I had the exact same experience when applying for a clearance while I was in college, for the "have you taken illegal drugs" question. When I honestly answered yes, the interviewer got fidgety and then asked, "well do you take them now?" no. "Do you know any drug users?" We're on a college campus, what would you like me to say? "Well, are you friends with any of them?" Again, we're on a college campus. "Ok, well, we're just going to put down no for all of that."
My first clearance interview, about 10 years ago, it was all going along just fine. I had the standard litany of "bad" things any early 20-something American guy gets into - a few mushroom trips, an alcohol ticket, friends from foreign countries. No deal-breakers so long as you are honest and I answered honestly.
The only stumbling block came when the interviewer asked "have you smoked marijuana?". I truthfully answered no. The interviewer suddenly changed from bored old lady to the hardened, ex-cop that I suspect she was, glared into my soul and asked again. "No", I answered once again. "Well, that does not check out with your background. We will have to ask around on that one." She did ask around, my friends corroborated my story and I got the clearance.
My background involved undergrad education at a #1 party school, in a college town where open marijuana usage was common well before being legalized. And I had casual experimentation with other drugs (the aforementioned shrooms) and plenty of alcohol usage. I was probably the only one in my college acquaintance circle that didn't smoke on a semi-regular basis. I sometimes think I could have lied and said "yes I smoked weed", and still gotten the clearance. It would have actually been less of a red flag for the investigator(s).
I knew several guys in the military who had never smoked weed. Their recruiters had them lie on their applications and say they had smoked it because they feared nobody would believe them and their honesty would be questioned. This was such a common experience that it was almost a trope: the only people who have to lie about their marijuana history are those who have never used it.
On the other hand, I also never smoked weed and I said so on my application, and nobody ever gave me trouble about it. Maybe I just looked like enough of a square for it to be believable.
I don't understand why the US is so full on about marijuana. I've heard this is a major thing in federalinterviews but other much more scary drugs are not.
What's the hangup with this particular drug that's actually legal in many states?
Ps: I've been asked that question too in less formal settings and I always truthfully say no which does raise some eyebrows as I'm Dutch :) But I've really never done it. Not counting all the second hand smoke around me though.
A great deal of government positions involve carrying a gun. Having a gun and being a pot user is a felony with 10+ years in jail. It's one of the most serious non-violent offenses for mere personal use possession on the books.
It's also very easy to detect because pot stays in your system longer than about any other drug and the penalty for pot use by non-firearm owners is so weak and unenforced that people often forget it is a very severe crime for the ~40% of US that owns arms. People mistakenly get nonchalant about it.
The flip side is that someone hoping to prosecute a "pot user" for being such while obtaining a firearm would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the suspect was indeed a "pot user" at the time one answered the question.
I've submitted to no less than five background checks for purchasing firearms. My ID has also been scanned at multiple dispensaries in the same state as those background checks. Not once has the latter caused any issue with the former - in all likelihood because "I at one point set foot in a dispensary" != "I actually purchased something in that dispensary" != "I actually consumed something purchased from that dispensary" != "I was a user of something purchased from that dispensary at the time that I answered a question about whether or not I use federally-controlled substances".
Maybe if background checks included drug tests this would be a practical concern, but as it stands, unless you show up to the gun store stoned out of your gourd (hell, even then), there is little opportunity to demonstrate "the defendant lied about not being a user of illicit substances at the time one purchased the firearm".
I can not give you legal advice but only tell you my personal understanding for entertainment purposes. And my personal understanding is that the same prohibition applies even for possessing it, not just when you acquire it. My non-lawyer mind it's pretty clear under 18 USC 922.
At the end of the day the feds got a warrant to drag me to the hospital and internally search my body for drugs because third party hearsay that an anonymous cop said an anonymous dog supposedly said I had drugs (there were none and their search was fruitless). If third party hearsay is good enough for a warrant why wouldn't video evidence or ID scan of you at the gun store and the pot shop? Sure you can claim "well the test at the hospital shows metabolites and the video shows buying weed and guns but hey you can't prove I actually used weed" but good luck with that.
The relevant bit(s) would be "It shall be unlawful for any person [...] who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802)) [...] to ship or transport in interstate or foreign commerce, or possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition; or to receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce."
So a prosecutor would need to prove that I was "an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance" at the time that I received a firearm or ammunition that has crossed my state's borders (which would presumably be nearly all the firearms and ammunition I own, but still). There's also the parallel prohibition on the seller's end (and another one involving the actual background check questions), with the same present-tense language of "is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance".
> If third party hearsay is good enough for a warrant why wouldn't video evidence of you at the gun store and the pot shop?
A warrant != a conviction. The video evidence of me at both stores would not establish that I was "an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance" at the time that I took possession of the firearm.
Now, if there was video evidence of me smoking a phat blunt right outside the gun store before walking in and walking back out with a firearm, then yeah, that'd be a slam dunk case (assuming the prosecutor could convince a jury that it was indeed cannabis I was smoking). Likewise, if I was actually tested for cannabis in my system and the tests indicated that it was indeed in my system at the time I took possession of the firearm, then that would similarly be a slam dunk case.
(I guess even in the latter case I could maybe argue "yeah, I was an unlawful user, but I quit before buying the gun", but that defense is pretty weak if it's still in my system; I reckon it'd be stronger if I was sober for an actually-significant amount of time.)
Barring those? I ain't a lawyer, either, but my personal understanding is that the present-tense wording leaves a loophole big enough to drive a truck through it. Obviously the safest bet is to not rely on that being the case, but it's pretty easy to answer "No" to "Are you an illegal user of or addicted to any controlled substance?" without it being a felonious lie.
Doesn't this mean that the prohibition of using such substances doesn't apply just to the moment of purchase, but to the whole period of time that you posses a firearm? I'm not a lawyer either and I'm not even American, but this is how I would interpret it. Also it would make little sense to have a law saying that you can't be a user of illegal drugs at the moment of purchase of a firearm, but you can start using such substances afterwards.
It would apply as it pertains to being "in or affecting commerce"; it'd be quite the stretch to apply that to possession outside the immediate context of a purchase/sale/transfer, though I suppose it wouldn't be the first time the Feds abused the ever-loving hell out of the Commerce Clause. Maybe taking a gun across state lines while high would qualify?
> Also it would make little sense to have a law saying that you can't be a user of illegal drugs at the moment of purchase of a firearm, but you can start using such substances afterwards.
The law in question derives from the federal government's Constitutional authority to regulate interstate and international commerce, which is (I would guess) why the language fixates on that aspect. The federal government doesn't otherwise have the power to infringe on the Second, Fourth, and (possibly) Tenth Amendments - as would likely be necessary to federally require gun owners to submit to random drug tests over something that one's state has made legal.
Meanwhile, my state (last I checked) has laws on the books separately prohibiting intoxication (be it via cannabis, alcohol, or whatever) while in possession of a firearm; to my knowledge, most (all?) states do.
Read up on Jeremy Kettler's attempt to avoid interstate commerce and also Wickard v Filburn. You probably know about the latter but not the former.
If growing your own plants with nothing but seed and material from the earth on your property, and then feeding it to your local animals is interstate commerce.... then it's hard to imagine any firearm even if made of iron pulled from the earth underneath you and machined on site and never sold to anyone or hell even fired could be considered to not have interstate nexus.
Those are what I was alluding to when I said "it wouldn't be the first time the Feds abused the ever-loving hell out of the Commerce Clause" :)
Both those cases entailed the defendants manufacturing something, which would be where the Feds would claim jurisdiction via their jurisdiction over interstate commerce. It's harder to make that argument w.r.t. something after a retail sale has already concluded (i.e. after the interstate commerce has happened). I wouldn't doubt the Feds would try to assert that literally everything that ever happens is or pertains to "interstate commerce", but that'd be sufficiently broad as to invalidate all sorts of other judicial precedents if actually held up in court.
Wait until you read the gun free school zone act, which seemingly makes it interstate commerce merely to be on a public property proximal but not on school property, no matter you have no intent to interact with the school or the school property in any way.
