People get clearances even if they've used hardcore drugs such as cocaine and various more serious crimes than computer crimes. The adjudication guides for clearances explain this in more detail. I have a friend who exploited RCE full-chain exploits on productions servers and used to DDoS. He got a TS/SCI clearance no problem and didn't even finish college. I interviewed too and admitted to that stuff. They cared more about me admitting to cheating in math at college lol.
TS/SCI clearance is a lot more about truthfulness. The adjudicators are looking for secrets that can be used as leverage. Publicly writing reviews for cannabis strains is not a risk. A Mormon secretly hiding alcoholic tendencies could be. I'm also told that owning foreign property is unfriendly countries, and debt are the other big reasons for clearance denial.
I have a theory that the normalization of homosexuality in the united states was a move by the security agencies to lower their exposure risk. If everything is cool, nothing is blackmail.
Blackmail is what sinks orgs because you have no idea who is going to be a mole.
> I have a theory that the normalization of homosexuality in the united states was a move by the security agencies to lower their exposure risk
the decades of civil rights expansions, first for women, then african-americans, then disabled, and eventually the gays -- that was all just the CIA trying to do recruiting 2% easier?
rather, homosexuality as a secondary non-lifestyle, non-professed interest, often in one-off scenarios, is WAY more common than culture would like to admit, and the intelligence agencies are in the perfect position to precisely observe that fact.
For the US:
Women ~50%
African Americans ~12%
Disabled ~ 20%
Homosexual ~7%
It’s a lot more than 2% for any one of those categories, let alone them all. You’ve comfortably described a group that forms the majority of the US population, even when allowing for the homosexual, African American, disabled woman, who is in all 4 ‘minorities’.
Why recruiting? It’s not as if gay people universally stayed away from these jobs. Given the times plenty probably didn’t understand or accept this part of who they were until careers were in full swing. The issue would have been stopping a risk that was already known and actively exploited.
I don’t think this is at all why normalization occurred, that intelligence communities had anything to do with it, but if they had then it wouldn’t need to have been for recruitment.
I'm not the parent comment, and I think I get the gist of what you're saying. To be fair to the parent comment though, it's not just making recruiting easier. It's reducing the risk of compromise within your organization. Just one compromised employee can present a tremendous risk, which is nothing to 2%.
I can see why that idea is tempting, but it doesn't seem to work.
Military had "don't ask don't tell" for a long time because legalisation and social acceptance are different (also seen in reverse order with cannabis). Even today, the percentage of people in the US who think society should not accept it, 21%, is higher than the percentage who are homosexual or bisexual: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-...
For this reason, there's still plenty who want to stay closeted.
If sexual liberation was driven from the top to reduce blackmail opportunity, I think there'd be a lot more desires whose taboo was lessened, not just homosexuality.
(Though perhaps I'm underestimating how much else has changed due to what hasn't; I'm sure "cheating on spouse" used to be a thing that killed political careers, clearly doesn't now).
It also feels like the social acceptability of trans people has moved backwards. (Just my perception, or has that actually shifted?)
That said, the logic you give is still sound, and I think the increasing ease of private surveilance means we must eliminate as many taboos as we can so that society can keep functioning.
I think broader acceptance of trans people has increased as long as you view acceptance as "do whatever you want with your body."
The big wedge trans issue I've seen is with children and puberty blockers which is much more complicated and I don't think can be boiled down to "acceptability of trans people."
The violent acts against trans people are up. They are the most hated group currently.
And it has zero to do with puberty blockers as a leader. They have issue with any kind of trans affirming care. It is simple. You demonize the thing that trans are using and then people fear it. It is basically impossible to believe it is driven by care for those kids. If they cared for trans kids, they would care about them when they are not on puberty blockers too.
But they dont, as far as they are concerned trans kids can all kill themselves and should be punished. It is just when they get trans affirming care that it becomes a problem for right.
> I think broader acceptance of trans people has increased as long as you view acceptance as "do whatever you want with your body."
