> When I handed the form in to the security officer, he scanned it quickly, looked me over slowly, then said, ``Explain this''--pointing at the FBI question. I described what had happened. He got very agitated, picked up my form, tore it in pieces, and threw it in the waste basket.
> He then got out a blank form and handed it to me, saying ``Here, fill it out again and don't mention that. If you do, I'll make sure that you never get a security clearance.''
Everything fits into bins and categories with checkmarks and such. As an entity it has no "bin" for "investigated as Japanese spy as a joke when was a child". So you have to pick the closest bin that matches. However, that doesn't mean the same government later won't turn around also punish you for not picking the right "bin". Not "realizing" that it's its own fault for not having enough categories i.e. bins for you to pick. And, some may argue, that's a feature not a bug...
the challenge is always determining what the "bins" are.
maybe the government has no bin for "investegated by the FBI for a silly and innocuous reason". but maybe they do, and lying about it slots you into the bin for "lied on their security clearance form".
In the security space you’re encouraged to be as transparent as possible. Most modern forms have ample space to write in detailed explanations.
I have some silly not nearly as interesting infractions and I wrote them out in detail explaining, without any issue in processing background checks. It usually is something that’s asked about in an in person interview at that point.
The fact is that even for (NATO) top secret security clearances, there are lots of people that lie through their teeth, and receive the clearance. Obviously on things that aren't in any records. The big ones being alcohol use, drug use, personal finances, foreign partners. Some are more forgiving than others, though.
The military is unfortunately chock full of functional alcoholics. As long as they don't get caught drunk on the job, seen partying too much, DIU, or admit anything to their doctor, they keep getting renewed their clearance.
Interestingly enough, if there's even the smallest suspicious that you smoke weed, they'll put you through the wringer. I've seen more people lose their clearance for pissing hot, than those with six figure debts or drinking 5 days a week.
Yes and I am saying I am tired of those boring cop-out "analysis". Yes, having a social science degree, it was full of those. Make solutions instead. Anyone can """analyze""".
> Interestingly enough, if there's even the smallest suspicious that you smoke weed, they'll put you through the wringer. I've seen more people lose their clearance for pissing hot, than those with six figure debts or drinking 5 days a week.
I have to defer to you here since it sounds like my experience is more limited, but this is not my understanding at all. The agencies care a lot about financial indiscretions, as those applicants are most susceptible to compromise. And indeed, if you look at the lists of denials and appeals, you might think that money issues are the only reason anyone is ever denied.
> The military is unfortunately chock full of functional alcoholics. As long as they don't get caught drunk on the job, seen partying too much, DIU, or admit anything to their doctor, they keep getting renewed their clearance.
Well yeah. If it's not affecting your job then what's it matter? If your a closet alcoholic then sure that's something the Russians could hold over you.
There's millions of people with clearances; that's impossible to staff at below market wages and also above average moral(?) standards.
> If it's not affecting your job then what's it matter? If your a closet alcoholic then sure that's something the Russians could hold over you
Alcohol lowers inhibitions and alters decision making. Drinking a lot of alcohol more so than casual drinking. Frequently drinking a lot of alcohol has a very high area under the curve of poor decision making.
Functional alcoholism can come with delusions of sobriety where the person believes they’re not too drunk despite being heavily impaired.
So they’ll do things like have a few (or ten) drinks before checking their email. It makes them a better target for everything like fishing attacks, as one example.
It’s not just about enemies holding it against you.
I think you’re misunderstanding the threat model for why security clearance cares about impaired judgment of your off time, too. There’s more to these people’s lives than when they’re on the clock (figuratively speaking). Getting compromised anywhere is a problem.
The thing that is missed in most efforts to replace people with machines is how often the people that are being replaced are on the fly fixing the system the machine is intended to crystallize and automate.
This is what a lot of people miss about "AI will replace" programmers narrative.
When converting from a traditional process to an electronic one, half my job is twisting people's arms and playing mind reader trying to determine what they ACTUALLY do day-to-day instead of the hypothetical offical, documented, process.
Some of the workarounds that people do instead of updating the process are damn right unhinged.
Without going into details, just recently I was able to get pretty decent business requirements from group manager, but it seems the only reason I was able to get somewhat decent idea of what they actually do, is because there was certain level of trust since we worked together previously so there was no need to bs one another. I openly stated what I thought is doable and he seemed to understand that I need to know actual use cases.
edit: Otoh, my boss is kinda giving up on automating another group's process, because he seems to be getting a lot of 'it depends' answers.
