If you are involved in a secret affair without your partner's knowledge or if you're closeted non-hetero sexually, you shouldn't apply for high level security clearances or run for politics.
Competing states can find this information out and potentially blackmail you. U.S. is currently pressuring a Chinese company to sell Grindr, presumably because of potential security risks like these.
I know of people who've gone through the clearance process and it's VERY thorough and personally invasive to minimize the risks of government employees being compromised due to their personal lives.
It's actually even worse than that. If you're cleared highly enough, "competing states" will actively try to entangle you in these kinds of compromising scenarios, expressly for the purpose of maneuvering you into a position where you can be blackmailed.
>If you are involved in a secret affair without your partner's knowledge or if you're closeted non-hetero sexually, you shouldn't apply for high level security clearances or run for politics.
Those two things are completely different. The first is an active lie to the person you are supposed to be closest with. It is a demonstration on some level of a lack of character. The second is the omission of not telling people something that it shouldn't be their business to know. LGBTQ folks are under no obligation to be out publicly and refusing to do so is not an indictment on their character.
It’s not a moral comparison, it’s recognizing that both could lead to situations where the person in question could prize the propriety of said facts above honest execution of their duties. People in debt aren’t morally bad either, but the same can be said of them as well.
And the same would apply to a political official who refuses to disclose their financial obligations to foreign powers. Except OP didn't call out an individual like that. They didn't call out someone who has substantial debt. They didn't even leave it as "anyone with a secret shouldn't run for political office". They singled out two and only two groups of people and equated them together as both being unfit for political office.
Bucketing LGBTQ individuals in with people who have a moral strike against them is one of the many reasons why some feel pressured into staying in the closet.
You’re attempting to move the goalposts. Nobody bucketed LGBTQ people with them, OP specifically said closeted LGBTQ people, meaning those those people for whom forced disclosure of their orientation could potentially form a basis of leverage. To make it perfectly clear, the issue is not their sexuality, it is private information about them and the lengths they may be coerced into going to maintain that privacy. As another commenter said, any secret that a person values would be at issue.
I am not moving the goalposts and I am not even disagreeing with OP's underlying point. I am simply calling them out for their language. I wouldn't have said anything if their original comment said "any secret that a person values would be at issue". Instead they listed only two groups of people and didn't even hint at that list being incomplete.
People are always going to have affairs, go into debt, or have secrets they want to keep private. But people don't always have to feel shame in revealing their identity or orientation. That is simply a societal problem and one step to fix it is to be more mindful of the language we use.
It could also occur in the instance that a person is of a different religion then their community, or a person who eats meat in a community of vegans, but we don’t enumerate every possible situation in which leverage over other may be obtained. Failure to enumerate every possible instance as opposed to just mentioning the most common instances isn’t intended to slander anyone.
You are still missing the point. The problem was not the idea. The problem was the way that idea was communicated. The problem was not that every potential group was not listed. The problem was that only two groups were listed. The problem was that there was nothing to even insinuate that the same argument applies to anyone outside of those two groups. The problem was that someone readying the original argument can interpret it as belief that closeted LGBTQ people should not hold political office due to some personal flaw. I never would have commented if OP listed more groups to make their reasoning more clear or said their list was not all encompassing.
> You are still missing the point. The problem was not the idea. The problem was the way that idea was communicated.
No, the problem is that you are trying to misrepresent what was actually said and in the process using your misunderstanding to fuel your baseless outrage and moral tirade.
> Bucketing LGBTQ individuals in with people who have a moral strike against them
Your reading compeehension skills are failing you, or you're desperate to be outraged for having read something no one wrote.
I suggest you read parent's comment again to try to understand what was actually said and to acknowledge the real point that was made, and subsequently apologize for the silly insinuations.
Those things would exclude you from a basic secret clearance as well, but the investigation isn't quite as thorough, so they might not turn up. For secret, there's a questionnaire, and they check public records, and make a few phone calls. Unless you're doing something egregiously bad, it's unlikely to surface. If something like an ongoing concealed marital affair does come up, though, it'll exclude you.
