Also any financial/credit problems in history will probably ruin your chances (more susceptible to blackmail I was told).
I don't get that. Why blackmail? I would assume that they feel people with financial issues are more susceptible to bribes to make their financial woes go away. Blackmail is just odd though. I wouldn't necessarily broadcast my financial woes to the world, but "Steal some Top Secret documents or we'll tell the world that you're in massive debt" wouldn't have any leverage with me (and I assume this is the same for most people).
The world knowing that you're in debt is probably too small of a carrot to have someone take the risk of leaking documents/information.
You just answered your own question. Someone that has had money problems is more susceptible to taking bribes, and once they've taken a bribe, they are now more susceptible to blackmail. As a question along the lines of "have you ever taken a bribe?" is unlikely to get answered honestly, debt problems are used as a proxy.
My understanding is that credit problems are the #1 reason for denying clearance. In fact, as long as you check all the 'No' boxes and aren't on anything top secret, credit issues are about the only thing that will sink you.
umm don't know if I'd call that "extremely bad." I was applying for TS in the US and I had a very different experience to admitting experimenting. They understood and it didn't influence me while cleared. YMMV.
Yeh probably, but it doesn't seem worth the risk. I know people who have not been cleared for similar "additions" (this is for mundane stuff btw, nothing exciting).
I would not lie on security clearance applications. Being honest and truthful is a big factor is the security clearance process. It's OK if you have incidences like this in the past, as long as there are mitigating factors such as passage of time and circumstances in which the incident occurred. The investigators just want to make sure you cannot be blackmailed in exchange for secret information.
For example, say John has a drug addiction, but he failed to disclose this on his application. He is eventually granted the clearance, but now he has to keep this secret for the rest of his life. Someone could easily blackmail him for secret government information. If he is caught lying, his clearance will be revoked and he will lose his job, and more than likely he will never be hired for a position that requires a clearance ever again (many US gov't jobs require a clearance).
Honesty is a sign of your loyalty to the U.S. Depending on the type of clearance, you are sometimes required to take multiple polygraph tests, and you will more than likely be caught lying.
So at the airport to the 'have you left your bags unattended, has anyone given you anything to carry on'
Do you answer, yes - the bags have been unattended in the cupboard for most of the year, and on the incoming flight and my company gave me this laptop to carry on?
Incidentally if you fly El-Al they do ask you if you were given a new laptop for this trip and even if it has been out for repair since you knew you were taking this trip.
The job is more stable and there is less pressure to perform. You'll never be outsourced, and you'll never be passed over for promotion in favor of Raju or Yun. If the project doesn't move quickly enough, your dept will just get more money.
The government is a great place for mediocre people to work.
you summed up exceptionally well some of the reasons why I'm leaving. Having said that, gov't can allow you to work on some extremely interesting problems and data sets that you just won't find anywer else.
Still astounds me how you can have such an eclectic mix of brilliant and less than mediocre people working on the same projects. I guess that's everywhere though.
I think in the private sector the you find the 80/20 rule (20% of the people do 80% of the work) while in my experience, in government it's more like 95/5 (5% of the people do 95% of the actual work). It can be excruciatingly frustrating, but you are right, the types of problems and the datasets are not ones you'll find in your average fortune-500 corporate entity.
Having a security clearance can be job security for the private sector, too (well, government contractors). I interned at a company that decided they needed to do a large round of layoffs. To my knowledge, nobody with a security clearance lost their job, even though it was a 'classified' project that was lost.
The top end of "Senior Developer" at Lockheed is around $100k. The top end for the same job at BofA (with an impressive-sounding but meaningless title) is $200k. And you don't have to lie about being investigated by the FBI. And if you get bored, you can just jump ship to their competitors across the street.
Dunno, but I'm not convinced that anyone should worry about security clearance unless they are completely unable to write even the simplest computer program.
Some people choose their jobs based what they find interesting, not on how much the job pays. So, depending on your background, the cutting edge research at Lockheed may be far more interesting to you than the cutting edge research at BofA.
I'm doubtful that anyone with a VP-Level title at BofA is writing software. I have a feeling you're comparing entirely different jobs here.
Additionally, Lockheed built (among other things) the SR-71 and the F22. Its probably a safe bet to say that writing the control systems for those machines took more skill than "the simplest computer program."
Financial services firms are FULL of Vice Presidents. At Merrill Lynch, we had a 23-year old, 2 years out of school who was an Assistant VP and many mid/late-20s engineers as VPs. [Almost] All of us wrote code all day long.
You're conflating two very different things. Lots of people have security clearances and still work for private-sector companies (contractors). They just work on government contracts, sometimes in addition to traditional commercial work.
