Tattoos and lifestyle do strongly correlate with other factors which are themselves viewed as correlating with "personnel unreliability or susceptibility to for

Tattoos and lifestyle do strongly correlate with other factors which are themselves viewed as correlating with "personnel unreliability or susceptibility to foreign influence or coercion". Tattoos and pink hair -> drugs, party lifestyle, potential crime -> bad at managing money/desperate, making bad life choices, sleeping around, etc. -> pressureable by foreign intelligence -- potentially by threatening to reveal those issues to the Government (which is irony in purest form...) It's inherently discriminatory, but if I had to hire a code clerk (or other non-differentiated role, which did need to be trustworthy), I'd hire a successful 45 year old Mormon with kids comfortably in school and no history of any problems. Where this is fucked is that quality computer security people are also usually (false?) positives for the pink hair and tattoos. There's also the HUGE factor of foreign citizenship or foreign ties -- a Pakistani or Iranian or Chinese engineer with grandparents in the home country is definitely at risk for coercion by a foreign power. Parents, even more so. Personal citizenship, vastly more so. Lots of great engineers meet this criterion. The way contractors deal with this is by having low-side roles doing the actual work, with untrusted employees, in a way which doesn't directly touch anything classified; they then throw the work product over a wall to the high-side where much less skilled people make $300k to take the research/products and implement them in the classified environment, while being US-citizen 2nd+ generation white people without tattoos.