Between Trump's repeated executive orders and Facebook for some reason feeling the need to explicitly call out that you can now call trans people mentally ill (but not other groups!) on their platform, we're well beyond riling up people who don't know anything and aren't impacted into nevertheless buying into this moral panic. We've 100% moved backwards on the "acceptability of trans people."
Screw especially unpopular, it has multiple downright illegal and unquestionably immoral ones.
But the gender ratio preference is fascinating. There are multiple ones I would have never guessed (e.g. cannibalism is much more interesting to women than it is to men, which is weird because of all the high profile cannibals that I can think of, none are female).
> It also feels like the social acceptability of trans people has moved backwards. (Just my perception, or has that actually shifted?)
You're not wrong, it certainly has. I think this is more of it having become a cause célèbre than actual transpeople standing up for their rights. As is so often the case, if a movement doesn't have a strong leader to "stop" the movement once it achieves what it was after, then it goes ever onward - partly because there's a group of people who derive their life meaning from it (stupid), partly because there's a group of people financially dependent upon it (disgusting).
As Michael Malice said in one of his episodes of Your Welcome, "They way they fucked up was going after people's kids. The normies will fight back when you do that."
I think you're both correct. For those that care about their fellow (hu)man, it is extremely important to improve people's lives, to live without fear and violence. Unfortunately for the politicians, it was often just an issue that could be spearheaded to avoid and "hide" other issues. Much like businesses that celebrate pride month, and then drop the issue and remain silent on it until the next year comes around, because people are too easily fooled by a perceived month of caring. I am not of the opinion that gay or LGBTQ+ rights were ever pushed in order to prevent blackmail, especially since in the US, it is often the side that fights against those rights that end up getting caught in controversy for the exact thing they fought against. Much like how you hear that homophobia and transphobia is often perpetrated by those that haven't accepted their sexuality.
As much as I would like to believe this, I highly suspect that the normalisation of homosexuality killed the forbidden fun for those high power psychopaths.
There's this idea that sharing in illegal or socially shunned activities is an effective way to establish strong personal ties, and strong personal ties can in turn help advance careers.
Which is why there were a lot of successful secretely gay people in politics even in the 19th century.
As homosexuality became accepted, there was a shift to "harder stuff" playing this role. Not by literally the same people, mind you, but over time the composition of who's powerful shifts towards people who engage in shunned activities to form their strong personal ties. And as more activities become socially accepted, the activities that are shunned and give people a leg up become increasingly worse.
I don't like this conclusion, but it's the strongest potential argument against social liberalism that I know of.
I have the impression that sexual harassment became the opposite. Something most successful man are blamed for, decades later when all possible proof have vanished. In terms of blackmail, the power seems much higher.
People who sexually harass are on supreme court and literally the president. For considerable amount of people, it is a positive sign that "the guy is like us".
I don't think anyone takes it as a positive. It's just not what voters vote on. If they support one candidate's policies more than another's, they won't flip because of that issue. The example of Bill Clinton demonstrates that this happens across the political spectrum, and his feminist supporters were the ones making this argument back then. They got criticized for being hypocritical, but in politics you have to prioritize.
I do actually think they see it as a positive. It is not just that they do not care. It is that it heightens his credit in their eyes and they get to see him as victim.
At the least, it often makes them feel empowered to speak out in favor of forgetting all about the issue, and emboldening them to push for whatever the politician pushes that they agree with. At least in the US, you can hop on social media and take a look at your local newspaper or news channel's posts, and see some of the truly insane comments (and I use insane here as in bringing up politics to promote their voted politician, or smear the other side, when the issue is something at a local level or unaffected by politics in any way).
This is pretty darn specific. It must be tiny fraction of applicants. Hell, most Americans never leave the United States in their lifetime. The security concern about heavy debts or debts to unfriendly counterparties makes sense to me. But what is the security concern with "owning foreign property is unfriendly countries"? They can take it from you?
