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Many family members have been pressuring me to steer my IT/InfoSec career towards obtaining a security clearance because it is a big salary and job security boo

Many family members have been pressuring me to steer my IT/InfoSec career towards obtaining a security clearance because it is a big salary and job security booster. While I know many US Gov employees have these and do not have to work day-to-day in/on controlled security stuff, they must have had to do it for one point during their career, and I fear that I could not last through such an ordeal. The concept of not being able to collaborate with coworkers due to arbitrary security rules sounds like a disaster.

leephillips 5y ago
If you are already a civil servant without a clearance, getting a clearance decreases job security. It effectively nullifies your civil service protections, and allows you to be fired at will on a security pretext, with absolutely zero recourse. I worked at a navy lab for 21 years and saw this happen to colleagues who displeased their bosses.
sneak 5y ago
Aside from the whole grossness of working for the military-industrial complex, there is another issue for those of us who care about rigor: the whole system of clearances in the US relies heavily on the inaccurate and pseudoscientific polygraph test, which does not test or prove any measurable thing. The interpretations of this pseudoscience can have devastating effects on your career, and not being based on facts or anything truly measurable, you have effectively zero recourse against such destruction, whether willful or otherwise, because it's elevated to the status of "evidence", simply because "the machine said it!" https://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml https://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml What's worse is that the failings of this pseudoscientific nonsense are well known to the USG, and yet this continues for decades to be central to the system of ostensible "trust" in those who keep government secrets. It's abusive. (Imagine if your government health insurance only covered crystal healers.)

leephillips 5y ago

If you are already a civil servant without a clearance, getting a clearance decreases job security. It effectively nullifies your civil service protections, and allows you to be fired at will on a security pretext, with absolutely zero recourse. I worked at a navy lab for 21 years and saw this happen to colleagues who displeased their bosses.

sneak 5y ago

Aside from the whole grossness of working for the military-industrial complex, there is another issue for those of us who care about rigor: the whole system of clearances in the US relies heavily on the inaccurate and pseudoscientific polygraph test, which does not test or prove any measurable thing. The interpretations of this pseudoscience can have devastating effects on your career, and not being based on facts or anything truly measurable, you have effectively zero recourse against such destruction, whether willful or otherwise, because it's elevated to the status of "evidence", simply because "the machine said it!" https://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml https://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml What's worse is that the failings of this pseudoscientific nonsense are well known to the USG, and yet this continues for decades to be central to the system of ostensible "trust" in those who keep government secrets. It's abusive. (Imagine if your government health insurance only covered crystal healers.)