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Former national lab engineer here. For access to any of the classified buildings, you must have a Q clearance or be escorted by someone with a Q clearance. Thi
by bhopro 5y ago
Former national lab engineer here. For access to any of the classified buildings, you must have a Q clearance or be escorted by someone with a Q clearance. This means all of facility staff are required to be cleared as well (janitorial, maintenance, etc). Just because one has a Q clearance does not mean you are provided any classified information.
- N1H1L 5y agoNational lab scientist here. All the janitors in my building have Q clearance. Half of my team does, and people really use it once every 2 years.
- pdpi 5y agoSomewhat related, a physicist friend of mine had diplomatic immunity while working at CERN, for no other reason than the fact that the LHC sits on the border between France and Switzerland, and most of the usual diplomatic privileges become pretty important when you’re potentially crossing the border several times a day, potentially importing and exporting expensive equipment.
- Symbiote 5y agoDiplomatic status for staff of international, intergovernmental organisations is common. Similar status applies to the ESA, ITER, and many others.
- chihuahua 5y agoThat could explain "Q Anon" - maybe his day job is polishing linoleum floors.
- Hamuko 5y agoOr more plausibly, his day job is trolling imageboards.
- mike_d 5y agoWe will never know for sure, but well researched and supported theories about who is behind the Q persona indicate that none of the people involved have ever seen the inside of a secure facility.
- ocschwar 5y agoThe mere fact that they hint at a Q clearance shows they have no idea how little weight that actually carries.
- xxpor 5y agoI thought I had read that "Q" explicitly said that's where the name comes from
- bb88 5y agoRemember that the best lies also have a kernel of truth in them. You don't need to have a Q clearance to say you have one on 4chan, 8chan, 8kun (etc). How would anyone validate your Q clearance? Instead you just post something plausible, but just out of the reach of validation.
- Perceval 5y agoYou could tell that Q Anon was fake from the very first post, because they said Q was the "highest clearance," a statement that is doubly incorrect. Q is an access, not a clearance. Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret are the only clearances—people with Q must have a Top Secret clearance. And, Q doesn't provide you access to higher level information about global politics than Top Secret, it provides you access to information about nuclear weapon design. None of the things Q Anon purported to have insight into were at all related to the actual information controlled by the Q access.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago> Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret are the only clearances Not necessarily. Maybe in DoD land, but there's also a different system (uses similar terminology) for the State Department, and Department of Education (and some others) also has a thing called "Public Trust Clearance" and they involve different background checks (which aren't transferable). But the DoD clearance is the one that takes much longer to complete.
- atkailash 5y agoThat’s what most people who have never been granted or interviewed for clearances don’t quite get. You could technically have the same level, but not the same access. It’s compartmentalized and for the exact reason as to prevent a single person from being able to leak the grand picture. Though someone has to organize it so I guess it gets blurrier at much higher levels but that’s not the level we talk about with most dumb conspiracy theories/Qanon specifically
- t0mas88 5y agoI think the common misconception is that a security clearance gives you access to things. The reality is that a specific role / need to know gives you access to things if you have the clearance, not the other way around. If you clear millions of people, that sounds unsafe to the general public, but it isn't really because the clearance is only a confirmation that nothing is wrong in your background. It doesn't give you any access.
- ganoushoreilly 5y agoExactly, most programs require specific compartmented information and additional read in. I've only ever seen people with vanilla clearances working operational positions to manage facilities, etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- starwind 5y agoLOL from reading the New York Times reporting on the DoD’s internal UAP (UFO) reports last summer me and a guy I worked with guessed which compartment it fell under. We went to our FSO and asked for access to that compartment and he was like “why do you need that?” Us: “UFOs!” Him: “Oh, you mean FUOU? That goes by CUI these days.” Us: “No, UFOs like Aliens!” Him: “GET THE HELL OUT OF MY OFFICE!” So yeah, even with TS/SCI I couldn’t couldn’t get access to aliens :|
- todd8 5y agoThis was true for me. I was in a internal software tools department at a large company that did some classified work. Because I might need to interact with departments doing classified work I had to apply for Top Secret classification. This was required just in case I might have to get into those areas of the company to teach them how to use our in-house compiler. (I didn't finish the process of obtaining the classification because of my desire to return to grad school in a different city. I never touched or even saw a classified document despite having Secret clearance already.)
- jfrunyon 5y agoInteresting. I worked for a company doing some classified defense contracting (as an intern). I didn't need any clearance and the only limitation was that anyone without clearance needed an escort to enter the lab. Although really it just boiled down to "see if someone has opened it for the day yet, if not go ask one to" (And in reality I didn't even need that because several people kept their lab key in plain sight on their desk in their open office 24/7...)
- toss1 5y ago>> Just because one has a Q clearance does not mean you are provided any classified information. Exactly. "Need to know basis." is the key phrase here. The clearance is just the tag that gets you in the door. If you do not have a specific need to access the information to do your specific job, you do not have any right to access it. AFAIK, deliberately taking steps to access info beyond your need to know -- even if it is within your clearance level -- is grounds for disciplinary action or prosecution. So the TS/Q-cleared janitor, parts contractor, or engineer from the other project who gets found browsing in TS/Q file cabinet is waaay out of line,and likely in big trouble.
- loonster 5y agoI was in service during the the start of Wikileaks. We got talks about how going on that site and viewing classified information that is against the UCMJ. It did not matter that the information was now public.
- Pokepokalypse 5y agoyes. Even as a civilian; they told us that we should not visit the site.
- salamanderman 5y agoOne of the unfortunate things that goes along with this, from my experience, is that those area can be absolutely filthy. There was no janitorial staff for the cube farm I was briefly in. Everything had a layer of old dust and grime on it, and we wiped everything with wet wipes. Men In Black it was not.