You have to remember that the DC area workforce has a lot of immigrants, people married to immigrants, and people who've done significant overseas stints. Plus there is a need for hiring linguists and cultural experts with fluency in unfriendly languages.
I know of TS clearance holders who have significant ties to Iran, Syria, Russia, and Afghanistan, but have renounced those citizenships and are loyal to the US. The clearance process works to figure out what levers those countries could still pull on them - foreign property and close family still there are the big ones.
"Are you an untrustworthy person?" Are you likely to take a bribe? Will you get mad at your boss and try to burn the place down, literally or metaphorically? Will you be careless in a way that brings about the same, with no malice?
"Are you as trustworthy as anyone else, but subject to inhuman pressure?" Anyone would be vulnerable to having a relative threatened; you probably don't want to hire someone who would be apathetic to having their parents or child threatened. If that relative is already in unfriendly hands, that's a huge risk.
In some ways, a $100k house in a (hostile) foreign country is no different than a $100k bribe; it's just stuff. If you ignore a threat to your property in a scheme to extort you, you are $100k poorer than if you give in, just like if you turn down a bribe. But humans are prone to loss aversion. Having $1 taken from you is far worse than receiving $1 is good, even ignoring any sentimental value of the property in question. Some people will still be able to ignore the threat, not allow themselves to be compromised, but a lot of people will find it hard.
For a job where security is a concern and you have thousands or millions of perfectly cromulent candidates, it's not crazy to winnow the pool first by discarding everyone who's untrustworthy or has extra levers that can be used against them. You still have thousands or millions of great candidates left.
Yes they can, which is why there are many many factors considered in granting and maintaining a clearance. None of them are simple black and white things. For foreign property, it is very different owning a small vacation house and owning a house where 3 generations of your spouse’s family live or owning a commercial property that provides a significant income to you. A foreign government putting each of those things at risk would have very different implications.
Only if you don't take 30 seconds to think about it.
Of course you can be compromised without owning foreign property. But foreign property is a vector by which you can be compromised.
Doesn't it make sense an intelligence agency would want to know all the possible vectors by which potential employees could be compromised? For each vector you'll have certain remediation steps, up to and including "don't hire this person."
sure, but it's way easier for the FBI to request the title and deed for things in the US and track their history than an apartment building in Panama, or a plantation in Indonesia.
they need to hire people who speak Arabic, or Chinese, or Hindi, and have ties they can utilize in those countries -- or at least understand well enough to build ties.
overseas money and property, esp. in unfriendly countries, rapidly becomes a concern in that sense. go double agent, have a friend overseas give you some sweet improvements to your house on the cheap, then sell it later for 4x than it's worth, and repeat.
Maybe the US 3-letter agencies are a bit more forgiving, but when I worked in intelligence there were three deadly sins that would make you untouchable as a candidate:
- Drug use
- Financial crimes
- Close ties to hostile countries (China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, North-Korea, etc.)
And at least in my country, it's not the intelligence agencies themselves that handle the security clearance, but rather a dedicated agency/authority that processes all the security clearances in the country.
Now, if you've never been arrested / charged / convicted on the two first points - who would know? I'm 100% some candidates would simply lie.
America has recently waved the security clearance process entirely for certain roles, so currently there isn't anything that is disqualifying right now.
Prior to that change, lying in the clearance process was the one thing that was absolutely disqualifying. As you noted candidates are incentivized to lie, and so "did you lie here, where it is likely to benefit you?" becomes an effective screening mechanism for people who are willing to compromise their ethics for personal gain.
US intelligence agencies really only care about your third point directly, everything else they care about only insofar as it can blackmail you or make you beholden to criminal interests.
They don't care if you're gay, but they care if you're closeted. They don't care if you do drugs, but they do care if it's such a problem you could become financially beholden to someone over it.