The thoroughness just increases through the clearance levels. So in a secret clearance investigation they do a cursory check of references, dates, addresses, relatives, etc. but as you go up the ladder to TS and getting cleared for particular programs the investigations become more extensive.
> it's VERY thorough and personally invasive to minimize the risks
And yet, near completely useless as shown by cases known to wide public.
If you think blackmail is the only thing that can compromise a man, you have a lot to learn about life.
History: some of most baffling espionage cases were "walk ins"
I think, it is the type of personality that services all around the world seek – somebody brilliant, but easy to guide, and motivateable with BS pretenses, that itself makes such people to seek to play with fire.
This guy is the textbook case for clearance exclusion: lots of personal debt that he couldn't manage. It's the number one reason people are rejected or have their clearance revoked. While the article doesn't state it, I assume he had already stolen the information prior to losing his clearance, and that they were no longer monitoring his finances (nor could they know he had the information stashed away). It does show some premeditation, though; the fact that he saved information tells me he was always planning to use it if the opportunity arose.
A CIA case officer isn't exactly a normal civilian. I'm also not sure why you think being in the military would make any difference here. For all we know, he was recruited out of the military. There's nothing magically special about non-civilians that makes them more or less likely to commit espionage.
> And yet, near completely useless as shown by cases known to wide public.
Just because a system isn't foolproof, doesn't mean it's useless. There are certainly many improvements that can be made to how we protect secrets and conduct investigations into individuals but what we have in place now is far from useless.
> When he received a LinkedIn message from a Chinese headhunter.
At the beginning I wondered how can the Chinese know who to contact.. On LinkedIn! Then a glimpse at the OPM data breach made my realise that the system might not be useless, but certainly dated and suitable to a very different threat model.
It's not easy to update your operating procedures to an information asymmetry at your disadvantage, after decades of advantage in info gathering.
Realising that, the top comment starts to make a lot more sense, even if at first sight it's potentially unrelated to the topic: they need to be much more careful about all sorts of things.
Because people who worked for the CIA have resumes too. Do you think they all have cover jobs? Sure, some do, but most people don't. I've worked for a number of defense intelligence agencies. In my case, indirectly via commercial entities, but it's not hard to read between the lines. We dealt with classified information, but the fact that I worked for them isn't classified, and the nature of the projects isn't classified. I put this all on my resume, and so does almost everyone else who works in intelligence. It's just another career.
That's the point. The US has a loose approach. China is aggressive and takes advantage of every weakness. This is not an isolated case, as you will be well aware.
Just because a system isn't foolproof, doesn't mean it's useless.
It's just like network security - you take every precaution you reasonably can to prevent breaches, but you also plan for when measures fail. Locks on the doors don't mean you can skip drive encryption, managed antivirus doesn't mean you skip monitoring for ransomware activity or exfiltration, RAID doesn't mean you skip backups.
You want not just the belt and suspenders but also properly fitted pants and underwear so no single point of failure leaves your secrets visible to the world.
>Just because a system isn't foolproof, doesn't mean it's useless.
I think this is... a common mistake people make. It's a common mistake I make, really, to look at a system for preventing a bad thing, see a hole, and then argue that system is worthless.
All systems have holes, and just 'cause a system has a hole you can see, that doesn't mean the system doesn't have value.A system that prevents 80% of the bad things it was designed to prevent can be really useful.
> And yet, near completely useless as shown by cases known to wide public.
How do you know that? A few public failures says nothing about how many successes there are or aren't. Any system involving hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people is going to have some failures, no matter how good the system might be.
Yeah sure, because all the politicians are "clean", right? And they don't do dirty stuff while they are in office either, right?
If there is something to be learnt from politics it's that it doesn't matter what you've done or what you do but what your electorate wants to hear.
Morality is luxury and as such most of the people can't afford it. Simply they don't care.