I recommend you consult a lawyer. Always understand the difference between "the law can be flouted and probably safely gotten away with so long as I don't piss off anyone powerful" and "this is legal."
That's the thing: as written, the law puts everything short of "I was literally high at the time I took possession of the firearm" in the "this is legal" category.
This of course only pertains to federal law; states have their own laws, and said laws usually prohibit being armed while intoxicated - regardless of the legality of the intoxicating substance.
Once again, because I am not a lawyer I cannot give you specific legal advice for your situation.
I strongly, strongly believe you are overconfident in your interpretation, particular when I read the provisions regarding possession which may be a seperate crime from say what was written on the 4473 at the FFL.
But I'm not the one you have to convince. I pray you are never in a position you must do the convincing.
I do not believe I am an authoritative enough of a professional to convince you, even were it that I had time to type a more complete explanation. Again I recommend you consult a lawyer, and preferably one that has worked in this area. My opinion as a rando on HN has no legal bearing on the justice system.
> A great deal of government positions involve carrying a gun.
The vast majority do not; there are 137,000 that are authorized to carry a gun and/or make arrests, out of 2.85 million non-military federal employees.
By my reckoning the majority of clearances are DOD active or reserve/guard [0]. That alone pushing it to 50+% of the people need to be allowed to have guns even if they only shoot a rifle once during basic and then are supposed to be able to figure it out if shit hits the fan. Now consider 3 letter agencies etc.
I feel very confident saying being qualified to use a gun is essential to the majority of those with an active clearance, and thus highly relevant to the drugs question part of the clearance.
I still wonder why the law is that way though. As drugs go, marijuana is probably the least worrying when it comes to gun possession. As it makes people docile and relaxed, it will help de-escalate conflicts.
As opposed to coke which makes people pumped up or even the fully legal alcohol...
It sounds like federal law should catch up to reality. Though as a European I am not in favor of widespread gun use anyway but that's another discussion.
Cocaine is schedule II. A doc can write a federally valid script for it. So someone could be using it and hypothetically not be breaking the law regarding illegal user with guns.
Asking for a friend: what should you do if you were a legal firearm owner before moving to an area with medicinal cannabis and then got your card? Sure don’t do it in the first place, but what options should so recommend to my friend in order to keep them out of trouble? Also, does the ATF trawl through state cannabis records to cross-reference gun owners?
I haven't been in a federal interview, but I would say it gets more focus merely because it is the most popular of the illegal drugs by a landslide.
The government has to remind you it's illegal because well "everybody" does it and it really doesn't seem like it actually is and it sure as hell doesn't feel like you're doing something wrong or harmful. So somebody has to tell you that this drug is really bad because you'll go to jail for it for a long time.
The main reason pot is bad is because it will get you a jail sentence. The main reason you'll get a jail sentence is because it's bad. Hope that clears it up.
No, any illegal use or addiction to a wide array of drugs makes it a crime for you to own, possess, buy, sell, transport, etc., a firearm, and separately a crime for anyone to knowingly sell or transfer one to you. Marijuana is included, and because it is a Federal Schedule I narcotic, all use is, by definition, illegal use, even state-permitted medical use (and even though there is a federal policy against direct enforcement of the federal prohibition of marijuana against state legal use, this policy does not extend to the criminal firearms exclusion tied to it.)
The quasi-legality of state-permitted and federally-prohibited-without-direct-enforcement is kind of an awful trap, and that’s even before you consider the risks if the federal enforcement pause – which doesn’t change the criminal law and thus would not raise ex post facto concerns for enforcement against acts that occurred during (or before, if the statute of limitations allows) the pause – were to be lifted.
No. A single speck of pot + just being someone that owns guns at all is 10 years in jail. Look up "constructive possession."
AFAIK it's the feds position that even merely having a medical marijuana card (which doesn't mean you actually have ever even bought/consumed weed) and owning a gun makes you a felon.
A medical marijuana card is a much stronger indicator of "I am currently a user of marijuana" than even current possession, let alone some past purchase. The whole point of such a card is to be prescribed marijuana, and the whole point of a prescription is for you to follow it.
Why? I've read a number of accounts of people who got the card just to buy/grow for their cancer stricken grandma or whatever. Sure maybe it's a lie but then again it's pretty believable and reasonable.
Even assuming grandma is going to buy it herself, which probably isnt always practical, there's probably some people out there not thrilled about going to jail because grandma put pot in the console of the car or left it on the kitchen table and suddenly they have constructive possession without a card.
Right, but that's the thing: possession (even in the actual sense, let alone constructive possession) doesn't mean use. A card declaring (in effect) "I have been prescribed cannabis to use it as medicine" does mean use.
If anything, Grandma being the card-carrying pot user and not you would likely be evidence in your favor - to be presented and argued by a competent defense attorney in court, of course, not by you to some power-tripping cops interrogating you (the only correct response to a cop asking you anything for any reason at any time under any circumstance is for you to invoke your rights to silence and an attorney - and such a "shut the fuck up" strategy has indeed gotten people out of pot-related convictions, at least if these lawyers are to be believed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgWHrkDX35o).
When I had my wisdom teeth removed I received a legal prescription for opiates and had the prescription filled and took possession of them. Thankfully I was able to tough it out with just NSAIDS and never took them.
Was I an opiate user? If I just keep the script but never fill it am I more an opiate user than the guy on the street with a little baggy of white powder? People seek out and obtain scripts for stuff they never use, all the time.
Given that they were prescribed to you, "yes" would be a reasonable assumption, barring you able to provide evidence introducing reasonable doubt (e.g. "I still have every pill I was ever prescribed").
In any case, "was" is the key word. You were given a prescription for a finite number of doses, whereas usually a medical marijuana card is more indefinite.
I filled out DoD form for TS clearance years ago and answered honestly that I had smoked weed and done coke in college. That's what my boss said to do. He said if they caught you in a lie you were finished because that meant you could be blackmailed.
EDIT to add: Ironically he had gotten in trouble for phone phreaking as a teenager.
Yes, it is about blackmail. At the start of the 80s, smoking weed or being gay was OK with DISCO (Defense Industrial Security Clearance Organization) as long as you came clean about it and (for example) did not try to hide your sexual orientation from your friends & family. Because therein would lie the opportunity for blackmail.
This attitude of tolerance eroded later in the 80s. During the Reagan regime, they (DoD?) sent out a memo saying that marijuana use was "incompatible with national security goals". Not sure what the effect was out in the trenches though.
If the thing you did was less bad than the penalty for treason or revealing secrets (life in prison and/or death) then the blackmail argument falls apart. It's just more irrational hocus pocus by self-important bureaucrats. Hell the thing you're blackmailing doesn't even have to be true, they can just find an ex lover and blackmail that person to say you raped them or whatever, and well even if you beat the charges your kids get tossed into DCS/foster care your life is ruined etc etc.
Yet another reason why I'll never work for the government.
I mean, I used to say that I'd never be able to run for public office because <thing that a lot of people do, but that I should be mildly circumspect about>. These days, have you seen the people in public office?!? If you can be elected President after some of the shit that last guy is on the record as having done, I think blackmailing me is probably hard.
The counter-example I'll mention is that if someone framed you for CSAM and could convince people you actually were doing that, blackmail might be effective. Not only is it fully beyond the pale, but just going to prison would be a death sentence.
It's not uncommon for people to _commit suicide_ over things they are being blackmailed about.
Plus people doing the blackmailing aren't stupid. They don't go "we know you lied on your clearance form about smoking weed once. Get us that top secret document!"
They start with something much lower risk and then leverage compliance into higher and higher value targets.
I don't see much functional difference between outcomes of committing suicide because you were blackmailed regarding a fake but believable rape accusation vs say blackmailed because someone found out you grew a bad plant. In the end though suicide seems like an honorable pick if the binary option is that or revealing life-or-death secrets to the enemy.
