JPL Scientists Take NASA To the Supreme Court 238
CheshireCatCO writes "Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, concerned about background checks now required of federal employees, sued NASA to suspend the checks back in 2007. The case has now worked its way up to the Supreme Court. At stake: whether all federal employees can be forced to undergo open-ended background checks whether or not the employee has exposure to classified or sensitive information. The background checks, which can include interviewing people from employees' pasts such as landlords and teachers, may seek, among other things, sexual histories."
Go JPL (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope the JPL scientists win!
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Obama? He's busy loading the Justice Department with RIAA lawyers. Really, I don't think you want to call on him for this.
Obama's Busy Defending Bush Admin. Policies (Score:5, Insightful)
I care much more about issues like illegal prisons, torture (whether or not by that name), secret kidnappings, state secrets, assassinations without trials, warrantless wiretapping, and policies like that than I do about downloading free music, but Obama's Just-Us Department is defending the Bush Administration's policies on all of those things. Instead of Hopey Changey Stuff, we've been getting Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss. And the kind of people who want the uncontrolled spying on people's music download habits get along really well with the politically-motivated spooks who want the same powers and same infrastructure.
As far as the economy goes, Keynes himself was smarter than most people who use his name to describe themselves - it's not surprising that the Obama Administration tried to fix Bush's massive economic damage by borrowing and spending lots of money, but if that were all it took, the way Bush racked up deficits by spending money like a drunken sailor with a bunch of stolen credit cards should have helped things instead of hurting them. It's certainly better to spend them on domestic pork-barrel projects than on wars, but Obama hasn't slowed down the wars by much either. There's a better excuse for it (naive optimism instead of cynical irresponsibility), but I don't see it getting us out of the tar pits, since we're still going to have to pay that money back, and with the demographic hit of all the boomers going on Social Security in the next decade, the general budget will need to start running surpluses, not deficits, which will be tough with fewer actual workers.
(And religious bigotry's not pretty even if you are attacking politically correct targets. Blamin' Texans is ok, though...)
(Also, I once pulled a bird out of the La Brea Tar Pits; it was still alive, but the folks at the museum said it was unlikely to recover from getting stuck in that stuff.)
Re:Obama's Busy Defending Bush Admin. Policies (Score:4, Funny)
Sir, you are offending drunken sailors everywhere with this.
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Obama before he was elected made his opinions on warrantless wiretapping known.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barack-obama/my-position-on-fisa_b_110789.html
And what do you mean by defending Bush Administration policies? Obama, on his second day of office, issued several executive orders that outlaw torture and extraordinary rendition policies.
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/2009-obama.html
Obama is not the same as the Old Boss. Educate yourself.
Re:Obama's Busy Defending Bush Admin. Policies (Score:5, Interesting)
Obama is not the same as the Old Boss. Educate yourself.
Sure, he's not identical. Sure, he changed a couple policies. Policies that studies were showing were ineffective. But he's held the same course in so many OTHER areas that you can stay he's much the same.
For example, we're still in Iraq. We're still in Afghanistan. We're still spending borrowed money like crazy. Gun control hasn't changed, and don't ask don't tell still stands.
Personally I think that we need to 'finish the job' in Iraq and Afghanistan, which to me means a functional government able to defend itself from extremists and foreign powers. Able to represent the people, etc... At this point the reason we went in is almost moot.
I'm very much FOR balanced budgets. I think that gays should be able to openly serve in the military, it's only a source of friction right now. As for gun control, well, check out my sig for my thoughts on that...
For the record, I'm not happy with either party.
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But he's held the same course in so many OTHER areas that you can stay he's much the same.
For example, we're still in Iraq. We're still in Afghanistan. We're still spending borrowed money like crazy. Gun control hasn't changed, and don't ask don't tell still stands.
Troop levels are down a lot in Iraq. He said in his campaign that he would leave a small force in. He said in his campaign that he would focus on Afghanistan. Borrowed money -- yup, you got him there. It was supposed to be "pay as you go". I don't know about gun control, as I haven't paid attention to it, but I'd be just as happy to leave the status quo. Don't ask, don't tell is on its last legs, something that would not have occurred under McCain.