I will say, in a lot of cases, they aren't BS-ing/lying with intent. Just the general way their minds work seemingly isn't compatible with the very idea of laying out the process in its entirety (inc. the warts/hacks/workarounds).
So what ultimately winds up happening is, you'll roll out the process according to the official way, and then it is drip-drip-drip of changes as you find out the real-world version.
> how often the people that are being replaced are on the fly fixing the system the machine is intended to crystallize and automate.
If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.
I have some experience doing automation work in small and large scale factories. When automating manufacturing work you almost always discover some flaws in the product or process that humans have been covering up as part of their job. These problems surface during the automation phase and get prioritized for fixes.
You might think you could accomplish the same thing by directly asking the people doing the work what could be improved, but in my experience they either don’t notice it any more because it’s part of their job or, in extreme cases, they like that the inefficiency exists because they think it provides extra job security.
I’m not so sure. They operate that way because of scale and economy (and tech that enables that). In a future where all industries are optimized in such way, very little will actually flow as most won’t have the money to buy goods, thus factories won’t make goods, thus shippers won’t ship, and the global economy grinds to a halt.
We need waste as much as we need investment. The trick is to find the value in between. I think the sweet spot will be augmenting work, not necessarily optimizing it.
That doesn't seem to make sense. As things get cheaper and wages go down too because there's an oversupply of labor, those poorer people can still afford those cheaper things.
When I joined the Air Force, they helped us fill out the clearance forms. One question was related to marijuana use in the past. The NCO helping us told us “if you have used it before, be honest. They will know.” But then followed it up with “remember: you used it less than 5 times and you didn’t like it”.
In Navy boot camp the person reviewing my security clearance application (which was filled out weeks before) was very helpful in the way he asked the critical question. “It says here you tried marijuana once. Is that true?”
It's easy to pass judgement on a decision like that when so far removed from the context where/when it took place.
It's likely that answering yes to that question meant an instant rejection for the clearance AND summer job. The FBI was probably not inclined to spend money looking into such an obviously trivial matter just so some kid could get some work experience. "Sorry, try the McDonald's down the street."
That security officer did the author an incredibly big favor.
And there's good reason for that. Someone with a clearance once explained to me that they're mainly worried about things that make you vulnerable to exploitation by foreign agents. If you're covering something up, that's something they can use to blackmail you.
But maybe if the thing you're revealing is "I myself was suspected to be a spy," that changes the calculus a bit.
> There is nothing morally wrong in felonies like this, just don't get caught.
Highly debatable. If you believe in a categorical imperative that to intentionally deceive another person is wrong, then lying by omission is still an immoral act. A Christian might also interpret the words of Jesus “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” as an imperative to comply fully with the law of the land.
I don't think it's all that debatable to say that deceiving people is categorically wrong, nor is it to say that it's immoral not to follow the laws of the land -- both are obviously untrue as absolute statements.
For extreme examples, would it be immoral to lie to the Gestapo about harboring Jews? Were people illegally helping slaves escape the American South being immoral?
There are many laws in many jurisdictions that are immoral. Following those laws would be an immoral act. Legality and morality should be aligned, but in the real world they often aren't.
If Jesus (assuming he existed, even, regardless of any sort of divinity) tells us that following the law is always the moral thing to do, then he was wrong.
He made a cypher with a school friend, which cypher was handed by a stranger to the FBI and investigated. That one possible outcome of the investigation might be 'the subject is a Japanese spy' doesn't mean _he_ was suspected of that; not by the FBI at least.
If he said, "I made a cypher in school", then likely the form would have been considered fine? Presumably his record clearly showed the FBI incident, so I'm surprised that lying in the second form didn't cause concern sufficient to question him. But there you go; I've never had any associations with TLAs, what would I know.
The reasoning for some of these questions is that if you are caught, it’s sometimes easier to charge you with fraud (lying on the form) than the actual thing (such as espionage).
There's often also some arbitrage on standard of proof or statutes of limitation or jurisdiction.
Maybe to deport you for espionage requires a jury trial, but to revoke status for misleading answers on an immigration form is administrative and so is deportation for lack of status.
I seem to recall some extraordinary cases where untruthful answers on immigration forms were used to justify denaturalization.
Thats why I presume its asking about previous engagements, if they catch someone they suspect of espionage, dig into their background and find proof of previous activity they have a clear fraud charge without having to prove their suspicions about current activities.
The fact you worked for an intelligence agency doesn’t mean you were an intelligence officer. You could’ve been a cleaner, or an executive assistant, or maybe you were working as a software developer on the payroll system.