The US has such insane conspiracy laws frankly it isn't much effort for a few motivated individuals let alone a state actor to blackmail someone for the worst of false offenses using some corrupt "witnesses." Maybe before the war on drugs it was easier to blackmail someone with real offenses than fake ones but nowadays it's probably easier to manufacture them TBH.
If you want top secret documents, you don't start by asking for top secret documents. You start by asking them to violate a relatively innocuous rule. Changing a date by one day on a file so it's no longer late or something like that. Doesn't matter what it is. The point is that it's not worth being exposed over. And the rule you're breaking would technically be worthy of getting fired over. Especially for the thing they're blackmailing you over. "It's changing a date by one day, no one would know, and it's not worth losing my job over."
It starts off "Hey man, I was cool about the weed thing, do me a solid here." Then it's "Hey, remember that thing you did, do you think you could do this slightly bigger thing?" If they refuse, you can bring up that first thing they did.
Then, a year or two down the line, you're fucking cooked. They come to you and say, "Look man, you've done this, that, and the other thing. If they find out, you are fired, in jail, life ruined. What I need now is this top secret document."
The idea is to build a list of escalating transgressions so in the end, the asset feels as if they have no choice but to comply with your requests. You don't need fabricated offenses. You just need a small issue you can use as a starting point.
If someone can be blackmailed to do ever progressively worse things over something minor, why couldn't you do the same thing and possibly even faster with something major?
If someone has done something really bad (maybe murdered someone) then yes, directly blackmailing them to do something major might work.
But in general the things we are talking about are mostly things were someone lied on their clearance form and if they decided to they could get that cleared up and cause the foreign agent significant problems by reporting an approach.
So instead they escalate. They don't directly blackmail you - you just happen to meet a woman at a bar who happens to have pictures of you smoking weed at a party 5 years ago. So you are joking around about what a great party that was, and it just happens to turn out that this woman works at a defense contractor and they are waiting on this stupid proposal to be released so they can bid on it, and you don't happen to know when it will be released do you?
So you go look it up. It's not classified, maybe it's commercial-in-confidence at worst. But then this woman needs to know how long she should rent her apartment in town for, so exactly how big is the project? How many units are they ordering?
That's still not classified, but is need-to-know. But she's hot, so you tell her.
And now they have you. You might not actually realize yet you are being blackmailed, but as soon as they ask for classified info you realize she can ruin you.
> Hell the thing you're blackmailing doesn't even have to be true, they can just find an ex lover and blackmail that person to say you raped them or whatever, and well even if you beat the charges your kids get tossed into DCS/foster care your life is ruined etc etc.
Someone being falsely accused like this would most likely immediately report it to their boss in the government asking for help. It would be very unlikely that the person would hide it and become an intelligence asset for the blackmailer.
A rational person would immediately report it whether the blackmail was true or not. The penalty for revealing secrets is worse than about any crime except a few high level drug dealing or crimes involving death. If you get fired because you didn't admit to eating a scary mushroom or whatever so be it, the alternative is much worse.
> If the thing you did was less bad than the penalty for treason or revealing secrets (life in prison and/or death) then the blackmail argument falls apart.
I'm no expert on spycraft or anything like that, but this sounds overly reductionist. If they can threaten you to lose your career, then maybe doing one tiny little other thing that won't matter seems like it might be worth it. Now they can blackmail you further.
> they can just find an ex lover and blackmail that person to say you raped them or whatever
How do they find that person? How do they blackmail them? It becomes exponentially more complicated than just blackmailing one person. Additionally, someone finding themselves in the situation that they are being actively targeted with blatant lies is much more likely put up an indignant and active defense vs somebody who actually has a guilty conscience.
If working for a murderous government that sends drones to bomb kids overseas, invade vietnam and iraq, imprisons innocuous non-violent offenders for decades, funds nun-raping militias in central america, etc doesn't give one a guilty conscious I honestly have no idea what would. It's got to make you feel far more guilty than whether you put on a form you grew a bad plant or not.
>How do they find that person? How do they blackmail them?
Finding someone's ex is not complicated. We're talking about blackmailers so I think a blackmailer knows how to... blackmail. And the example I gave was just one of a million possible scenarios I can imagine an enemy using. The point was using something fake is likely as easy or possibly even easier than using a real crime for the purposes of the enemy, and thus the ratcheting effect you describe is immaterial to whether they start with the bad plant grown that wasn't listed on the form or because they told the compromised person that they'd reveal the false criminal allegations.
You're assuming a level of rationality on the part of the person being blackmailed which blackmailers will do everything to avoid. Look at the reports of people getting caught giving away secrets for and it's often shockingly little given the stakes. Remember the main issue with harsh punishments as a deterrent: people generally don't assume they'll be caught.
Not related to a security clearance, but a coworker at a summer job in high school was applying to be a police officer. He was told to answer "yes" when they asked if he had ever smoked pot, because anyone answering "no" was presumed to be dishonest.
I had a somewhat similar experience with the polygraph portion of my clearance process - apparently its common to calibrate the machine to the subject by asking "have you ever smoked marijuana" and they expect you to lie and say "no" but then sometimes people have never smoked marijuana.
The polygraph is 100% pseudoscience - at best it's a prop to make interrogating people that don't know it's fake easier because they believe the interrogator can read their mind, but it falls apart when the person being taken knows that it's woo. So we shouldn't really use technical/scientific terms like "calibration" when talking about it...
It’s not like, thetans. It may not be reliable, but it’s not pseudoscience.
From Wikipedia:
>In 2002, a review by the National Research Council found that, in populations "untrained in countermeasures, specific-incident polygraph tests can discriminate lying from truth telling at rates well above chance, though well below perfection". The review also warns against generalization from these findings to justify the use of polygraphs—"polygraph accuracy for screening purposes is almost certainly lower than what can be achieved by specific-incident polygraph tests in the field"—and notes some examinees may be able to take countermeasures to produce deceptive results
Vanity. Having lost significant body fat mid way through high school, I could not stand the idea of consuming a drug whose side effects included “the munchies”.
Investigators are required to find “derogatory information”. I wasn’t an investigator myself but knew some people who did it as contractors. They said they couldn’t turn in a package for adjudication without something negative. Weed was usually the check in the box for that, but if it wasn’t then they had to dig to find something else.
The chances of someone being a foreign agent increases significantly if they are from a foreign country. Meaning if you have foreign friends there is a small but non-zero chance that they desire, for their home country, the sensitive information you are being trusted to protect.
You are not going to lose or be rejected for a clearance because you have a few foreign friends. It is just another one of those things you have to report to the government (meaning the government issuing the clearance).
This is surprising because it's the exact wrong thing to do. Past drug use will not disqualify you from a clearance, but lying absolutely will. Depending on the clearance level they will interview a number of people, including second degree connections. I know someone who used to be an investigator, and it surprised me when they told me how often first degree connections would say bad things about their 'friend'.
Yeah. My father didn't do secure work, but he was an immigrant to the country where I was born. As part of the immigration process, he was asked whether he had ever been arrested (maybe it was charged, I don't recall and he's long gone so I can't ask). He said "no". In fact, he had been arrested as a pre-teen for stealing an idling tractor and joyriding in rural post-war England. Immigration authorities don't care that a teen went for a joyride on a tractor. They care that he lied. Took a bunch of lawyering and paperwork to resolve the issue.
I guess fundamentally the distinction is "if they can catch you, tell the truth, and if they can't, make yourself look good", but I guess it can be hard to know.
On the other hand, you can answer this too truthfully and just screw yourself up for no reason. Example: I know Afghan former translators/employees for ISAF projects who have been arrested by Pakistani "authorities", local police in various cities just for the purpose of shaking them down for bribes/money.
I can guarantee you that no record of any such arrest exists in paper or electronic form anywhere in a database that can be queried in Pakistan, even if US immigration authorities had a way to get cooperation from Pakistani federal police authorities without involving very high-level diplomatic contacts. Answering truthfully on a question like that will just fuck up your own case.
Is it still being legitimately arrested if you've been detained unlawfully for a shakedown by corrupt police? The same happens in many developing nations. It's actually more like being kidnapped.