Re:Obama's Busy Defending Bush Admin. Policies (Score:5, Insightful)
The NRA has had a history of supporting pro-gun rights candidates irregardless of party. I've paid attention. While there hasn't been a lot of movement on the federal level, there's been quite a bit at the state level. We're down to, what, 2 states that don't allow concealed carry at some level? Then again, speaking of federal level there was the strike-down of the DC gun ban. But I wouldn't associate supreme court judges with parties...
The problem, as I see it, is that the Democrats for the longest time seemed to insist on putting gun control advocates up for election, not to mention making gun control a party plank. I can't blame the NRA for taking the party at it's word and assuming that a candidate, unless he or she has stated differently, follows their party's platform, to include the gun control bits. You have some of the most vehement gun grabbers in the democrat party. Feinstein, for example. Kennedy, before his passing, was recorded proposing banning all rifles capable of penetrating soft body armor - He listed the '30-30' as an example of a gun caliber to be banned. The .30-30 was developed on the cusp of the widespread replacement of black powder with smokeless. It's primarily for lever action rifles, and was never intended for military use. It's generally considered on the bottom end of cartridges suitable for deer hunting today. Yes, it'll cut through soft body armor like butter, but so won't pretty much every other center-fire rifle round.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that Obama hasn't touched gun control stuff. Because, frankly speaking, he's a politician from Chicago and doesn't have the best record.
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Thanks for the pointer on Obama's positions on wiretapping.
Obama's first week or two in office were great, but the followthrough has been rather the opposite. If you look at what's been happening in the courts, Obama's Justice Department has been defending itself against people who are suing because they were renditioned and tortured, and using the ostensible state secrets privilege to do so, blocking inquiry into policymakers like John Yoo, and doing a bunch of things like that. Recently there's been the
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"As far as the economy goes, Keynes himself was smarter than most people who use his name to describe themselves - it's not surprising that the Obama Administration tried to fix Bush's massive economic damage by borrowing and spending lots of money"
Unfortunately, Obama has not used _enough_ of stimulus. There was enough spending to arrest the slide into Depression, but not enough to compensate for rising unemployment.
Basic Keynesian analysis shows that.
Re:Go JPL (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that he had a choice between representing a monied interest and representing the people in the form of no such cronyism. He made the same choice that any politician with any distant hope of high office has learned to make.
Absolutely. Now, consider this: the same sponsors, corporate interests, vested interests in the status quo, and, if you like, the same Establishment brought us both Presidents. This system is sometimes called the "military industrial complex" after a speech [h-net.org] given by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. Meanwhile, two parties with a complete duopoly on any important public office means an affordably low number of factions to buy off, err I mean to support their campaigns. Do you see the problem?
You're talking about a man who hires staffers with opinions like "never let a good crisis go to waste." If that were me in charge I'd have fired that person immediately as a public service. That's an attitude that is unworthy of proximity to power and not to be trusted with it.
He's a puppet but he's a really charismatic one. The whole skill of politics is to adopt a position because of the way that the wind blows and then wear it so naturally that you must have felt that way your entire life. The author of the script he's always reading from a teleprompter is the one you should be looking at.
None of this is new, it's just that Presidents in the past would speak extemporaneously at least some significant portion of the time. The basic motivations that determine their choices remain extremely similar, with insignificant differences to which much attention is called. That's why the whole "Left" and "Right" deal is just two forms of Statism. Their differences concern only implementation details. But the constant bickering over those "ideological differences" distracts from the realization that they are indirect paths to Statism. The name for this effect is "divide and conquer".
The only interesting question is to what degree this arrangement is deliberate. Is it the product of a great deal of intentional engineering, or is the political environment more like an evolutionary pressure in the sense that politicians who aren't like this have no hope of competing with politicians who are? The very high incumbency rate of Congress gives one the impression that failing to really represent the interests of the people carries negligible political consequences.