Those forms also ask if you've ever been a member of a communist party, and basically everyone over 35 in all of Eastern Europe would have to check that one (they don't, if they want to enter the US)
People born in the 90s wouldn’t have a chance to be old enough to belong to any group other than a preschool before the collapse of the Soviet and Soviet aligned regimes.
For those who were adults before 1990, while they may have been party members for reasons unrelated to political ideology, it wasn’t as common: in the late 80s, only ~10% of adults in Warsaw pact countries were communist party members. Far from “everyone”.
And even if you check that in the DS-160 visa application form, you are allowed to add an explanation. Consular visa officers are very well familiar with the political situation at the countries they are stationed in, and can grant visa even if the box is checked.
Yes, my sense of the passage of time is a little off. I've met folks who were members of the FDJ in East Germany as young teens, but as you say, they are 50-ish now.
I ran a dial-up BBS in the late 1990s. One summer a few of my loyal users suddenly stopped calling.
About a year later I learned that one of my users hacked an airport. At the time a few of my users would set their computers to dial random numbers and find modems answering. One of the numbers was a very strange system with no password. The story I heard was that they didn't know what the system was, because it had no identifying information. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/doj-charges-...
> the hacker left behind a calling card by changing the system identification name to "Jester."
> The attack on the branch of an unidentified major pharmacy chain occurred on four separate occasions from January through March of last year. The hacker acquired the names, contact information, and prescriptions for the pharmacy's customers
I think the story you heard was a watered down version of what they were doing. You can’t do things like exfiltrate data from a pharmacy database and not know what the system you’re attacking is for.
Not on the same scale as AI, but my first ever AirBnB host still owns harley.com. He made his money writing "The Yellow Pages of the Internet" physical books and had turned down numerous lucrative offers from Harley Davidson.
Really fascinating and quirky guy as you can probably infer from the site.
I admire people who don't lie about past drug use on their clearance forms. Sure, it might delay their clearance, but I still admire them.
The core social problem with drug addiction and alcoholicism is this concept of telling people what you think they want to hear from you, not telling them the truth.
This happened to my mom when being interviewed when coming over here in the 60s.
During verbal questioning she said something like “of course”. The government agent turned deep red and asked her if she understood the question (English isn’t her first language and she hadn’t). She’s been here since.
I kind of get that the agent is looking out for the applicant in this story. You have no idea what’s going to happen when you do a security clearance thing and they ask about this and that. How serious is the wrong answer.
Excepting my favorite question which something like “have you ever tried to topple the government?”
The system is messed up when screening for honesty encourages people to lie.
I once worked at a top financial firm which had regular background checks from Pinkerton (yeah, that very agency from the books and with bad US history).
They sent me a questionnaire asking to fill personal details in a Word file while their email signature said not to disclose personal details over email.
Security clearance business is rotten to the core.
This story was written in another text also and discussed on HN. It was longer and the author also described how later in life he introduced a standard to wear hemlets on bicycle competitions. (Sorry, I dont have a link handy)
Security 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
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.
> On another occasion much later, I learned by chance that putting certain provocative information on a security clearance form can greatly speed up the clearance process. But that is another story.
Presumably this is the famous (?) story of him listing his race as “mongrel” whenever asked?
When I was 15, a couple months short of 16, I ended up working as a student intern at a research facility. They required a clearance to badge into and out of the building, but I never worked on anything that directly needed the clearance.
So I was given the form to fill in and read the question:
Since you were 16, or in the last 7 seven years, have you ever smoked weed?
So I thought, I guess I better think back to when I was 8!
> On another occasion much later, I learned by chance that putting certain provocative information on a security clearance form can greatly speed up the clearance process. But that is another story.
Investigating a cryptographic key found near a major military installation during war time doesn’t strike me as a waste of money. We have the full information about the outcome, but the San Diego FBI field office did not.
I think that’s what makes this story so funny- the FBI was acting appropriately and rationally, but ended up with a relatively absurd result.
It's not funny. It's a dag-gone jobs program. ICE, TSA, and more throw away billions to effect little but a heavy burden on the population. These organizations, FBI and other law enforcement included, invent crises and problems so as to secure even more funding.
Maybe the individual investigator in the story is excepted considering it seems he took it seriously, perhaps, but yes, a lot of money is intentionally thrown into these organizations for security theater, jobs programs, and padding the pockets of political friends and cronies.
What we should be worried about is how many legitimate threats fly under the radar because time and again these organizations have been proven to be highly ineffective at actually preventing what their charters mandate, but they can appear to be very visibly effective by incarcerating thousands of innocent people.
