alt Hacker NewsSecurity clearances are probably a really good example of Goodhart's Law.
One reason for all these questions is really to determine if someone can be blackmailed, and thus a security risk. (Big reason they look at your financials and why debt can cause you to lose clearance) But the letter of the law trumps the spirit. A common lie these days is about weed usage. You may get or entirely rejected for having smoked in the past even if you don't today (e.g. you tried it once in college but didn't like it). So everyone lies and it creates a system where people are even told to and encouraged to lie, like in TFA. The irony being that this is exactly what creates the situation for blackmail! Now you can get blackmailed for having that past thing cause you to lose your job as well as lying on your clearance form.
Honestly it seems smarter to let the skeletons out of the closet. Spill your secrets to the gov. Sure, maybe the gov can blackmail you but a foreign government can't blackmail you for something that the gov already knows. You can still have filters but the dynamic really needs to change. Bureaucracy creates its own downfall. To reference another comment, I'd rather a functional alcoholic have a clearance and the gov know about it than a functional alcoholic have a security clearance and the gov not know about it (or pretend to not know). We've somehow turned clearance checks into security risks. What an idiotic thing to do
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This information is highly outdated. You can say any number of things on your SF86 and still get cleared. This is indeed the point.
imagine curing alcoholics and drug dependant ppl who work for you ?
I'm really surprised at how they would rather ignore or silence all and report that they is strictly no problem among their pool of employees, to say they have the best employees and good KPIs
It doesn't look like a winning strategy indeed.
I myself refused to do government jobs as the table in which you had to list foreigners in your friend list was just so small. They prefer you to say you don't know nobody.
Also yeah, I agree with you. These forms are straight out of the 1950s when more liberal habits have been coming since the 60s. And we're straight up declining anyone who is outspoken about his habits while he knows the true boundaries of the laws.
The government is just selecting applicants who do the sharia or some straight up vague "you have to be a good guy" menaces that completely opens them to blackmail
Yeah on my SF86 I listed all the dumb shit I did and the investigator called obviously kind of concerned but receptive. We went through each one and his key point was "do you understand you can't do that" and as long as you answered yes, documented it on the form ahead of time, and it was obvious you weren't lying through your teeth then pretty much anything you did that wasn't in the last 3-5 years was pretty much immediately forgiven.
Some security officers are really touchy on these kinds of things and will tell you to exclude or lie but investigators pretty much never care what you did as long as it is obvious you don't plan on doing those types of things again or being an active problem.
They just want it for their records and they want you to be an open book such that they don't feel you are concealing anything problematic.
It seems to me that if you lie and get the clearance, it is better than being honest and getting NACKed. Maybe morally dubious, but there's financial incentive and motivation for having a clearance.