Some of the process of using other data sources to verify that what a person has said is truthful/factually accurate only works if you're dealing with people coming from places with non-corrupted legitimate record keeping and bureaucratic processes.
I don't think any consular officer would hold it against someone if they truthfully tell "yes, I've been arrested", even if the documentation doesn't confirm it. During an interview they would most likely ask about the circumstances (whenever they know no record of it exists or not), and telling them "I was arrested for [cite the reason if there was any or say "an unexplained reason"], they openly told me they wanted my money, but still it is being detained by some formal authorities (or someone pretending to be such) so I had to answer truthfully" is very unlikely to be a problem. They'd tell the truth, and it's not like they did something wrong.
I mean, immigration is extremely stressful process (been there, done that, currently repeating for my spouse), consular staff are demigods who literally rule over people lives, and people have a lot of superstitions, but I highly doubt it's going to be an issue.
I had a late passport renewal, which is considered an administrative infraction where I've lived. I have no idea how this translates to "have you been arrested or convicted of any offense or crime" on DS-260, so ticked the box just in case. Naturally, I was asked about it - I've explained that I don't know if this counts but that's what happened, and that I'd rather mistakenly mention this than fail to disclose. And everything went perfectly fine.
I've seen immigration officers go on power trips before, and it ain't pretty. That much discretion with little if any opportunity for the potential victims to retaliate goes to some people's heads. And then they just need an excuse.
Well, if they decide they don't want you to pass - I suspect they'll find their excuse then, no matter what. With power tripping people, I believe, it's typically not about someone's file but if they arbitrarily like you as a person or not.
I had one tell me, a US citizen presenting with valid passport, he had the authority to prevent me from entering the united states.
I told him he had no such authority, unlike with the room full of Mexicans around me he was used to harrassing, and even if I didn't answer his (non-citizenship related) questions he'd still have to let me in.
By god did that piss him off, and I spent many hours detained, but in I went. After hearing his irate and false claims that my passport would be revoked, not allowed in, etc etc.
Reminding CBP/ICE of something like that in a confident way is a good way to get a thorough anal cavity search and/or all the carpets and upholstery in your car destroyed.
I see you've read my other accounts of experiences with CBP lol.
I got put on CBPs shit list many years before that because I helped some people in a scary country which made some dumb uninformed government worker sad face. They do that stuff no matter how nice I am. Finally I learned they will treat me like shit and break my things even when I am nice so I should at least be assertive about my rights in the process.
The same happens in the US. We've just given authorities leeway to institutionalize stops and arrests and even convictions that would otherwise be considered illegal - especially if they were ever to be put under scrutiny and scrubbed of the blank check that is given to avoid gumming up the works with accountability. And these incidents do affect employability and eligibility for aid, at much lower levels than applying for a clearance or a visa. It's just something to keep in mind.
So in context, they ask if you've been arrested, you say no. But this is because you characterize an incident as unlawful, while others characterize it as a lawful arrest.
Surely the answer for the example is "I was falsely arrested because I refused to pay a bribe". Since paying bribes is illegal in most countries, that shouldn't be an issue and you can't be accused of concealing it if it came up later.
Yea, sounds like terrible advice. I tried pot a couple of times in college, honestly really disliked what it did to my memory, and disclosed it on my EPSQ 2.2 clearance paperwork. I had absolutely no problems. The background check folks never even asked me about it.
The main reasons people betray their country are MICE (Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego). Drugs might be expensive (money), might themselves be a secret you hold (coercion/blackmail) or might cause you to do dumb blackmailable things (e.g. fall into a honey trap). So, that's what background check folks are looking for w.r.t. drugs.
Hiding drug use makes it look like maybe it could be used to blackmail you, and suggests that maybe you're hiding other things.
Also, they're looking for people who follow the rules, won't bring classified material home, won't try to impress people by revealing classified info, etc.
The US is safer if you don't bring home classified information. You don't have control over what the president does. It's in your rational self-interest to not bring home classified information. Your perception of fairness has nothing to do with it, and if you can't get over that, you shouldn't be handling classified information.
Also, guarding the houses of a few high officials is much easier than guarding the houses of everyone with a security clearance.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
There are lots of dumb rules, but keeping classified documents inside secure areas is not one of them. Once, I was working as a contractor, and there was a NATO classified document I needed for my work. I just needed to be a citizen of a NATO country and have a clearance from that country (check and check). The hitch was that I needed someone in my company to read me the paperwork/walk me through the PowerPoint presentation that I'd go to prison if I shared the info, etc., etc. and watch me sign on the dotted line. There was nobody at my employer who was certified to give me that presentation. (There was someone who was signed up to get the training to walk people through the NATO paperwork, but that was going to be 3 months later.) Someone at my client was certified to give that presentation, but (for accountability reasons) it needed to be someone at my employer who gave me the "you will go to prison if you share this NATO information" presentation. So, what we did is have my friend sit down across from me with the document. I'd ask her questions, she'd read the documents, and mentally redact the information by giving me wide ranges of frequencies, bitrates, etc. I then wrote my computer models, and if they needed higher fidelity, someone at the client later came back and patched the estimated values I used. It was a bit of a pain and a bit silly, but you follow the procedures. If you can't do your job while following the procedures, then you escalate and escalate until you can do your job while still following the procedures.
It takes a certain level of tolerance for BS to work with classified information and stay within the rules, but that's a valuable skill that carries a good amount of financial reward.
Yeah, that’s not for me. My tolerance for that kind of BS is way too low. It’d no doubt take less than a week before I started to follow the spirit of the rules, rather than the letter.
Yeah but that was the one claiming he could retroactively make it okay so now that Biden is president I guess by that logic it's retroactively okay as well.
That's been my impression with myself and several friends going through the process. The defense establishment is looking for honest people without drug abuse problems, not people who've never tried a joint. But I understand the opposite is true when applying for a job in law enforcement.
To reiterate half of what you've said, but maybe in a slightly different way, the defense security clearance process is designed to determine how likely you are to be incentivized or coerced into revealing classified information.
The point of the deep dive is not to prove you've always been an upstanding citizen, but to look for factors that make you an easier target for foreign intelligence services such as:
1. Do you have any financial problems that could make you easier to buy off? (Bad credit, gambling problems)
2. Do you have any (real or perceived) addictions that might impair your judgement or can be leveraged against you? (drugs and DUIs)
3. Are you currently attempting to hide any criminal activity that you could be blackmailed with?
4. Do you have any sensitive foreign connections or other possible allegiances?
Police typically have a 5 year period they want for zero drug involvement. The military is more dependent on the position and clearance level, but the max limit numbers are arbitrarily set. They set the numbers high enough to make recruiting possible, but it isn’t based off of any science.
I meant that lying was more acceptable on police applications because police, in the course of their duties, often have to lie whether its telling a suspect that you have proof of their guilt and they just need to confess or using boilerplate language like "there was a strong smell of marijuana" to justify a search in the paperwork whether you smelled anything or not.
I’m mostly referring to federal law enforcement, I’m not familiar with local police suitability (but I’m guessing it’s not nearly as well resourced as the feds).
I would also expect lying to be a bigger red flag compared to past drug use, and while it seems these stories invalidate such an idea, I believe they actually validate it: these are stories of people who did get security clearance and they were honest, the ripping up part is more like a symbolic gesture from the system "let's both pretend none of that happened".
These stories don't mean the person would have past when immediately denying the past offense...
While growing up, and during my studies I had often considered job roles where security clearances would presumably be required, but I decided to stay away from that world for multiple reasons:
1. when a sector is heavily propagandized / advertised in media (books, films, ...) then usually it's to attract more talent who wouldn't spontaneously apply. lots of people get disillusioned in armies etc around the world, which is why the experience is artificially inflated in movies etc...