I mean, in this case the government spent thousands because there was a small amount of circumstantial evidence that suggested there was clandestine communication happening during wartime.
What was the immediate government spending on Japanese American internment, where there was no evidence or investigation into the ~120k people whose lives were disrupted, and who were transported, housed, fed and guarded for multiple years?
Arguably, spending thousands on investigating something specific is less wasteful than the alternatives the government was willing to take at that time.
I have a somewhat similar story involving the death of an extremely elderly neighbor by an accident on his farm,
and the suspicion by the state police that I at 12 years old had murdered him, based solely on someone saying they thought they saw me messing with his mailbox from a car that was similar to the one parked in our driveway. The mailbox which stood directly next to ours at the end of an easily walkable driveway. So yes, Mr. SF-86, I had once been investigated for a felony. Oh, you're only supposed to tell the truth if the truth will help the government catch to a bad guy? Very impressive system, sir. Top notch.
> When I handed the form in to the security officer, he scanned it quickly, looked me over slowly, then said, ``Explain this''--pointing at the FBI question. I described what had happened. He got very agitated, picked up my form, tore it in pieces, and threw it in the waste basket.
> He then got out a blank form and handed it to me, saying ``Here, fill it out again and don't mention that. If you do, I'll make sure that you never get a security clearance.''
It's important to "see like the government" when dealing with the government (pun on "seeing like a bank" by https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ if anyone didn't catch the reference).
Everything fits into bins and categories with checkmarks and such. As an entity it has no "bin" for "investigated as Japanese spy as a joke when was a child". So you have to pick the closest bin that matches. However, that doesn't mean the same government later won't turn around also punish you for not picking the right "bin". Not "realizing" that it's its own fault for not having enough categories i.e. bins for you to pick. And, some may argue, that's a feature not a bug...
Not sure if you were maybe joking, but Seeing like a Bank is itself a pun on the famous book "Seeing like a state"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
So you've come almost full circle!
It is the full circle! patio11 refers to that explicitly in the blog. But most people here probably saw and remember Pat's blog more than the book.
The danger isn't just being risky, it's being anomalous
the challenge is always determining what the "bins" are.
maybe the government has no bin for "investegated by the FBI for a silly and innocuous reason". but maybe they do, and lying about it slots you into the bin for "lied on their security clearance form".
In the security space you’re encouraged to be as transparent as possible. Most modern forms have ample space to write in detailed explanations.
I have some silly not nearly as interesting infractions and I wrote them out in detail explaining, without any issue in processing background checks. It usually is something that’s asked about in an in person interview at that point.
The fact is that even for (NATO) top secret security clearances, there are lots of people that lie through their teeth, and receive the clearance. Obviously on things that aren't in any records. The big ones being alcohol use, drug use, personal finances, foreign partners. Some are more forgiving than others, though.
The military is unfortunately chock full of functional alcoholics. As long as they don't get caught drunk on the job, seen partying too much, DIU, or admit anything to their doctor, they keep getting renewed their clearance.
Interestingly enough, if there's even the smallest suspicious that you smoke weed, they'll put you through the wringer. I've seen more people lose their clearance for pissing hot, than those with six figure debts or drinking 5 days a week.
The Vietnam War and all the soldiers on drugs encouraged a very strict drug policy.
A lot of that comes down to what's objectively verifiable vs what's discretionary, and also what's culturally normalized inside the org.
Are you saying weed should be punished less, or the others should be punished like weed?
I think they’re saying that there is an inconsistency, but they don’t suggest anything, leaving any conclusions to the reader.
It’s just “things aren’t right”, and not “here’s what we need to do…”
Yes and I am saying I am tired of those boring cop-out "analysis". Yes, having a social science degree, it was full of those. Make solutions instead. Anyone can """analyze""".
I'm not sure security clearance is really about punishing people.
You know exactly what I mean. Chased after, investigated?
I think I'm less confident that I know what you mean now than I was before.
Who are you replying to? When I click 'parent' on your post, the poster said nothing about his opinion on what should be done, only what he's seen.
> I've seen more people lose their clearance for pissing hot
When? In the 90s? Biggest pothead I know has had a clearance since '05. For my own form, I straight up admitted I had done it and did not regret it.
> Interestingly enough, if there's even the smallest suspicious that you smoke weed, they'll put you through the wringer. I've seen more people lose their clearance for pissing hot, than those with six figure debts or drinking 5 days a week.
I have to defer to you here since it sounds like my experience is more limited, but this is not my understanding at all. The agencies care a lot about financial indiscretions, as those applicants are most susceptible to compromise. And indeed, if you look at the lists of denials and appeals, you might think that money issues are the only reason anyone is ever denied.