As far as national security is concerned you could say that any big foreign company could be considered a national security threat if it kills its US competitiors regardless of the industry. We already had steel, telecom, social media and cars. What's the next security threat? Corn? What happened to free trade?
This was the big fear that came out of the OPM hack back in 2015[0], that the exfiltrated data could be used to mine for targets of coercion by foreign governments.
With all of the personal data floating around the web and government systems clearly unable to keep up with modern security best-practices, we can almost guarantee this is going to get worse.
OP was incorrect about the year - it was 2013. The OPM breach included ANYONE who filled out/submitted an SF86 form to the USG. I believe fingerprint data was compromised at all - our (US) government flopped real hard on this issue and put millions of people's personal information into the wild.
To me this is a story about how financial security impacts national security. It gets me wondering about the mortgage he couldn't pay. What were the terms? How out on a limb did he get with his finances?
I doubt this is a fresh argument but it makes me more inclined to see things like mortgage regulations as a national security issue.
Financial stability is one of the most important criteria checked when you apply for clearance.
I read through a public list of the decisions on clearance appeals a couple of years ago, and financial concerns were a very common reason for denied clearances. (Might have been http://ogc.osd.mil/doha/industrial/)
Another thing I found interesting from that list was that a lot of concerns (e.g. earlier drug consumption) could be successfully addressed, but lying on the questionnaire was pretty close to an absolute no-go. I also expected a lot more denials for political opinion to stop ideologically motivated whistleblowers, but barely found any such entries.
I think the only politically related questions you get asked are whether or not you've ever been a terrorist, and whether or not you've been a member of or supported an organization that was attempting to violently overthrow the governemnt. You're spot on about drugs though. They really don't care what you did in your past, as long as you don't have a criminal record from it, and you're honest. They just don't want people hiding things that can be used for blackmail.
Many years ago, I worked for a contractor where we required clearance. We hired this one sysadmin "stick it to the man" type of guy that was extremely well educated and talented.
When he got to the part of the form that asked if he has ever consumed drugs, he said "yes" as he should have by being honest. The follow up question asks something along the lines of, "If yes, will you ever consume drugs again?"
The jack-ass decided to answer "I won't not do them again..." We fired him a few days later.
With these sort of things, it's better to tell the truth and get fired than to lie, and wonder if you're going to get prosecuted somewhere down the line for lying to a federal agent. Jobs aren't so rare; you should think twice before lying.
Edit: Yes, it is better to work at a car wash than to get convicted for lying to federal agents. Don't believe me? Ask any federal prisoner if they'd be willing to work at a car wash in exchange for their freedom.
Are those questions about illegal drugs or all drugs? Can you answer you don't take drugs when you smoke or drink alcohol? What if you have Marijuana in a country where it is legal? What about alcohol in a country where it is not? Is the trouble for the government that you are willing to go against the law, or that yoj could be under influence?
"In the last seven (7) years, have you illegally used any drugs or controlled substances? Use of a drug or
controlled substance includes injecting, snorting, inhaling, swallowing, experimenting with or otherwise
consuming any drug or controlled substance.
[...]
In the last seven (7) years have you intentionally engaged in the misuse of prescription drugs, regardless of
whether or not the drugs were prescribed for you or someone else?
[...]
In the last seven (7) years has your use of alcohol had a negative impact on your work performance, your professional or personal relationships, your finances, or resulted in intervention by law enforcement/public
safety personnel?"
It's a questionnaire to get a security clearance in the US. Pretty sure it's only from a US perspective and you'd be disqualified if you lived abroad where these concerns would make any sense.
> I also expected a lot more denials for political opinion to stop ideologically motivated whistleblowers, but barely found any such entries.
Realistically this could be a concern with nearly any ideology, so unless you were going to reject anyone who had political opinions at all (and to be honest I’d be pretty suspicious of people who claimed not to on such a form) that’s probably a nonstarter.