2. I understand that in some situations people in certain job roles need to sacrifice some of their personal freedoms in order to protect the freedoms of the population at large, think for example freedom of expression vs secrecy, and the need of secrecy say among the Polish, French, British, ... in the context of the cracking of the Enigma coding system. To join and apply for security clearance entails signing away certain rights and freedoms. The mere thought that the only way to find out if that's a good decision or not is by taking that decision for life is nauseating to me. Even if I were to become an employee and the practical experience would be that the organization and the individual that signed up agree on the need for secrecy 99% of the time (which sounds very optimistic), I would balk at that 1% or more of the time where I disagree, where I might be convinced the secrecy is creating more problems than solutions. That thought seems unbearable to me, so I'd rather have no security clearance at all and feel ... free.
That's my understanding as well. Lying on a clearance application is far worse than admitting to many criminal acts.
The thought is that someone could blackmail you into revealing secrets by threatening to expose your lie, thus causing you to losing your clearance, job or worse.
> Lying on a clearance application is far worse than admitting to many criminal acts.
For one thing, admitting to past criminal acts doesn’t add a new criminal act with the statute of limitations clock at 0, whereas lying in any official government process, like a security clearance application, does.
Right after high school a friend of mine went into the military and needed a clearance for his assigned job on a nuclear missile submarine. Investigators came around and asked his friends back home about him, we all lied a little in his favor. I remember explicitly thinking at the time "Of course people's friends are going to lie a little for them. What's the point in asking these questions?"
Then I realized the real red flag would be if you weren't stable enough to have friends who would help you out a bit.
A friend of mine has the same experience. They answered yes to the marijuana question and still got clearance.
Another friend lied and said no (this was for a college internship so I knew a couple people working there) and got rejected once their story didn't check out with their personal references.
The interview/form is looking for potential blackmail or tendency to lie or obscure facts. If you are honest, that's fine, although they sometimes ask that you are currently using as well and that is a strike against you.
I was talking to an NSA recruiter last year, though, and they told me they routinely report applicants to the FBI for confessing to crimes during a polygraph. So damned if you do, damned if you don’t…
(For a recruiter he did an uncanny job at convincing me never to work for the NSA)
I mean, that might be true if someone confesses to heinous/violent crimes (and shouldn't they?) but its definitely not true for things like minor drug use/sale etc.
But if the crimes that you confess to are skilled hacking crimes and the NSA hires you anyways, then the FBI never finds out ? Thus making the NSA judge & jury.
I'd be careful, a friend of mine answered yes (and doesn't smoke anymore/at the time of the question) and got denied a clearance for it. But we can also see others who are suggesting interviewers are pressuring them into a "no" answer, which I had some personal experience with. But it seems different people are having different experiences. I understand why people lie though.
I always found this odd too because I agree with the sentiment that you're expressing. It's always been told to me that the reason they don't want people with a history of drug usage (different from current usage) is that it can be used as blackmail against them. But the explanation of blackmail is that it can get them fired, from a job where the only reason that happens is because you lied on your clearance. Wouldn't they want no skeletons in the closet?
E.g. i admitted to drug use, but the firm was so insanely detailed there was no way to be fully honest. It literally asked how many times youve done each drug, who with, whered you get etc. Well for a raging polysubstance addict, this is hilarious. Just listing all the differe t drugs would take more room than there was on the forum and that doesnt even start to account for all the tertiary information they wanted.
I got interviewed of course. Was a very weird experience sitting in an office in my workplace 14 feet from my boss talking about "yeah I did cocain a few times" "why did you stop" "well it feels good but it makes you act brazen, selfish, and flippant. Also it sucks to be around people who are coked up"
The fact that you frankly acknowledged the drawbacks and foolishness of casual cocaine use, with the benefit of additional age/maturity/experience, reflecting upon your own actions as a younger person is probably why they cleared you.
Additionally they were looking for any hint that you might have had an ongoing/current drug habit where you would either be vulnerable to financial pressure or societal coercion from drug dealers/persons associated with drug dealers, and that they they believed you were no longer a user was likely a factor.
My only experience with serious US government forms was applying for a tourist visa. This form also has some bonkers checkboxes like "do you plan to commit any crimes in the US".
Also the entry form they give you on your flight deserves a mention. This one has "did you handle livestock in the last X months" repeated like 3 times in different phrasing. Not as stupid as the first one, but... why? Why is that question that important in the first place? Pest control?
Ah, the "are you a terrorist" section of the U.S. visa application is hilarious. I was honestly laughing out loud at some of the questions, imagining a sincere terrorist having their plan foiled by their strict moral code which requires them to lay out in detail their plan to topple the government :)
I am reminded of the (probably apocryphal) story about a logician asking for a visa to enter the US for a conference. When he got to the question "Do you plan to overthrow the United States Government by force or violence?" he hesitated and then answered "violence".
> Other writers have speculated that Gödel may have had other parts of the Constitution in mind as well, including the possibility that a partisan ratchet effect, via lifetime Supreme Court appointments and selective application of the law, could permanently stack the Supreme Court with Justices of one political persuasion.
This is mentioned in the article. It's a pretty standard way to overthrow democracies — it subverts the system, using the system.
I mean, yeah. It's like gun laws that prohibit having a joint whilst commit armed robbery or whatever - it's not actually trying to stop the behavior, merely empower the prosecutor after the fact.
But, hey, there might be a true believer on the T-side! God says you're not supposed to lie, so it's a real Catch-22 - 'Render unto Caesar the evidence he deserves.'
You're correct. In fact, there doesn't need to be a joint at all - you become a prohibited person by virtue of being "an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance". Note that, since this is a federal law, it doesn't matter if it's legal on state level.
There's already precedent that having a state medical marijuana card already makes one ineligible, and using as an ID when trying to purchase a firearm is grounds for automatic denial by the seller. Hawaii, which requires all firearms to be registered, went even further, proactively cross-referencing their gun registry with the medical marijuana one (https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/surrender-your-guns-pol...).
It's not really surprising that the law is so broad, given that it was written in 1968 when anti-drug craze was still ramping up. The reason why it doesn't get amended is, I think, because it manages to touch two third rails at once: Republicans don't want to be perceived as "soft on drugs" by their base, while Democrats are afraid of being seeing as not sufficiently aggressive wrt "gun violence". And so, here we are.
It's strange especially because marihuana makes people very docile and laid back. Probably not a bad state for someone handing a firearm.
On the other hand for someone pumped up on coke it would be a big worry. Though I guess if the US had medical coke cards they would be banned as well :)
Cocaine is schedule II. You can get a script for it. So the thing you say not only exists, but such a person could hypothetically legally own guns unlike the pot user.
So Marijuana with a widely accepted medical benefit is considered a more dangerous drug than coke which is much more addictive and makes (some) people total pumped up jerks?
I really can't imagine that, it should be the other way around. This is what I don't understand about the US federal drug policy. Most countries define marijuana as a "soft drug".
I wonder how this came to be.. It sounds a bit like a 'war on hippies' thing from the 70s still lingering around the law books or something.
It's much older than that. There was that one guy who was the founding commissioner of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics back in 1930s, and he was obsessed with the dangers of weed in particular:
As to why, the guy had many purported horror stories to tell about weed - collecting such was his hobby. Often, although not always, they boiled down to overt or covert racism. Some choice examples:
“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
“I think the traffic has increased in marihuana, and unfortunately particularly among the young people. We have been running into a lot of traffic among these jazz musicians, and I am not speaking about the good musicians, but the jazz type.”
“Colored students at the Univ. of Minn, partying with female students (white) smoking and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy.”
It's mostly so that someone can't say "well you never asked!" -- okay fine we'll ask from now on.
Additionally it creates a condition of jeopardy, because now you've made an official statement, and if it's false you're now potentially chargeable for perjury or making false official statements. So if you're a super-slick spy type and they can't pin something on you conclusively, but are sure you're up to something (in the same way they could only get Al Capone for tax evasion), then at least it gives them a pretext to take action and charge or deport you.