Lying about having smoked weed is another story.
> The military is unfortunately chock full of functional alcoholics. As long as they don't get caught drunk on the job, seen partying too much, DIU, or admit anything to their doctor, they keep getting renewed their clearance.
Well yeah. If it's not affecting your job then what's it matter? If your a closet alcoholic then sure that's something the Russians could hold over you.
There's millions of people with clearances; that's impossible to staff at below market wages and also above average moral(?) standards.
> If it's not affecting your job then what's it matter? If your a closet alcoholic then sure that's something the Russians could hold over you
Alcohol lowers inhibitions and alters decision making. Drinking a lot of alcohol more so than casual drinking. Frequently drinking a lot of alcohol has a very high area under the curve of poor decision making.
Functional alcoholism can come with delusions of sobriety where the person believes they’re not too drunk despite being heavily impaired.
So they’ll do things like have a few (or ten) drinks before checking their email. It makes them a better target for everything like fishing attacks, as one example.
It’s not just about enemies holding it against you.
Gross misunderstanding of the threat model.
Phishing is not the problem here. Your laptop isn’t getting SIPR emails with links to fake login screens.
I think you’re misunderstanding the threat model for why security clearance cares about impaired judgment of your off time, too. There’s more to these people’s lives than when they’re on the clock (figuratively speaking). Getting compromised anywhere is a problem.
Being drunk at the bar/club/social event and telling that very interested lady a bit too much is probably the better example
Still not as bad as being susceptible to blackmail or bribes
In case you want to read about the proactive information speeding up your security clearance: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/6/50
Thanks for posting. That's actually a much more interesting story.
Thank you. I was wondering about that.
This sounds a bit like Feynman. I wonder whether it was more the style of the time.
Boggles the mind that the advice from the security was to lie on the form, which is almost certainly a felony.
The thing that is missed in most efforts to replace people with machines is how often the people that are being replaced are on the fly fixing the system the machine is intended to crystallize and automate.
This is what a lot of people miss about "AI will replace" programmers narrative.
When converting from a traditional process to an electronic one, half my job is twisting people's arms and playing mind reader trying to determine what they ACTUALLY do day-to-day instead of the hypothetical offical, documented, process.
Some of the workarounds that people do instead of updating the process are damn right unhinged.
Without going into details, just recently I was able to get pretty decent business requirements from group manager, but it seems the only reason I was able to get somewhat decent idea of what they actually do, is because there was certain level of trust since we worked together previously so there was no need to bs one another. I openly stated what I thought is doable and he seemed to understand that I need to know actual use cases.
edit: Otoh, my boss is kinda giving up on automating another group's process, because he seems to be getting a lot of 'it depends' answers.
I will say, in a lot of cases, they aren't BS-ing/lying with intent. Just the general way their minds work seemingly isn't compatible with the very idea of laying out the process in its entirety (inc. the warts/hacks/workarounds).
So what ultimately winds up happening is, you'll roll out the process according to the official way, and then it is drip-drip-drip of changes as you find out the real-world version.
> how often the people that are being replaced are on the fly fixing the system the machine is intended to crystallize and automate.
If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.
I have some experience doing automation work in small and large scale factories. When automating manufacturing work you almost always discover some flaws in the product or process that humans have been covering up as part of their job. These problems surface during the automation phase and get prioritized for fixes.
You might think you could accomplish the same thing by directly asking the people doing the work what could be improved, but in my experience they either don’t notice it any more because it’s part of their job or, in extreme cases, they like that the inefficiency exists because they think it provides extra job security.
> If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.
And the system is always broken. Reality is messy, systems are rigid, there always has to be a permissive layer somewhere in the interface.
This is exactly why “automation” hasn’t taken _that_ many jobs. It is a totally overlooked detail. Thanks for the reminder.
Some industrial shipping docks can be managed by a very small crew. I think this is the metaphor for what's going to happen to a lot of industries.
I’m not so sure. They operate that way because of scale and economy (and tech that enables that). In a future where all industries are optimized in such way, very little will actually flow as most won’t have the money to buy goods, thus factories won’t make goods, thus shippers won’t ship, and the global economy grinds to a halt.
We need waste as much as we need investment. The trick is to find the value in between. I think the sweet spot will be augmenting work, not necessarily optimizing it.
That doesn't seem to make sense. As things get cheaper and wages go down too because there's an oversupply of labor, those poorer people can still afford those cheaper things.
dark factory
And then, how often they aren't[0]
[0]: "Computer Says No" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU
When I joined the Air Force, they helped us fill out the clearance forms. One question was related to marijuana use in the past. The NCO helping us told us “if you have used it before, be honest. They will know.” But then followed it up with “remember: you used it less than 5 times and you didn’t like it”.