More accurately, they don’t necessarily care if you did drugs in the past. Current drug use, or very recent drug use is a risk, as addiction is a huge risk for both judgement and susceptibility to blackmail, and even controlled drug use is illegal. Also, being a previous drug addict extremely risky drug use can speak to your current judgement.
Making a judgement against someone based on where they randomly happened to be born is self-defeating as talented people who are security- and defense-oriented will just work for another place that you maybe don’t want them to work. Interestingly, most of the news I’ve come across of someone betraying national secrets has almost always concerned a white man, but maybe that’s just what I know.
If you have connections to a hostile country - family, friends, business, spouse, etc. they can (will) become targets of intel ops.
So your wife is from Russia? GRU or FSB will start to pressure family and friends of your spouse.
Anything that is worth anything to the enemies of your country, they will find a way. Which is why agencies that require top secret security clearance will rather just set the threshold extra high, and lose out on potentially good talent. Better to be safe than sorry.
That's a fair assessment. I will just point out that it's a bit simplistic to believe that ally or friendly countries don't have ideological opponents which could potentially do the same and target people based on ideology. Ideological grievances exist in any society regardless of similarities in country, race or religion. So I agree, that it's a tricky situation.
People often lie yeah. The polygraph has been proven to be pseudoscience and the tactic of we know you're lying about x to get you to spill the beans is common knowledge now.
The difficult thing, at 19, is that a person has had zero time to at all demonstrate that they have put drugs and/or other criminal activities behind them.
These guys worked for SpaceX anyway, so it's pretty much guaranteed that they were already cleared even before joining DOGE.
A lot of speculation and guessing on this topic, which is surprising from news outlets which pride themselves on "facts" and "truth"... I'm not even mentioning the fact that revealing the names, handles, identities of employees and clearing saying that they have admin rights on systems X and Y, is in itself a serious breach of cybersecurity...
Journalists' rights to publicize who works for the government is absolutely protected by the first amendment.
Republicans didn't have any problem with that when they used it to blow Valerie Plame's cover in political retaliation. Somehow now that it's Musk's army of channers stealing our data and breaking the government payment systems _some_ people have decided the first amendment is optional I guess.
Tangential, but the Plame thing was very much done by the political establishment types which tends to go beyond parties. For instance the person who outed her (Richard Armitage - Republican/Bush's Deputy Secretary of State) endorsed Clinton and was a never-Trumper. The motivation is that her husband's work (as well as her own) revealed that a lot of the pretext for the Iraq War was built on outright fabrications and lies. They apparently refused to play ball and were going public, so "they" destroyed her.
I think Democrat/Republican loses meaning in these sort of contexts. I've never once voted for a Republican in my life yet I also am extremely supportive of what's happening right now, mostly because of a strong anti-establishment inclining. I find that when powers grow too comfortable, they trend towards corruption and abuse, exactly of the Plame sort as but one tiny morsel of such. A bit of a shake-up now and then keeps everything far healthier for everybody (the country itself most of all), and it's far nicer doing it this way than by watering Jefferson's Tree of Liberty.
I assure you, as DOGE starts to look at the Pentagon, which has failed audits repeatedly, to 0 consequence, expect to hear all sorts of establishment Republican yelping.
Interns aren't around long enough to get security clearances and interns in defense companies usually work on non-classified work. The only vetting is "are you a citizen or lawful permanent resident?", for export compliance.
If an intern had access to any classified materials, it is because a crime was committed.
Internships with clearances are common in the Intelligence Community.
Homeland Security
“The Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) Internship Program is for… an exciting career in homeland security and intelligence…all selected applicants must undergo and successfully complete a background investigation and be granted a Top Secret/SCI clearance” [1]
Department of State
“Students tentatively selected for the internship program must undergo a background investigation and receive either a Secret or Top Secret security clearance.” [2]
Office of Naval Intelligence
“All interns must receive security clearances at the interim or final top-secret level with access to sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI).” [3]
Defense Intelligence Agency
“Summer Internship Program (SIP)… To be eligible, you must…Maintain a security clearance” [4]