I heard about a company web site that had a tick box like that on their download page. Unfortunately they got it the wrong way round so you had to claim to be a terrorist (or intending to build a nuclear weapon: I forget exactly what it was) in order to download the software. The story is that the web site was broken like that for about six months but it didn't stop hundreds of thousands of downloads from taking place. I hope no poor bastard in the FBI was tasked with investigating every case.
Hm. I had multiple UK visas (but only visited once lol) and I don't remember that. Granted, all of those visas were applied for with assistance from the job I had at the time. The entry form was also much more boring.
The US has this question as well, but I've heard that it didn't eliminate people from China who were able to make a "I had to join the party to get a certain job" argument. I presume that as long as you don't voice actual support for the revolutionary aspects of the ideology, the migra won't care.
The federal and state departments of agriculture go to great efforts to control agricultural diseases. Others have mentioned foot and mouth, but there are lots of other things. For instance, half of Washington State is declared an "Apple Maggot Quarantine Area" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maggot_Quarantine_Area) where it's illegal to bring in homegrown / wild-picked fruit lest you infect Eastern Washington's massive apple orchards. A couple years back the Governor very publicly violated that long-standing order: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/sep/16/inslee-brings-...
> half of Washington State is declared an "Apple Maggot Quarantine Area" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Maggot_Quarantine_Area) where it's illegal to bring in homegrown / wild-picked fruit lest you infect Eastern Washington's massive apple orchards.
The article you link suggests that the quarantine area is the region from which it's illegal to bring fruit out.
The wikipedia article also does something interesting where it describes a mature fly as being an "apple maggot". I would have thought that the term "maggot" referred exclusively to the larval form.
I guess technically the state of Washington has declared western WA and pretty much every other state in the continental US to be "quarantined" because those other areas have apple maggots. It's a lot easier to talk about eastern WA as the "quarantine area" though.
It is illegal to bring homegrown fruit into eastern Washington, regardless of terminology.
I heard a pretty good interpretation of why these questions exist.
If you say that you don't plan to commit crimes and then commit one, you have essentially lied on the form. In some cases at least it is way easier for the state to deport someone if they lie on their immigration form. But if the question wasn't there you would have to go through the whole legal process.
On the other hand, if you answer yes to this question they will probably don't let you into the country... But I can't say for sure.
But you might legitimately not be planning to commit any crimes, but then change your mind once you get there. The fact that you committed a crime after saying you weren't planning to do so does not mean that you were lying.
Or worse, what if you accidentally commit a crime? Not all crimes are obvious and something that can be normal in one country can be criminal in another. For example, jay walking (crossing the street not at an intersection (when an intersection is not reasonably near by)). Or something else silly like that.
Because you need proof, and proving that someone is a terrorist is a long expensive and not guarantied process, while the lying on a form thing is purposefully self evident.
I doubt that this is the logic but there are different standards of evidence. If the traveler faces a criminal charge they'll get an attorney and the government will need to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
In a civil case, it's likely to be about the preponderance of evidence and in front of some non-court administrative body there may be no particular standard of evidence at all.
The main purpose is likely to allow the police to cite a pedestrian who is at fault for an accident, which helps protect the other parties involved from civil liability.
I think there are following expected scenarios for this question:
- If you answer "No": That's what they expect everyone will say, but having it in writing may still come in handy in international disputes. Say you're considered a terrorist in another country. The form, AFAIK, doesn't define by whose standards you are a terrorist, so it might be grounds to kick you out if the US isn't specifically interested in keeping you in.
- If you answer "Yes": You most likely have mental issues. Entry denied.
- If you stress too much over it: Entry denied, possibly notify relevant law enforcement.
- If you start to ask questions about it, like precisely what is meant by this question and why: You either have mental issues, or are up to something. Either way, entry denied.
Well the form doesn't literally ask, "are you a terrorist? ". It's just a bunch of terroristic and criminal activities. So if you said no to "do you plan to commit any crimes" and then you rob a store or God forbid actually commit terrorism, which is a crime, you've lied on the form and can be expelled quickly
It may be burden of proof. Where I live, criminal court is to be thought of as 99% proof of guilt, where as civil court, eg being sued, is more like 50.1%.
The Oz government used some similar loophole (or threatened to use it) with the Djokovic covid saga at the Australian open. As I recall, a judge said that he could get a visa for whatever covid medical exemption reasons, but on his immigration form he said that he hadn't been travelling elsewhere. Social media proved otherwise, so he was caught in an easily provable lie on an immigration form. He was then able to be refused entry for reasons unreleated to the covid rules. In the end, they didn't have to rule on whether or not the Oz tennis association could issue a medical exemption for covid - they could kick him out on a much clearer legal basis. I don't recall the exact details, but that is the gist of some of the legal drama.
From the outside it seemed like lets go hard on this foreign player from an eastern European country no one cares about hurting relations with. He didn't get the vaccine and we are still trying to push lockdowns hard locally lets use this to score political points.
I feel bad for him that he got caught up in local politics.
I understand those normal people ate up the rich guy foreign ploy. What they missed was their rights were being trampled on while the rest of the world opened up and they were distracted by a fake booeyman.
If i was to guess i would say the same as for Al capone, easier to prosecute for an administrative issue for which there is clear evidence and a fast-lane of application rather than go through heavy procedure required for heavy crime for which you may not have clear evidence
If I said, in the US, "Peter Thiel is a woman-hating monster and the country would be better if he and every politician on his payroll was swinging from a lamppost Mussolini style" it would be difficult to make any case that I was doing anything not covered by first amendment protections.
If I'm a visitor to the country and say the same thing having signed an affirmation that I'm not going to advocate for violent overthrow of the US government it's not a first amendment case, it's a lying-on-immigration-forms case and out I do.
That paragraph is not much different from what you'll find from self-described stocastic terrorist LibsofTikTok.
And, you know, I certainly agree that this kind of speech is terrible! But just as the US first amendment has protected, for example, supplying lists of doctors providing women with healthcare, showing crosshairs over them, putting red crosses over ones who have been murdered, and so on, the US has decided over the years that you have to issue very direct threats, or very clear instructions, to be held liable for speech that could incite harm.
This is not legal advice but I think they are. See Brandenburg v Ohio.
"Brandenburg was convicted of violating a criminal law that prohibited speech that advocates crime, sabotage, violence, and other similar acts after he spoke at a KKK rally. The Supreme Court found that the law infringed on Brandenburg's First Amendment rights, and created the imminent lawless action test. In order for speech to fall out of First Amendment protection, it must 1) be directed at producing imminent lawless action and 2) it is likely to produce such action."
I think there is an exception for ones made against certain public officials, which IMO are likely unconstitutional, but no one is really excited about challenging those.
If they commit a crime there is the question of whether they should be imprisoned or deported. That likely involves a court case, something US prosecutors famously hate (just look at all the plea bargains).
If you lie on your immigration form, you gained entry under false pretenses. Nothing complicated or grey about that.
The livestock question might have been added during the Foot and Mouth epidemic, which could be spread on footwear and necessitated the destruction of livestock in the millions in Ireland and the UK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
Please don't equate the death of people with the death of non human animals. It's not useful and it's needlessly inflammatory. Murder is defined as the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another. The term doesn't apply to deaths in battle, through negligence, or by execution, however distasteful we might find those things. It also doesn't apply to the killing of animals - whatever ones moral perspective on the matter.
Just rhetorically, using inflammatory terminology isn't going to convert anyone to vegetarianism / veganism. For those of us who've lost friends and relatives to murder (including myself unfortunately), it's profoundly distasteful.
> Murder is defined as the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.
Surely this is not as easy as just pointing out the 'correct' definition of words. The difference between "execution", various other forms of killing you mention, and murder can't be so clear that you can easily say "it doesn't apply in this case".
> not useful
More than rhetoric and saying what is useful, sometimes I just feel like I should be saying what I find to be true. After billions and trillions of 'killings', with people saying 'useful', definitinly correct things in response, I just want to be more honest, sometimes—instead of pretending I don't find certain things disgusting, distasteful, vile etc for the sake of garnering 'converts'. I am not running an evangelism program—I'll leave that to the experts. They will perform like the they do regardless of what I say. Maybe honesty is the more useful policy in the long term.