I remember similar advice.
In Navy boot camp the person reviewing my security clearance application (which was filled out weeks before) was very helpful in the way he asked the critical question. “It says here you tried marijuana once. Is that true?”
It's easy to pass judgement on a decision like that when so far removed from the context where/when it took place.
It's likely that answering yes to that question meant an instant rejection for the clearance AND summer job. The FBI was probably not inclined to spend money looking into such an obviously trivial matter just so some kid could get some work experience. "Sorry, try the McDonald's down the street."
That security officer did the author an incredibly big favor.
It’s also odd, because usually, as long as you don’t lie on your security form, you’ll get your clearance.
The coverup is always worse than the original sin.
And there's good reason for that. Someone with a clearance once explained to me that they're mainly worried about things that make you vulnerable to exploitation by foreign agents. If you're covering something up, that's something they can use to blackmail you.
But maybe if the thing you're revealing is "I myself was suspected to be a spy," that changes the calculus a bit.
Clearance forms are weird in that they're not just legal documents, they're inputs into an investigative process
If it is plausible that you did not remember, it's not a felony. Something that happened for 12-years old is easy to forget.
There is nothing morally wrong in felonies like this, just don't get caught.
Not remembering is one thing, but if they find out during the vetting process, and then they ask you about it, your answers had better be forthright.
> There is nothing morally wrong in felonies like this, just don't get caught.
Highly debatable. If you believe in a categorical imperative that to intentionally deceive another person is wrong, then lying by omission is still an immoral act. A Christian might also interpret the words of Jesus “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” as an imperative to comply fully with the law of the land.
Mala in se vs. mala prohibita.
I don't think it's all that debatable to say that deceiving people is categorically wrong, nor is it to say that it's immoral not to follow the laws of the land -- both are obviously untrue as absolute statements.
For extreme examples, would it be immoral to lie to the Gestapo about harboring Jews? Were people illegally helping slaves escape the American South being immoral?
There are many laws in many jurisdictions that are immoral. Following those laws would be an immoral act. Legality and morality should be aligned, but in the real world they often aren't.
If Jesus (assuming he existed, even, regardless of any sort of divinity) tells us that following the law is always the moral thing to do, then he was wrong.
Probably thought he was joking around. This was for a summer internship after all.
He wasn't investigated though. His missing glasses and hobby were. Once they found out the owner was not worth investigation, it was dropped.
He was TWELVE at the time the "investigation" happened, and he clearly wasn't engaged as a suspect. His mother was.
He had no obligation to put that on security clearance form whatsoever.
He lied originally, kinda.
He made a cypher with a school friend, which cypher was handed by a stranger to the FBI and investigated. That one possible outcome of the investigation might be 'the subject is a Japanese spy' doesn't mean _he_ was suspected of that; not by the FBI at least.
If he said, "I made a cypher in school", then likely the form would have been considered fine? Presumably his record clearly showed the FBI incident, so I'm surprised that lying in the second form didn't cause concern sufficient to question him. But there you go; I've never had any associations with TLAs, what would I know.
The travel forms to visit the US ask if people have ever been involved in espionage, at least they did, I'm not aware that it's changed.
You can guarantee the many people who work for intelligence agencies of US allies aren't admitting to that when they travel to the US.
It's all a bit of a game.
The reasoning for some of these questions is that if you are caught, it’s sometimes easier to charge you with fraud (lying on the form) than the actual thing (such as espionage).
Wouldn't they need the be able to prove that you are a spy in order to argue that you lied ? In which case who cares about the form ?
There's often also some arbitrage on standard of proof or statutes of limitation or jurisdiction.
Maybe to deport you for espionage requires a jury trial, but to revoke status for misleading answers on an immigration form is administrative and so is deportation for lack of status.
I seem to recall some extraordinary cases where untruthful answers on immigration forms were used to justify denaturalization.
Thats why I presume its asking about previous engagements, if they catch someone they suspect of espionage, dig into their background and find proof of previous activity they have a clear fraud charge without having to prove their suspicions about current activities.
Proving you worked for a spy agency is far easier than proving you did spying in actuality. Assuming you didn't get caught in the act.
The fact you worked for an intelligence agency doesn’t mean you were an intelligence officer. You could’ve been a cleaner, or an executive assistant, or maybe you were working as a software developer on the payroll system.
But they're required by laws of their own country to lie, presumably. There are certainly game-like aspects.