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I would say the other interesting question is how the heck do we fix it.
Re:Go JPL (Score:4, Interesting)
This technique in combination with what the ancient Romans called "bread and circus" are the two main methods used to subvert the will of the people.
Another thing a healthy republic or "democracy" needs is a thorough and widespread understanding of critical thinking, logic, and how to recognize propaganda techniques such as the "Big Lie", repetition, and fallacies such as the excluded middle. Government-run educational systems consistently fail to produce a population who have mastered this knowledge, and that's not a coincidence.
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As an outside observer who is not American, when I look at the mess GWB left for BO to deal with I have to say he's doing one hell of a job. The USA would be a third-world country by now if it wasn't for the crazy hard decisions Obama had to make to keep the US from tanking more than it did!
Political discussion in the US has largely declined to a point where it's all dichotomies, black and white. Politicians are either all good or they're all bad depending on how you feel about them. If you like a politician, you focus on one thing he or she has done or stands for and the rest doesn't matter. If you don't like a politician, you focus on something shameful they've done and act as if that is all they have done. The idea that there's no real right answer to economic questions is beyond many p
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"An outside observer"? That would explain how you presume to sit there in judgment of us who have to live with the Community Organizer's capricious policies, foisted upon us by his choicest advisers who have never had private-sector jobs in their lives. The inconsistency of those policies is clearly not leading us out of the tar pits, but rather burying us in them even more.
Wherever you are, do us a favor and stay there.
"Men in the game are blind to what men looking on see clearly"
Re:Go JPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Insightful, really? Where's the patriot act rage? The DMCA rage? How quickly people forget that Bush told us there were weapons of mass destruction (there weren't) and waged a war of aggression that cost us nearly 50 times the original estimate of $60 billion dollars. That high-level Bush administration officials were personally responsible for suppressing evidence of human rights violations in overseas American prisons. That people are only now being released with our apologies for being held without trial for almost 10 years. That civil rights were eroded beyond anyone's wildest imagination in the anti-terrst frenzy after 9/11.
And what about the financial crisis? Which would you rather have, Obama stealing thousands from the pockets of millionaires [huffingtonpost.com] or a downward spiral of economic peril that was the consequence of a presidential administration's pathological revulsion to reasonable regulation.
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economic peril that was the consequence of a presidential administration's pathological revulsion to reasonable regulation.
All of your previous points were spot on. But name one, single regulation that Bush either blocked or repealed that led to the economic mess. Just one. I'll wait.
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That civil rights were eroded beyond anyone's wildest imagination in the anti-terrst frenzy after 9/11.
Wildest imagination? A mass round-up of Arabs/Muslims and exporting them from the country. No, not a small number of people with terrorists ties. I'm talking Japanese-size round-up of American citizens, as was done in World War II, but exporting instead.
You really don't have any sense of history to be making claims like above.
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That civil rights were eroded beyond anyone's wildest imagination in the anti-terrst frenzy after 9/11.
Wildest imagination? A mass round-up of Arabs/Muslims and exporting them from the country. No, not a small number of people with terrorists ties. I'm talking Japanese-size round-up of American citizens, as was done in World War II, but exporting instead.
We really don't have any sense of history to be making claims like above.
There. Fixed that for ya'. You and I, and a handful of others, may have seen the glaring similarities between these two disgraceful periods in our nation's history, but the collective "we", the citizenry as a whole, and the journalists and pundits in particular, missed it almost entirely. I don't know which is more shameful, ignoring the huge human rights issue or ignoring the blatant raiding of the nation's treasury for the benefit of a few well connected cronies, for it is the latter crime that has had th
Re:Go JPL (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's politics for you, on this point they make used car salesmen look like saints. Nothing like passing the reins to the other side with the closet stacked with skeletons that'll come tumbling out and pretty much all be blamed on the acting president/congress. There's an expression "don't shoot the messenger", sometimes even the president is just the messenger telling you what mess he took over. And in politics, we do shoot the messenger.