I got an immigration official very worried when I was asked whether I'd ever been convicted of any "crimes of moral turpitude" and asked whether they could tell me what that meant before I answered. They had to go print out a dictionary definition.
(I had never been convicted of any crimes, so admittedly I could have just said "no" without causing a scene.)
Yes, pest control. E.g. foot-and-mouth disease is eradicated from the U.S. and cattle here are no longer vaccinated, but it's common in Asia and Africa and there are occasional outbreaks in South America. Even a single outbreak imported from abroad could cost billions of dollars, mostly because it would trigger international embargos preventing exports. [https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45980/12171_er...]
My father got caught at an agricultural inspection entering the U.S. with an apple he’d picked up in a business class lounge and forgotten about. He got special treatment every time he entered the U.S. for about the next five years.
> This form also has some bonkers checkboxes like "do you plan to commit any crimes in the US".
The point of this is not to get people to admit their plans.
Its to convert having those inchoate plans into a crime (fraud against the government) that can be prosecuted if discovered without any criminal act after entry (and can be used, with a reduced proof threshold compared to prosecuting crime, as a basis to withdraw status and deny any future application.)
I can say confidently that asking potential refugees--who were born and have lived in a refugee camp for their entire lives--if they intend to pirate software when they are in the US is hilarious to refugee officers, too. In some languages it takes a lot of explanation to even get to a yes or no.
It's exclusively asked as a, "turns out you lied, that's perjury" question to make deportation easier in criminal cases.
It also used to have a question "Are you a gunrunner", any computer person had to lie and answer "NO" to it. At the time, strong cryptographic algorithms on your laptop counted as a munition.
This response is a really bad idea, and I think the security office people that recommend this are actually compromising security by making value judgments about what is and isn't relevant to background investigators based on their own personal beliefs. If this came to light they might get fired, despite it being way too normalized.
The conventional wisdom is to answer truthfully, and justify your answers. You really don't want to get caught lying. It's not up to the person asking you to fill out the form to tell you what to list and what not to list.
If the government can't find enough qualified people they need to adapt the process (and they have). Some things are 100% dealbreakers and should have been changed a long time ago (see local Marijuana jurisdiction laws), but I'm a firm believer you shouldn't lie to get the job. Find another one and move on. My .02.
What would the ramifications be if they ever found out you lied? It’s an innocent lie, but still, I can imagine that lying on these types of forms could turn out badly.
I assume it’s to give you plenty of opportunities to lie.
Revoking naturalization or a green card involves a huge legal effort, but if it can be shown you lied on the application, that’s a much easier case.
Many US laws seem to be designed for ease of prosecution than for strict fairness. For example, open container laws are probably easier to prosecute than drunk driving.
It's not the lie itself, it's that you lied at all. Now you are untrustworthy. Drug use in the past is typically not an issue, particularly if you were young at the time. The whole process is to determine if you have good judgement and can be trusted.
Yes, but if you admit everything in your application process then no leverage! And if you're in the habit of admitting things then if some foreign agent get you to commit some indiscretion in the future you might also admit that rather than letting them blackmail you into treason.
Didn't the previous Executive Administration have a few issues with their SF-86 forms? The fact that I remember the form number leads me to believe it must have been in the news a bit. I think they just had to fill out some amended forms or something like that - didn't seem like a big deal.
I don't know, likely at very least they would take away the clearance. That was all over thirty years ago now and I have nothing to do with anything that requires a clearance any longer so I'm not overly worried about it at this point.
They would revoke your clearance. You would lose the job which required the clearance. And you would never get cleared again (source: happened to a now-former coworker).
The guidelines have changed in the last couple of years. With the exception of certain agencies(FBI and DEA), drug use is evaluated with the surrounding circumstances. They treat I smoked pot once in college or I dealt pot or I am currently addicted to heroin differently.
The guidance these days is to tell the whole truth and describe the circumstances. Lying on the form will definitely disqualify you and a couple dumb things a few years ago won't necessarily.
For the written form, I've always been told to be 100% truthful. During the polygraph though I've had several antagonistic interactions similar to yours. Its all part of the game though at that point. They are trying to get under your skin. My personality does not play well in that scenario. Glad to be out of that line of work now, and I generally say no to anyone asking if I'd be open to having a clearance again.
I got put in for a poly for one of my older job. Naturally being of a rational mindset, I started googling how to beat a poly.
During the poly, few question in, guy asked me if I ever looked up how to beat a poly. I naturally said yes cause I was startled that this in fact could be one of the questions, which automatically ended the interview.
Thats when I realized that smart people don't work in the government.
What if you're being recruited for a counterintelligence job for a 3-letter agency and part of the job definition is being intimately familiar with the details of how persons might attempt to beat a polygraph? That's definitely something a person in that specific field would spend a good deal of time studying.
I guess this is sort of a chicken/egg problem since you can't or won't get hired for the job if you appear too familiar with the workings of the recruitment process. But then if you don't get hired, they might be leaving out one of the better informed candidates.
Anecdotally from the defense contractor industry I've known a number of people who have a whole bookshelf of books on subjects like cold war era espionage, are deeply familiar with some of the most noteworthy moles/spies that were publicly prosecuted and jailed (or north korean, chinese, soviet officers and officials who were just straight out executed with a bullet to the back of the head). It didn't seem to prevent any of them from passing their clearances. Some jobs want to know that you're motivated to learn the subject matter at hand and research its past 60+ years of history.
Hehe, plenty of very smart people work in the government. But theres definitely a slice of personalities that dont. You and I both seem to fall in that slice : )
Its so frustrating because from my perspective its like... what do you want me to say/do here? Do you really think a curious person isnt going to look up polys? Am I supposed to deny that I did that? The whole thing is a joke. How many good candidates are we missing that could be working in the public sector just because of this BS filtering?
Hell, I never even had an interview like that (what an insane thing btw), and even I have looked up how to beat a poly at some point. What a silly question.
Over my years working for defense contractors, I've held clearences from multiple agencies and have gone through 5 or so polygraph tests. In everyone of them, the examiners were professional in every sense of the word. They clearly explained the procedure, went over what questions were to be asked, and ran the tests calmly and fairly. I never had a reason to complain about any one of them. Now, I didn't like to be tested but it was part of process to get and hold the clearance so I could do my job so I went through it. I never heard of any of my colleagues complain either. Still, every job has its assholes and you were unlucky to encounter one.
Thats.... the exact opposite of my experience lol. I was at a 3 letter agency for ~5 years and close to everyone I knew failed the first poly of every round. IMO its a ploy to raise the stakes and get you on edge.
Did they fail the polygraph? Or were they told they failed a sham polygraph in the hopes that they would confess their crimes afterwards? The police do this tactic often; if you are suspected of a crime, never consent to a polygraph not done by a neutral party no matter how not guilty you are, or you will probably "fail."
(Polygraphs are pseudoscientific BS in the first place, but I know there are some cases where you must undergo them for whatever reason.)
Yes, its all part of the game. The failures are real, but the reasons might be BS. In any case, you have to do another poly and now the stakes are higher. Its hard to understand the stress around the process without experiencing it. Passing the poly is a very important step in be able to get/keep your clearance so you can actually work. Otherwise you need a new profession. I miss the work itself but I dont miss the process.
EDIT: I'm not aware of any polys leading to discovering enemies of the state. Its all self-elected information from my understanding, in line with your suggestion.
You may remember the Aldredge Ames spy case some years back. Supposedly, his CIA polys revealed some strange results but rather call him on it and investigate it further, they shuffled him off to the FBI, still holding his clearances and accesses where he continued to pass classified information to the russians for several more years.
Polys are not the end-all for detecting bad guys but if you choose to ignore it anyway, it certainly becomes useless.
I think thats basically an indictment of the system. They are so unreliable that even the practitioners dont believe what it says as a scientific tool.