Other people work for the government directly, and most of these people (that I've known) also have security clearances, although there are some government jobs that probably don't require one. Why people work directly for the government I have no idea -- good pension plan, I guess? Doesn't appeal to me in the slightest.
But government contracting can be good work and good money IMO. There's more paperwork and overhead than straight commercial work, but you sometimes get to solve weird/unique problems too.
In some areas (DC) there is a big pay difference depending on what level of security clearance you have. Someone with TS/SCI can expect to make very good money, on top of whatever their experience and education would dictate, as a result of holding the clearance. This is because there are some projects which require people with those clearances, and for the highest clearances it's a relatively small pool of people (they're expensive).
However I'll agree with you on the market being inefficient. The labor market very rarely is, however. The natural tendency of people to not want to move around all the time ensures a certain amount of inefficiency, before you even involve the government.
Early-career research positions for cleared PhDs at gov't labs pay much, much more than the equivalent positions at universities (post-doc, lecturer, etc.) and still allow you to publish.
One very simple reason that one of my friends has been enjoying for some time: it allows you to continue your programming career past age 35-40. This part of the market, where they care if you already have a clearance and can do the job, but not your age, is much more efficient than the civilian US market.
And I'd be surprised if the pay is much better in the private sector for equivalent IT jobs; I've never heard any programmer with a clearance being upset with pay or not being able to live the lifestyle he liked (well, as long as it was average American suburban).
"Fucking up" is pretty easy to avoid; you can talk about the technology you're using (e.g. Suns/UNIX, .NET, Java (the CIA was a 100% Java shop in the middle of the last decade), just not about the domain. Which is often true in the civilian market, it's just that the penalties are higher.
You might be surprised what a clearance is worth over private sector pay.
That being said, private sector work is usually for more fulfilling and less frustrating.
Working a private sector job, with a clearance (and the pay bump that brings) making software for the government, now that's not a bad way to burn through a work week.
The question of what to reveal on official documents comes up fairly often. On the on hand, telling the truth can cause unnecessary trouble, on the other hand, lying is technically illegal. I'm amazed at how often people are strongly incentivized to choose the latter.
I have lied on the security it forms, but with approval of the agent. As I recall the question read something like:
Have you ever used or abused <<giant list of drugs, chemicals, and substances that goes on for a good 2 inch tall paragraph in small type>>, or glue?
Right there at the end… glue. I had to confess that I not only used glue on a regular basis, but I had just showed my preschool daughter how to use glue and we had a grand time using glue together.
In a decision to pain logicians everywhere the agent deemed that my "use of glue" was not "use of glue".
It sounds like the security officer was just some low-level grunt who didn't want to go to the trouble of filing extra paperwork. Rather than someone with the power to "make sure that you never get a security clearance".
There is actually some controversy over using the term "concentration camp" to refer to the internment. From wikipedia:
"Concentration camp" is the most controversial descriptor of the camps. This term is criticized for suggesting that the Japanese American experience was analogous to the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camps.[90] For this reason, National Park Service officials have attempted to avoid the term.[88] Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes each referred to the American camps as "concentration camps," at the time.[91] When the nature of the Nazi concentration camps became clear to the world, and the phrase "concentration camp" came to signify a Nazi death camp, most historians turned to other terms to describe Japanese internment.
Of course there is "some controversy" about anything that might make our politicians look bad. Sure, the severity was not the same, but it looks like they tried to skip the implications altogether. Internment is not nice, especially when the reason for it is simply hysteria.
Well, going back to the British use of them in the Boer War, I define them as "camps where significant numbers of people die of disease (or worse)." As far as I know, these camps didn't fit that definition, and they most certainly fit the time of war internment word of art.
Note that seizing the property that they were forced to abandon has been said to be another motivation.
It's funny how they have trouble with the word "concentration" when the word I would have trouble with is "camp". Makes it sound like a weekend getaway or fun for the kids.
Concentration "prison" is more accurate. Try leaving and see what happens.
Not the same. No one is trying to take a flower and call it a rose. They're trying to take a rose and say it's not a rose because it doesn't have as many thorns as some other variety of rose.
We did go there after 9-11, we just outsourced the actual camps to other countries.
What do you think the Maher Arar case was about? And that was just the tip of the iceberg. As a nation we have decided that lawlessness and torture are alright if they are inflicted on suspected terrorists. The continued public silence on this issue does not speak well of the moral qualities of the average american.
>>>We almost went there again with arabic Americans after 9/11 via census data.
>>Can you source this, please? I don't recall this being suggested by anyone serious.
>Gitmo, extraordinary renditions, enemy combatants...don't ring any bell?
Yes, and none of that implies general roundups, which is what original person asserted.
So, either you're trying to bully the guy who asked because you realize that there were no such suggestions and you don't want to admit it or you didn't understand the question.