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It's about blackmail (Score:5, Informative)
The "sexual history" questions will unfortunately remain relevant in background checks for highly important/secret positions so long as sexual history related topics remain highly taboo in society. The (intended) purpose of these questions is to determine if the applicant has anything in their past that would make particularly them subjective to blackmail.
They leave a bad taste in my mouth too, which is why I avoid those sorts of jobs...
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:5, Funny)
They leave a bad taste in my mouth too, which is why I avoid those sorts of jobs
Said Sir_Lewk to the NSA job interviewer, who had asked about Sir_Lewk's sexual history.
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, you choked it.. Right? Shouldn't be talking much at all now.
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Oh it doesn't have to, we have you secret video tapes right here mister chicken man.
You forgot the blackmail.
FTFY [substitute "wife" or "the press" if they are married or have a public reputation to protect]
AFAIK, the only defense against this sort of thing is either prevention (background check) or openness (antisocial weirdness that prevents you being embarrassed about having a bad rep), and savvy (to recognise so
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:5, Insightful)
The "sexual history" questions will unfortunately remain relevant in background checks for highly important/secret positions so long as sexual history related topics remain highly taboo in society. The (intended) purpose of these questions is to determine if the applicant has anything in their past that would make particularly them subjective to blackmail.
They leave a bad taste in my mouth too, which is why I avoid those sorts of jobs...
Maybe people should just stop be ashamed by crap they do and not worry about it?
We all have gotten together with people we didn't want people to know. Chances are, people already know and don't care.
Seriously, blackmail only works if you let it.
You want to blackmail me? go for it. and good luck!
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maybe people should not do things they are ashamed of?
Blackmail and Sexual Histories (Score:3, Insightful)
Blackmail isn't always about things you personally feel ashamed of - I've had friends who got fired from their jobs for being gay (hey, she didn't know her boss was a homophobe when she started working there), and there are people whose families would freak out if they knew.
One of the TLAs, probably NSA, once wanted to hire a guy who was gay, some time after it had stopped being illegal in most of the US. The deal they made was that he had to come out to his family, so it couldn't be used for blackmail. I
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That has been the policy since the 80s when I had to get clearance.
I was only 19 at the time and working for a contractor in college. It was interesting. They had to interview my girlfriend and her parents.
Yes if you are going to be in that situation you can not have any secrets. Frankly nothing will change that. If you want to do that kind of work you have to deal with it.
Just like you can not work as construction worker on a high rise if you are terrified of heights.
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I find it's easier (and more fun!) not to be ashamed by the things (and people!) I do.
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Re:It's about blackmail (Score:5, Insightful)
We all have gotten together with people we didn't want people to know.
Infidelity and other sexual indiscretions can easily damage or even ruin marriages and political careers. It doesn't really matter whether or not YOU are ashamed of what YOU did. What matters is what EVERYONE else thinks.
Blackmail will continue to work as long as your spouse and/or the voters care about what YOU have been up to.
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If you don't care if the public knows about your porn preferences then blackmail won't work. It's not like there's anyone who will vote you out of your cubicle if they discover your porn preferences.. If your spouse doesn't already know your porn preferences then you probably have some issues you need to work out.
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That's not what we're talking about here. We aren't talking about a highly public figure.
Right, so my comments about political career misses the mark a bit in this context, but the spouse/family aspect is still right on target.
We're talking about an employee who might want to keep something secret, like porn preferences.
Not really. Unless the porn preferences are illegal its not going to matter all that much to most people. I doubt anyone has ever really been successfully blackmailed with the fact that they
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"Revelations of infidelity and bisexuality/homosexuality will still be effective blackmail though, because they can still trash your marriage / family / personal relationships - whether you are ashamed or not."
Well bisexuality/homosexuality would be no use whatsoever for blackmail against people who turn up to the pride parade every year.
For a GOP senator on the other hand or someone who's "prayed the gay away" it would still be effective.
So weather you are ashamed or not can make a big difference.
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Bisexual.. How is that "blackmailable"?