I'm not talking about partisan politics or opinions irrelevant to the clearance. But rather about people being opposed to mass surveillance or other important activities conducted by the the intelligence community or military which might tempt the individual to whistleblow if they learned about unacceptable behaviour in those areas.
Not true. There may be people looking to get into that field who hope to have the chance to leak information. Imagine someone inspired by Snowden who wanted to unmask some other clandestine program that they didn't agree with or viewed as immoral.
"...Ms. Newbold also asserted that the Trump administration had made changes to security protocols that made it easier for individuals to get clearances. The changes included stopping credit checks on applicants to work in the White House, which she said helps identify if employees of the president could be susceptible to blackmail."[0]
Not sure why the parent comment is being downvoted —- the allegations against the current administration for bypassing the financial and credit checks for high-level security clearances are very relevant to the discussion.
The whistleblower, an 18-year civil servant, allegedly received retribution from superiors for speaking out against the abuse, which puts our national security at risk by inviting foreign powers to leverage government officials.
These are exceptions made for a very small hand-selected group of Trump's cronies working in the White House. It doesn't really have much to do with the procedures in place for normal clearances, and they didn't change the regulations, they just granted e.g. his kids a waiver. I don't approve of it, but don't extrapolate it to a policy change.
Having a healthy society has always been a national security issue: there’s literally millennia of documents on how governments collapsed because outsiders funded dissidents.
These morality lessons we see aimed at societies aren’t mere moralizing — they’re an evolved code of conduct designed to keep a vibrant whole in the face of genuine adversarial conditions.
People have forgotten the value of a strong national identity in many Western nations, largely because of the activity of groups funded by outside nations.
There’s definitely a strong angle about irresponsible decisions in this guy’s case but note also that areas like DC are extremely expensive and civil service pay scales have been slipping behind the private sector for decades. Most people react by cashing out to a contractor but there’s always a risk of something more nefarious, and the opposition only needs a few bites.
They are. An officer in charge of me in the military couldn't get his clearance renewed because after the housing bubble popped, he was forced to move to a new duty station. He couldn't afford to pay two mortgages, and couldn't sell his first home for what he owed, so he fell behind on payments and had to do a short sale. The military now provides assisstance where they'll make up the difference in situations like his, but it effectively ended his career in the military since no support system was in place at the time.
Previous reply was missing a lot of context because I was on transport and my stop was coming up.
I'm reminded of a similar circumstance of a family member. They bought a home prior to the financial crisis. They were given new orders and had to leave their home. They did manage to rent it but the lease was less than the mortgage and taxes. Their duty change sent them from a cheap southeast home to expensive northwestern apartment. Since that house ended up eating up a good chunk of their housing allowance they could only afford a 1 bedroom apartment for a family of 4. They didn't have to do a short sale, but for 2 years they were just scraping by financially, and mentally.
Your officers story just made me remember what he was going through and just how close he could have lost it all.
This fellow spent 15+ years in the military, he is out of money, and the country that he served will assist the bankers but not him. He now has not only money reasons to work for a foreign government, he has ideological reasons, too. You can't entrust him with anything confidential.
You'd think that the government implemented the mortgage assistance because they couldn't afford to lose too many career military personnel.
I’m reminded of how being gay was once considered grounds for denying a clearance. Why? Because a foreign government could discover that and threaten to blackmail you with it. What if you’re already out? Doesn’t matter, they could threaten to destroy your career since it would get your clearance revoked!
Near the end of the article: After a preliminary forensic investigation, the thumb drive was found to contain "malicious malware," according to the affidavit.
How come shortsighted thinking became so popular? Cut jobs, close factories for short term gain of the elites, but in the long term? There may be no one left to rule...
economists do not factor these risks and costs into their assessments. globalized free trade and labor are generally always assessed as win-win by economists.
aside note folks....there has been a very severe increase in spurious attempts to hack email accounts if you by accident email any person in China ...I recently had to stop sending any email comments to Chinese developers via email..