And yet, people who don't trust the census and refuse to answer unnecessary questions are considered nutters, even with relatively recent historical evidence that the government can't be trusted.
Well, yes, they're considered nutters because it takes a special sort of person to specifically refuse to answer a question. On one hand you have to distrust the government with the answer to the question they're asking, but on the other you have to trust them not to remember the fact that you refused and hold that against you. It's a weird position to hold, and to a lot of people appears inconsistent.
If you don't trust the government with the census, it would seem more logical to just lie on the very first paper form that they send you. Chances are (very, very good chances) that they'll never send a human being out to check and thus will never know that you lied about whatever question you're uncomfortable answering.
It's one thing to noisily refuse to answer some question in order to raise awareness of some issue you have with the census, but if you think there's a conspiracy or that the government might use the information to round you up in the future, it doesn't make sense to attract any notice. Better to lie low, if you think that's a risk.
"... At first, it seemed like a big adventure; a long train ride out of the city into the natural beauty of Slocan. Scientist David Suzuki, who was six at the time of the internment, recalls in this clip the duality of the internment experience. He says it was an "enchanted" time when he would spend his days gathering wildflowers, fishing and camping. But, he describes the communal living arrangements as filthy and crowded, his bed crawling with bed bugs. ..." ~ http://archives.cbc.ca/war_conflict/second_world_war/topics/...
Internment deeply effected Dave ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Suzuki to the point he checked his newborn child to see if the eyes had eyelids. Did they look Japanese?
I'm always a little surprised when Japanese people get so excited about America. We nuked them twice, and before that we rounded up anyone that looked Japanese and put them in prison camps.
When the US kidnaps and murders thousands, it's no big deal. When North Korea kidnapped 12 Japanese, it comes up in the news once a week for decades. I don't understand it.
I guess when North Korea starts buying their bonds...
They weren't "prison camps". They had schools on site, sports facilities, etc. Wikipedia notes "Nearly a quarter of the internees left the camps to live and work elsewhere in the United States, outside the exclusion zone." (the zone was the West coast.)
Wikipedia says 20,000 served in the military, mostly in the European Theater for obvious reasons, and I hope you all know of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd_Infantry_Regiment_%28Unit...) which earned a serious reputation and was the subject of a very favorable movie in 1951 (i.e. before the US was particularly enlightened). 7 Presidential Unit Citations (fine in one month, probably for the Vosges mountains rescue operation, that whole campaign was very tough and fought in terrain that has favored defenders for millennia (http://www.amazon.com/When-Odds-Were-Even-1944-January/dp/03...), 21 Medals of Honor, 41 net DCS, 560 Silver Stars all the way down to 9,486 Purple Hearts for a unit of 3,000 men....
Anyway, the point of all of the above is that this was complicated. The simplistic trope of "we threw them in concentration camps like Nazis" just doesn't hold up to even casual examination.
To be fair, he delivered citations, and you're painting the worst picture that is at all rational. I'd love to see citations defending your point of view as well.
Once something is deemed bad, the most extremely anti-that things are accepted as truth, for no other reason than the complete opposite of wrong MUST be right. Most of the time, it's wrong again, because, as grand parent poster said, things are complicated.
They were prison camps due simply to the fact that you were not permitted to leave (without permission). It might have been a gilded cage, but it was still a cage.
Internment is a special case of imprisonment - all internment is imprisonment, but only some imprisonment is internment (when it's done to large groups without a trial).
I know a group of 80+ year old Japanese-American men. During WWII, one was in an internment camp, two served in the US military, and one was visiting family in Japan and was drafted into the Japanese military.
"It's complicated" is about the best explanation I've ever heard.
Well we had some provocation for those bad things that we did. And then when the war ended, we put a lot of energy out to rebuild Japan and make life there massively better than it had ever been before.
On the West coast it's pretty common to know a Japanese American family who had a family member, still living, in an internment camp. It's usually not the first thing that gets talked about. It's very real history.
We touched on it in middle school as well, in that we all read Farewell to Manzanar, but it never came up again during my schooling. Its a sad part of our history that deserves more attention.
Have you seen or heard how (some/most?) illegal aliens are detained, today? The main difference between that and concentration camps is the illegals have good chance of relatively short stay.
I heard some people talk about the 9/11 thing, but I have not been able to find a good article that describes the hole thing, so I only know bits and pieces.
It's amazing how much American law enforcement has changed in the last 70 years. It's the most interesting part of this article IMO. When something like this happens today they serve a no-knock warrant and shoot the kid's dog (well, after shooting the neighbor's dog because they got the wrong house). Zero-tolerance and all.
"These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects. "
That sentence perfectly sums up my experience with the security clearance process and demonstrates clearly how broken it is.