I'm most likely bisexual, though I have yet to be with a guy yet. I am polyamorous. My direct GF has another guy as well as well as 2 GF's. Right now, four of the five of us live together.
However, it does NOT mean we're easy. They are committed relationships we have to each other. I'd do pretty much anything for them, as they would for me. It also means that for anybody to date one of us, we all agree.
And I even told my grandmother, who is extreme right wing Christian.
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And I even told my grandmother, who is extreme right wing Christian. She was happy that I was happy.
And that's where you immunise yourself against blackmail.
If on the other hand you for some reason decided you absolutely had to keep it from your family or some such then it would be great for blackmail.
the point is that anything you're hiding from someone is blackmail material.
And if you can be blackmailed easily then you're a security risk.
there's nothing special about being gay/bi.
It's merely a common thing people hide from their family/others.
Someone who's completely out of the closet has nothing to be
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Blackmail will continue to work as long as your spouse and/or the voters care about what YOU have been up to.
Slight correction: Blackmail will only continue to work to the degree that you care more about what other people think ('other people' includes spouse/voters/etc) about your past sexual history, than whatever the blackmailer is demanding. Although it is true that most politicians make themselves slaves to public opinion (kinda hard to get the job if you don't), I would avoid the assumption that all married people are ruled so absolutely by the cares/concerns/whims of their spouses. If you don't give a shit
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If you don't give a shit if your spouse finds out, even if your spouse would care a lot about it themselves, there is no leverage to blackmail.
If you didn't give a shit you wouldn't be keeping it a secret in the first place.
The fact that you are keeping it secret indicates that you put some value in it being a secret.
But I agree that 'how much value' you put into it remaining a secret is a personal valuation, that isn't directly tied to how upset they will be. ... but if you value your spouse highly, and yo
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:5, Insightful)
More accurately, people should stop caring about the crap other people do. Blackmail works if the people around you (your boss, your wife/family, your coworkers, your friends, your neighbors...) let it.
The spouse one is a big one. There can be big financial consequences involved there.
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sounds like you care alot about what other people do.
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Maybe people should just stop be ashamed by crap they do and not worry about it?
You might brag to everyone about whom you've slept with/are sleeping with but some people (especially women) consider their sex lives private if they had nothing to be worried about. The other part that made them nervous was the "unending" part of it considering that they never get near classified material.
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Re:It's about blackmail (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just blackmail. Stupid HR people may rarely work, but when they do it can be preventing people from getting jobs due to trivialities on their files. You'll even get a "40 and still a virgin - can't have him working here" response if that sort of thing is on file. Anything other than what the HR people consider ideal from their own personal background puts you at a disadvantage if it's on file. The only real answer is to never let them see this stuff if it is collected.
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Preyty stereotypical, considering the JPL scientists are annoyed not at HR, but Security.
And Security works a LOT. Your complaint might be that they work too much.
And that makes sense how?
I'm talking about additional stupidity not primary (Score:2)
The primary stupidity of security getting irrelevant information still applies, but I thought I'd mention the above as long term consequences from things that should be private trivia.
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Since the feds can't read your mind they have to play it safe.
If you have any secrets, they will assume someone can use them to blackmail you.
They have no idea of knowing how strong you are.
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The "sexual history" questions will unfortunately remain relevant in background checks for highly important/secret positions
The question is whether intrusive background checks are appropriate for scientists working on unclassified projects. I don't see what the "importance" of the project has to do with it. If they don't have access to national security secrets, why should the government be allowed to go on a fishing expedition through their private lives?
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:5, Insightful)
"The (intended) purpose of these questions is to determine if the applicant has anything in their past that would make particularly them subjective to blackmail."
Yes, but blackmail for what? The latest images from Mars? The shoestring budget numbers for a project? The motor control code for actuators? I think people have the perception that what goes on at JPL is top secret stuff when in fact just about all of it gets released to the public sooner than later. We're talking research-y stuff here. Not DOD. And where people might be working on DOD stuff then the security clearances come into play.