Those forms also ask if you've ever been a member of a communist party, and basically everyone over 35 in all of Eastern Europe would have to check that one (they don't, if they want to enter the US)
Every statement in the above comment is wrong:
People born in the 90s wouldn’t have a chance to be old enough to belong to any group other than a preschool before the collapse of the Soviet and Soviet aligned regimes.
For those who were adults before 1990, while they may have been party members for reasons unrelated to political ideology, it wasn’t as common: in the late 80s, only ~10% of adults in Warsaw pact countries were communist party members. Far from “everyone”.
And even if you check that in the DS-160 visa application form, you are allowed to add an explanation. Consular visa officers are very well familiar with the political situation at the countries they are stationed in, and can grant visa even if the box is checked.
Do you mean everyone who was 18 by 1989, or 55 today?
Yes, my sense of the passage of time is a little off. I've met folks who were members of the FDJ in East Germany as young teens, but as you say, they are 50-ish now.
"Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage, or genocide?"
Quite.
I mean, his name is Les Earnest, they should expect it.
I ran a dial-up BBS in the late 1990s. One summer a few of my loyal users suddenly stopped calling.
About a year later I learned that one of my users hacked an airport. At the time a few of my users would set their computers to dial random numbers and find modems answering. One of the numbers was a very strange system with no password. The story I heard was that they didn't know what the system was, because it had no identifying information. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/doj-charges-...
> the hacker left behind a calling card by changing the system identification name to "Jester."
> The attack on the branch of an unidentified major pharmacy chain occurred on four separate occasions from January through March of last year. The hacker acquired the names, contact information, and prescriptions for the pharmacy's customers
I think the story you heard was a watered down version of what they were doing. You can’t do things like exfiltrate data from a pharmacy database and not know what the system you’re attacking is for.
(1988) and real cute
From an OG computer scientist [0], about antics at age 12 which might strike some of us as familiar :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Earnest
I got distracted by how incredible owning milk.com is
https://milk.com/value/
Also the server header is "lactoserv"
The FAQ is super informative!
https://milk.com/faq/
I miss the Grate book of MOO lore from Usenet
Is it allowed to lol on HN?
You are welcome to lol silently.
Which is a real server, no less!
https://github.com/danfuzz/lactoserv
purple.com had a similar page for years, and eventually the mattress company rolled up with a dumptruck load of cash
He used to (maybe still does) have a page where he talked about turning down millions of dollars for it.
See the link above. He’s willing to part with it for 10 million
Almost as cool as owning ai.com!!
Buying AI.com for an AI company just shows they have more money than imagination. Many such cases during the dot-com era (pets.com, mp3.com).
The real flex would be for AI.com to have nothing to do with AI whatsoever.
Not on the same scale as AI, but my first ever AirBnB host still owns harley.com. He made his money writing "The Yellow Pages of the Internet" physical books and had turned down numerous lucrative offers from Harley Davidson.
Really fascinating and quirky guy as you can probably infer from the site.
Similarly, the guy who owned nissan.com never sold out and continues to spite Nissan Motors even in death.
https://nissan.com/
You've got to actually use a trademark-adjacent domain in good faith though, otherwise you might get the rug pulled from under you.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69634055/75-million-dolla...
> The real flex would be for AI.com to have nothing to do with AI whatsoever
Apple Intelligence?
Apple Inc. was right there man.
Talk about missing the low hanging fruit!
;)
How do you feel about x.com?
In an incredible coincidence, I just yesterday listened to a podcast episode that discussed milk.com.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5526903/domain-name-val...
I admire people who don't lie about past drug use on their clearance forms. Sure, it might delay their clearance, but I still admire them.
The core social problem with drug addiction and alcoholicism is this concept of telling people what you think they want to hear from you, not telling them the truth.
This happened to my mom when being interviewed when coming over here in the 60s. During verbal questioning she said something like “of course”. The government agent turned deep red and asked her if she understood the question (English isn’t her first language and she hadn’t). She’s been here since.
I kind of get that the agent is looking out for the applicant in this story. You have no idea what’s going to happen when you do a security clearance thing and they ask about this and that. How serious is the wrong answer.
Excepting my favorite question which something like “have you ever tried to topple the government?”
The system is messed up when screening for honesty encourages people to lie.
I suspect that's why experienced officers sometimes intervene like in the OP's story
I once worked at a top financial firm which had regular background checks from Pinkerton (yeah, that very agency from the books and with bad US history).
They sent me a questionnaire asking to fill personal details in a Word file while their email signature said not to disclose personal details over email.