I hadn't heard of the Ames poly history but I just looked it up and its interesting because apparently he had the same mindset that I do about polys in general [1], and basically when the poly tech said during the interview that they were getting some weird results, he essentially told them the same thing [2] and they were like "yeah youre right" lol.
Actually I just found one of the primary sources on this [1]. Its pretty interesting and not what I said above.
In his original 1986 poly, he popped on one question but basically smooth talked his way out of it so it never was something that required followup (i.e. they were sufficiently convinced he was a good guy). In the 1991 poly it gets more interesting because the entire poly was partially a ruse because he was _already under investigation_. Due to timing, the interviewer didn't get coached to dig in on specifics around financial issues, and so they followed a bog-standard interview which Ames passed. The really interesting quote around this is how the postmortum basically says this was a bad poly because they didnt play enough mind games to get him nervous in the first place:
In its review of the Ames polygraphs, the CIA IG report quotes several current and former polygraph examiners who stated that the Ames case should not be considered to be a polygraph "chart interpretation" problem. Rather, they say, the fundamental problem is that the 1986 and 1991 polygraph charts were invalid because the examiner in each case failed to establish a proper psychological atmosphere in the examination sessions. A former polygrapher noted that without proper preparation, a subject has no fear of detection and, without fear of detection, the subject will not necessarily demonstrate the proper physiological response. Consequently, they surmise, the Ames polygraph tests were invalid because the process was flawed by examiners who had not establish the proper psychological mind set in Ames because they were overly friendly. As a result, Ames's physiological reactions were unreliable.
Interesting because I thought the exam had to follow a script, to the letter. I would have believed that "setting a proper psychological atmosphere" would have showed up at step #1 or #2. Apparently not.
I wonder if that's because you were working for the agency instead of as a contractor. Since the testing costs the company money, they might get pissed if too many of their employees kept failing and require a retest. For large contractors like LMSC or Raytheon, that can be a sizeable expense. Of course, it goes into the overhead charges when they bill but still, not something they want.
My spouse was considering applying to the Air Force almost 20 years ago (for the language learning school), and got the recruiter very excited after demonstrating excellent scores on the ASVAB... then it all fell apart after they answered some questions honestly about past depression and refused to lie about it on the forms as the recruiter wanted them to.
On a life insurance form, I was asked "Has a doctor ever advised you to stop taking any drugs (including prescription medications)?"
I called up and asked them what to do about this question, because obviously the answer is yes if you include prescription medications. They didn't even understand what I was asking.
Interesting. About 10 years ago I got a job offer from a three letter federal agency that would've required a clearance. I ultimately declined so I never started the process, but I was told that past drug use (weed, at least) wasn't necessarily a deal breaker while being caught lying about past drug was an automatic fail.
Feds: Do you use drugs?
Guy: Yes.
Feds: Do you plan to stop?
Guy: No.
The feds went away and conferred briefly and then came back and told the guy that they needed him to at least say he planned to stop, so he said that, and got the clearance.
I still think about a question that used to be on customs forms when entering the United States: "Did you come into contact with any soil while abroad?"
My thought is always, well, the planet I visited is called Earth and is made out of earth, so it's more than likely that I came into contact with soil. I answer "no" anyway, because I feel you're not supposed to answer "yes" to that question, but I couldn't actually justify my answer with a straight face. So far, not in prison! Keeping my fingers crossed though.
I had a different experience, when I was in front of a Defense Investigative Service agent, filling out my forms in 1989, for a TOP SECRET/SCI clearance required for the job I had accepted working for the Defense Information Systems Agency, in the basement of the Pentagon.
I told him that I had smoked marijuana (I was still studying for my degree at University), and that a number of my friends also smoked, and they were the reason why I smoked (peer pressure). I also informed them of the damage I had seen done to our friendships inside the group, as certain friends had gotten into fights with other friends over the money needed to buy the stuff. I also gave names and contact details of various friends in that group. I informed those friends that they would be interviewed, and to just tell the agent the truth -- as I had done.
They all reported back that they had been interviewed, and told him the truth. But they also didn't give me any more details, and I was fine with that.
What was a little strange about that whole clearance investigation process was that the agent also wanted to know the addresses of my grand parents, in addition to the fifteen year history of everywhere I had lived myself. And about a month later, one of my grandmothers got a visit from a Secret Service agent. Turns out that the Defense Investigative Service didn't have any agents in that area, so they farmed out that work to the local Secret Service office.
So, yes -- I did smoke, and I did inhale. And all the agents cared about was whether I was trying to hide something like this, because that would mean I would be vulnerable to blackmail over those events.
My recruiter told me I had to fill out a pre-screening questionnaire. He said “I need all these answers to be NO at the end of this form if you want to join the military”
“So you want me to mark No for all the answers?”
“No. No. That’s not what I said. You should answer all questions with the proper answers. All I’m saying is I need these questions to be NO if we want to proceed”
I read between the lines and everything was no. When I went to MEPS, a processing stop where you get physically and mentally cleared to join, he told me to not admit to smoking weed. When we got into the room at MEPS, they said if you used drugs and we find out and you didn’t tell us, you can go to jail for 10 years, etc., so I raised my hand and told on myself. The whole drive home my recruiter was like “why didn’t you just say no?”
When I eventually got to my first command, an investigator came to speak with me about my pending clearance. She said they found some discrepancies, I told her the recruiting story. She asked if I’d be willing to take a polygraph. I initially accepted but then asked if I was required to. I wasn’t and if I didn’t want to do a polygraph I could instead do a sworn statement which I did. Eventually got my clearance but it took a long time.
>"Here, fill it out again and don't mention that."
>I had the exact same experience when applying for a clearance while I was in college
Speaking as someone on the autistic spectrum, this is why the entire clearance process is a joke and has been since I had the misfortune of meeting some of these spooks as a child.
They claim that the one thing that will preclude you is lying, but obviously as posts like these demonstrate, that's not the case.
I still remember going on a date with a woman who was recently divorced... she told me about traveling up and down Baja California for RAND (smoking her brains out along the way).
I've met a ton of these people -- they'd have been precluded from federal employment back in the day just for being divorced... or a woman... or a myriad of other things... but somehow they manage to get these cushy roles and cling to them.
I've since quit doing any job interviews... at all. I got the sense folks were treating them like free consulting sessions, so I'm very purposefully showing up in the comments when something comes up in the news and refusing to "stop posting".
At the end of the day, if you "do a clearance", you're helping perpetuate war crimes, and it's been that way since Iraq, arguably as far back as when the draft ended.
(I got the sense they, the royal they, "the feds" were aggrieved I kept applying to the agencies in my hometown, but hey, I was born here, and I'm not required to ignore antisocial behavior. It's not my fault if it begins to look like you're abusing someone you met as a child -- denying them employment in the private sector then overpolicing their applications in the public service)
You got off easy. I once had to apply for a clearance for an admin assistant position, coming out of college (which was certainly overkill; I never once came into contact with classified material, with the closest I ever got being walking past the building's one-room SCIF while seeking signatures for textbook order authorizations). When I got to that question, I truthfully answered that my single brush with mind-altering substances had been an edible a peer had passed me, after he realized that I was having trouble relaxing during a particularly difficult time, senior year. Back in then-present day, my boss had gone over the application, tsked, asked why I'd mentioned it, tsked again, and said that it was too late to remove, since she'd already seen it. It was sent off without another word.
My reserved, nerdy self was replacing her bubbly English major bestie, so I don't think she liked me much from jump, anyway.
I was proactively instructed by an O-6 (full bird colonel) to lie on my application about drugs if I had ever used them. Without even asking me if I had ever used drugs, he said, "I don't care what the truth is, on the form you put no." This was probably 20 years ago; I was pretty young.
I had the exact same experience when applying for a clearance while I was in college, for the "have you taken illegal drugs" question. When I honestly answered yes, the interviewer got fidgety and then asked, "well do you take them now?" no. "Do you know any drug users?" We're on a college campus, what would you like me to say? "Well, are you friends with any of them?" Again, we're on a college campus. "Ok, well, we're just going to put down no for all of that."