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!
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!
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:3, Insightful)
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 anything about you be turned into something that needs to be hidden.
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?
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.
Catch-22: the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:2, Insightful)
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 lot of imagination or experience working in a regular office to know that once they've graduated from the cubicle farm, employees are pretty mobile, and knowledge spreads like a virus.
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Go JPL (Score:1, Insightful)
Wherever you are, do us a favor and stay there.
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:3, Insightful)
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 like redheads in bondage porn.
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.
And illegal porn will of course be effective blackmail, along with any other blackmail involving crime.
Re:Go JPL (Score:3, Insightful)
"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:It's about blackmail (Score:3, Insightful)
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 you firmly believe that if they found out they would leave, then you will value the secret highly.
The point I made originally is that blackmail is not founded on a simple question of 'shame' but one of consequences.
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.
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.)
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. If it had been the Army, either under DADT or the previous Hunt Down The Queer Witches policy, blackmail would have still been a possibility even if his family was fine with it.
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:3, Insightful)
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:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:2, Insightful)
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 social engineering and not fall for it). Alternative better ideas would be neat if you have any?
Re:It's about blackmail (Score:1, Insightful)
Also, nations at war often tend to think it's the 50's again..
Re:Go JPL (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Questions presented to the Supreme Court (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Go JPL (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Go JPL (Score:3, Insightful)
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 the most immediate and painful impact on all of us. Scorecard aside, the fact that no one has been brought to justice for either of these crimes is cause for holding a grim outlook on the future of truth and justice.
Re:Go JPL (Score:2, Insightful)
Item 1, the housing bubble actually started before the dot-com bubble was even a dream, and merely accelerated exponentially during the late '90s and 00's. Item 2, when the dot-com bubble crashed, everybody who made it out with assets looked to put those assets into something. Real estate was very, very hot. Item 3, the infusion of dot-com money along with the tricks that were originally introduced to mitigate the pain of lawsuit avoiding but with high risk of default loans caused the bubble to inflate extremely quickly. Item 4, Bush tried to partially lance the bubble(It wouldn't have completely worked, although the actual crash may have been a bit softer) on at least 2 separate occasions, but was shouted down by the Dem peanut gallery, and Barney Frank in particular. Moreover, Bush didn't consider it important enough to expend significant political capital on, an obvious mistake on his part.
Re:Go JPL (Score:3, Insightful)
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.