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It begs the inclusion of "How much time do you spend online? And how much do you value the opinions of online communities?" as security clearance questions. Are
by ethbr0 5y ago
It begs the inclusion of "How much time do you spend online? And how much do you value the opinions of online communities?" as security clearance questions. Are they, now?
Historically, they'd be very interested in what you'd say to your friends, family, etc. But the allure of internet fame would seem to have a more pursuasive effect.
- eganist 5y ago> Are they, now? They're not included in Standard Form 86, latest revision November 2016: https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf That's not to say it's excluded from polygraph questions; I can imagine a world where online associations are very relevant to an agency in need of a CI or full scope poly for compartment access.
- Waterluvian 5y agoWait. Some people still get put through a complete nonsense pseudoscience polygraph test for clearance?
- evilduck 5y agoIt’s a standard practice for a tier of Top Secret security clearance.
- User23 5y agoIt’s like the FAANG interview process. Everyone knows it’s suboptimal, but nobody knows how to do better at that scale.
- atatatat 5y agoClose. It's similar because there are lots of false negatives, but few false positives.
- Spooky23 5y agoIt’s a polite way of saying that you’ll be randomly interrogated.
- alksjdalkj 5y agoMy understanding is that it's used as an "interrogation" technique and that they don't really care what the machine tells them.
- belkinpower 5y agoThey do, I had a clearance rejected because the examiner was convinced I had previous involvement in drug manufacturing. I don’t. I’ve never even used them. Hell, I barely drink. I ended up getting a much better non-clearance job offer elsewhere so it didn’t ultimately negatively affect my career, but it’s still irritating.
- smabie 5y agoIs this a rhetorical question?
- jdavis703 5y agoSF-86 doesn’t ask any questions like this. They’ll send out agents to collect more in-depth questions that may probe situations like this. They’ll also ask friends, neighbors, family etc about all sorts of things. This isn’t really the kind of question a self-reported form can answer (except for the most obvious questions like debt problems). It takes a human who can synthesize various statements to get pictures like “this person could be blackmailed” or “this person can’t keep a secret.”
- wdb 5y agoAnd of course your family gets checked too like for the anti-bribery check. E.g. how likely is it that your siblings can cause you to get bribed. Had a few of those as a sibling
- SkittyDog 5y agoIf you read some historical accounts of spies, I think you'll notice there is already a massive ego/excitement boost to be had, without involving Internet fame... It's not ay l clear whether online activity would move the needle, in terms of predicting leakers. But more importantly... Participating in online communities, and caring about one's online presence, is statistically normal behavior for working-age people in first world countries with Internet access... Moreso the younger you get. But the point is, it's massively normal behavior. So if you tried to use your questions to predict potential leakers, you're just playing the "Most serial killers eat bread" game. In order for your question to be a useful predictor, it would have to have low rates of both false positives, and false negatives. That doesn't seem very likely.
- ethbr0 5y ago> "And how much do you value the opinions of online communities?" Seems a more difficult question, but a more indicative one, which is why I included it. Per my experience, you can easily find individuals who spend similar amounts of clock time in online communities, but are very different in how much the community can influence them. F.ex. HN could offer me dang's karma count, and I wouldn't feel any compulsion to leak classified information here.