These abusive background checks might make a little more sense for those pursuing a secret clearance, but for the day-to-day activities at JPL they are just that. Abusive.
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I'm not commenting about the use of such interviews for the positions in this particular situation. I don't know the details, and can't be bothered to RTFA...
I'm just explaining what the purpose of those interview questions is at all, because it's something that may not be immediately obvious to all readers.
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I suspect the entire point is to hide the signal in the noise.
Then again, I suspect exactly the seem from /. I seem to be turning slightly paranoid.
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You make the assumption that someone working at JPL will always work at JPL. People get transferred to other jobs within thier organizations all the time. And there are parts of NASA that do work for DOD (putting secret satellites into orbit leaps to mind, there are probably many others).
You also make the assumption that JPL never does any research for or fills requests for any other government agency, or that the expertise of its staff are never called on for use in other departments.
It doesn't take a lo
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:5, Insightful)
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You make the assumption that someone working at JPL will always work at JPL. People get transferred to other jobs within thier organizations all the time. And there are parts of NASA that do work for DOD (putting secret satellites into orbit leaps to mind, there are probably many others).
You are making the assumption that your security clearance requirement (and subsequent check) never changes when your job changes. When you get a job with a higher clearance requirement, there will be a check. If you don't have any clearance, you will be investigated for one.
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:5, Informative)
No. I work at JPL. I've done classified work before. Just because I have done it in the past or might in the future implies nothing about whether I should have a background check for my current job. If I were to do classified work in my current job, I would need to regain my clearance. This is the same as if I decided to go work minimum wage at a fast food chain then went back to classified work.
Though I dont care for my own sake, since I've already gone through it for legitimate reasons, making all employees here go through it is absurd. My best understanding (I started well after they stopped issuing the badges, so I'm not certain of the details) is that it was an unassuming attempt to put a generic federal badging procedure, which normally applies to DOD contractors, for which the background check makes sense. However it should not apply to JPL or other NASA centers, and to me this lawsuit is against the idea that more security is always necessarily better, and should be applied without consideration for the civil liberties of federal contractors.
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You seem to be under the impression that JPL is part of NASA. It isn't; it's part of CalTech, and has a contract from NASA to conduct America's unmanned exploration of space. How do I know? I know because I worked at J
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Getting a security clearance on spec is worthless and wasteful.
Suppose Joe the new hire comes on board to do programming. He does not need security clearance but he gets one anyway, after passing all the tests and checks. Good for Joe. Fine upstanding citizen who doesn't speed, drink, or eat junk food (yes a fictional person, so what).
Five years down the line, he hasn't needed his clearance but suddenly he has the chance to move to a new position that does need clearance. He's got it, right? He's all
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If one is in the closet, it is usually for a pretty good reason. When you have people in this society that will literally get violent if they find that one is gay, one would have to be very careful who he tells in order to not get killed. Gays are still being murdered in this society. And if you get a boss who's belief system thinks that homosexuality is an affront to God or something like that, he has to cover themselves to have employment.
Everyone has something to hide - or I can make an
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Candidate A clearly cannot be blackmailed over a threat to expose their sexual preferences, but Candidate B could be either telling the truth
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Maybe sexual orientation should be like race...illegal to discriminate against.
Which is fine for security clearances (Score:2)
When you are talking about giving someone access to classified information, yes you need to make sure they have no skeletons in their closet, nothing that can be used as leverage. This means checking mundane things like credit history, and more taboo things like sexual history. The investigators for an SSBI doesn't care if you are gay, they are if you care that you are gay. If you are in the closet, well maybe someone could use that as leverage. If you are happy with who you are, no problem.
However, I don't
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in addition to blackmail, they might want to check if you're prone to talked about work.
Just off the top of my head... A monogamous married man is less of a risk than someone who bring a new girl home each nite in a drunken haze. The drumken haze guy could leave document around the house, tell random secrets, maybe gloat about some secret project, be tempted to let a hot Chinese spy into his home...