Not sure if its widespread but there was a significant uptick recently.
This not legal advice or even security advice..but take care
Yup. For anyone who is a security type IT person at your company, make sure you send out bogus phising emails to employees to see who falls for it and what type of data they give away. At my work if you fall for it the first time then you get training not to do it again. If you fall for it a second time, terminated. They just consider it to be too high of a security risk to keep you around if you fall for it a second time.
A yet another reason to recognize that life is so pathetic, so here is a guy who spent his entire youth supposedly serving his country (or actually serving his bosses agendas and ambitions?) for peanuts and he is now an old jobless man with thousands of dollars in debt that he has to become a spy to pay off his debt
Why does it seem like you are giving him a pass for treason? Everyone has struggles. This does not give you a pass to become a spy for a hostile foreign nation and endanger the lives of your countrymen.
Just because someone ends up in dire straits, doesn't mean they are good.
He could have spent less to avoid debt. He could have gotten a job in the private sector. In a country like the US, there is no excuse for resorting to treason to get a pay check.
It's not really about individual morality though. It's about the system, incentives, and aggregates.
Take 100 people in a situation comparable to his and given the same opportunity, maybe 10 partake in treason. We should aim to lower the total amount, the rate willing to partake, or both.
You're right that there's no excuse per se, but one must acknowledge that desperate people will resort to desperate measures - especially those who have a family to support. It's easy to take the moral high ground until you find yourself in the sort of situation where the future of your family is on the line. History has proven that people who are normaly good can be capable of terrible things when faced with perceived threats to their survival.
Easier said than done in most cases, not all people are 20 or 30 something above average IQs and can write some app or website and by the end of the year he would raise a couple of million from investors or get a job in some fancy startup, most lives are just pathetic and the need for money can make people do unimaginable things, the guy is 61 years old and he is jobless and in debt
>no excuse for resorting to treason
of course there is no excuse and it's totally a treason, I am just noting that how pathetic life can be
He was probably making $100k when he left the CIA. If he worked 20 years, he probably has a nice pension. Most career federal employees make decent money, both my parents worked their careers for the government and live debt free.
At what point of poverty would you start attacking people you know to be innocent, to sustain yourself? For many people, as the number of homeless testify to, that point does not exist. It's obvious that a multi millionaire would not become a spy for $25k (as this man did), but would he for $50 million? If our multi-millionaire is this person, I'd expect the answer would likely be a resounding yes. And this guy did something much worse than just attacking people. He allegedly gave information on undercover operatives to China. Them going "missing" after extensive "questioning" would be hardly surprising, and this blood would be on his hands. But hey, now he has $25k...
I think peoples actions generally reflect their character, not their condition. It's why you'll find penny pinching billionaires, or people who can barely afford a loaf of bread insistent on sharing it with you. But spies... if somebody wants to go join an enemy force and fight against their home country - that's fine - though they should never expect to be treated as anything besides an enemy. But a spy, by contrast, exploits good will to try to hurt the people giving it to him. As the article mentions he was pressing former colleagues for information, with the aim of giving it to people that would likely use it to hurt them with. Spies are the scum of this earth and in no way whatsoever does this individual deserve even the slightest grain of sympathy. Whatever punishment he receives will be far too lenient.
> The "defendant, who was entrusted with our nation’s critical secrets, put our country and human lives — including the lives of assets — at risk for financial gain," prosecutors said in their sentencing memo.
The US obviously spies on China like crazy but we never hear about it, is this Western bias censorship? Is it possible that China spies much more than the US?
The difference is that when US-run agents get burned, they get publicly executed by the Chinese government, as opposed to put on trial for imprisonment.
Competing states can find this information out and potentially blackmail you. U.S. is currently pressuring a Chinese company to sell Grindr, presumably because of potential security risks like these.
I know of people who've gone through the clearance process and it's VERY thorough and personally invasive to minimize the risks of government employees being compromised due to their personal lives.