Security clearance business is rotten to the core.
This story was written in another text also and discussed on HN. It was longer and the author also described how later in life he introduced a standard to wear hemlets on bicycle competitions. (Sorry, I dont have a link handy)
Security 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
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.
So something uncomfortable about clearance processes: they're not purely about truth, they're about interpretable truth
Not related to this story, but this one https://milk.com/true-stories/stupid_computer_users.txt was hilarious :)
Related. Others?
What not to write on your security clearance form (1988) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34437937 - Jan 2023 (545 comments)
What Not To Write On Your Security Clearance Form - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444653 - June 2010 (98 comments)
"the most frequently occurring letters in typical English text are e-t-a-o-n-r-i." But "Wheel of Fortune" told me to guess R-N-S-T-L-E!
It's not contradictory. Wheel of Fortune only gives you one vowel for free, e is the most common, same as here.
Wheel of Fortune gives you several consonants, order matters less, and both lists share n r and t.
Wonder if author name is Alice
"Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?"
For context: Alice's Restaurant Massacree [1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaKIX6oaSLs
Note the date, it's April 1 1988.
It's obvious the real spy was Bob.
Bob AKA "Satoshi-san".
> On another occasion much later, I learned by chance that putting certain provocative information on a security clearance form can greatly speed up the clearance process. But that is another story.
Presumably this is the famous (?) story of him listing his race as “mongrel” whenever asked?
When I was 15, a couple months short of 16, I ended up working as a student intern at a research facility. They required a clearance to badge into and out of the building, but I never worked on anything that directly needed the clearance.
So I was given the form to fill in and read the question: Since you were 16, or in the last 7 seven years, have you ever smoked weed?
So I thought, I guess I better think back to when I was 8!
> On another occasion much later, I learned by chance that putting certain provocative information on a security clearance form can greatly speed up the clearance process. But that is another story.
I have to know this now...
Here you go: https://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html
What a wholesome guy. Thanks for the read
I find it a little funny how much the government spends on these dead end investigations. We never will know precisely how much is wasted.
Investigating a cryptographic key found near a major military installation during war time doesn’t strike me as a waste of money. We have the full information about the outcome, but the San Diego FBI field office did not.
I think that’s what makes this story so funny- the FBI was acting appropriately and rationally, but ended up with a relatively absurd result.
If a Japanese spy knew this would happen, they could waste enormous amounts of time by spreading unused keys around San Diego.
It's not funny. It's a dag-gone jobs program. ICE, TSA, and more throw away billions to effect little but a heavy burden on the population. These organizations, FBI and other law enforcement included, invent crises and problems so as to secure even more funding.
Maybe the individual investigator in the story is excepted considering it seems he took it seriously, perhaps, but yes, a lot of money is intentionally thrown into these organizations for security theater, jobs programs, and padding the pockets of political friends and cronies.
What we should be worried about is how many legitimate threats fly under the radar because time and again these organizations have been proven to be highly ineffective at actually preventing what their charters mandate, but they can appear to be very visibly effective by incarcerating thousands of innocent people.
And then when something big happens, everybody and their dog starts screaming “how could this happen?!?”
You can’t have it both ways… (not specifically directed at you.)
I mean, in this case the government spent thousands because there was a small amount of circumstantial evidence that suggested there was clandestine communication happening during wartime.
What was the immediate government spending on Japanese American internment, where there was no evidence or investigation into the ~120k people whose lives were disrupted, and who were transported, housed, fed and guarded for multiple years?
Arguably, spending thousands on investigating something specific is less wasteful than the alternatives the government was willing to take at that time.
Just how little space was there on the form? I think I would have tried something like:
"When I was 12 years old, I exchanged encrypted messages with friends. The FBI found a code and briefly thought I was a spy."
Or, if there was even less space:
“As child, used encryption for fun. FBI found code & investigated.”
I would want to avoid lying at all costs, even if a superior instructed me to. Who knows what could happen.
I have a somewhat similar story involving the death of an extremely elderly neighbor by an accident on his farm, and the suspicion by the state police that I at 12 years old had murdered him, based solely on someone saying they thought they saw me messing with his mailbox from a car that was similar to the one parked in our driveway. The mailbox which stood directly next to ours at the end of an easily walkable driveway. So yes, Mr. SF-86, I had once been investigated for a felony. Oh, you're only supposed to tell the truth if the truth will help the government catch to a bad guy? Very impressive system, sir. Top notch.
The modern SF-86 only asks about charged, not investigated (and AFAIR, that was the case also 20 years ago).
(And arrested, but presumably you were not).