While a wife might find stuff out, she'll be less likely to spread it around knowing the husband's predicamen
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Any humor regarding sex. Or anything approaching honesty wrt sex, for that matter. It's not exactly new as a cultural phenomenon, but it still remains very fucked up, in the irrational sense. It's getting worse, in the national/media/political/legal sense. In the local/trust_friends/humor sense, perhaps better - but we don't make policy, and much prefer to stay un-advertised.
To anyone who can't parse that paragraph, well, you just ain't Old enough yet.
Sorry for the topical condens
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NASA is a civilian agency, not a "wing" of any branch of the military.
Military space operations are run by the USAF Space Command and/or SAC.
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How much evidence is there that such checks are effective though? Especially if they include such things as polygraphs...
Questions presented to the Supreme Court (Score:2, Informative)
At stake: whether all federal employees can be forced to undergo open-ended background checks
Really? I don't see that in the questions being answered by the supreme court. [supremecourt.gov]
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At stake: whether all federal employees can be forced to undergo open-ended background checks
Really? I don't see that in the questions being answered by the supreme court. [supremecourt.gov]
That would be question 2 in the link you provided.
Rethink of "security" (Score:2)
I'd be perfect (Score:2, Informative)
My sexual history fits on a post-it note.
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That's not all that much porn by 2010 standards.
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Dude, we fit pretty much the entire history of calculus on something not much larger than a post-it note. We were permitted one 3 by 5 index card of notes in some exams! You'd be amazed at what you can fit in such a small space when it really counts.
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Suspect? (Score:2, Insightful)
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, concerned about background checks now required of federal employees, sued NASA to suspect the checks back in 2007.
I always suspected the checks. Oh wait, did you mean suspend?
Catch-22: the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
American, huh?
We're All Safer For It (Score:2)
Suitability Matrix (Score:4, Informative)
By the way, here's a copy of the suitability matrix [hspd12jpl.org].
Deep Backgrounds (Score:2)
Sometimes those background checks are run without employees having a clue. I am of the belief that even for private sector jobs that our government is involved in those checks. And they are not always for positions that one might suspect that they would be run. I found out about this as a consequence of a burglary in which files were found by various employees.
And there is some good that can come from th
How you can help (Score:5, Informative)
As a named plaintiff in this lawsuit, I'm awfully happy to see the widespread support here on Slashdot. I'd like to be able to keep driving Mars rovers around without having to sign a form that says NASA can interrogate my priest, my doctor, my lawyer, my accountant, and my ISP to make sure I'm sufficiently uninteresting.
If you'd like to help, please consider donating [hspd12jpl.org] to keep our amazing legal team afloat. The privacy you save could be your own. Thank you!
Re:How you can help (Score:5, Informative)
An important thing to note is that the administration lied about the background checks. They stated that invasive personal background checks were required by a presidential directive called "HSPD-12". This, as it turns out, is incorrect.
The full text of HSPD-12 [dhs.gov] is available on the web. In fact, what it says is that the government identification cards should be difficult to forge. As a part of that, it said that the government should verify the identification of its employees before issuing identification cards. That's it. The only background check required it "check their ID."
Jack Parsons would've failed (Score:3, Funny)
Re:idiots (Score:4, Informative)
Everyone is put through normal background checks that should turn up things like "axe murder". And everyone is also at least obligated to pee in the cup if asked to. (I'm not sure if JPL runs randomized screening or just waits for probable cause.) But unless IBM is digging unusually deeply, your sexual history wasn't consider, nor were the histories of your friends and family. That's what's being disputed here.
Also, note that the scientists in question do no work on "gigantic bombs" or even on the rockets. They work on the robot probes which are in the vicinity of entirely different planets. There isn't much that they can to do you, even if they do snap and decide to hijack the probe. There's also very little that they know that any foreign government would pay for, in as much as said governments could wait a few months for the publication of the findings anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Sexual background checks are good in schools to prevent child molesters from teaching, however
Wouldn't that just come up in a normal background check under "criminal history"? You don't need to spend the time and money poking around asking who a teacher has dated or whether they're gay to learn that.
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