"For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law" — Óscar Benavides.
The problem is selective waiving of vetting processes due to political pressure and affiliation.
Acting as if the efficacy of the vetting process is a point relevant to this conversation either implies you believe they waived this process for these three due to their ineffectiveness - very much not the belief held my most observers, why just 3 then - otherwise it’s a pure strawman argument. Neither option is good.
Person A believes they work.
Person A says "we shouldn't use this on Persons B, C, D".
Pretty major implications about the integrity and suitability of Persons B, C, and D, and about how Person A suspects they have stuff to hide.
(In some ways this is a good reason to keep them around. Even if some people know they're crap, the existence and popular mythology causes people to reveal more than they otherwise would through actions like this.)
It’s certainly suspicious. But it’s also a huge problem they use them at all when the private sector was banned from doing so since they’re so unreliable decades ago.
That's something that companies do all the time, they pay people "out of band" or give them extra benefits or accelerate their vacation accrual or vesting, or one of hundreds of other things.
I agree it looks bad for sure but it isn't necessarily sinister.
It's irrelevant whether they do anything. It's more important why they were skipped. What questions would the interviewer ask that they didn't want to risk answering?
This is just something you made up. Here's an alternative idea:
You are deciding whether to take a test. The test's results are 100% subjective. Anything you say during the test can be interpreted as a negative statement about yourself, and this determination will be made by the examiner.
Is taking this test a good idea? Why or why not?
* Polygraph “tests” presented as objective, independent evidence for the truth or falsehood of statements, and
* Polygraph used as an additional channel (similar to but on top of assessment of body language, voice tone, etc.) by an interviewer to determine how to guide an interview to elicit information from a subject, including information that they might prefer to conceal.
From mid-way in the article
He’s had a rocky tenure so far, marked by public fights with senior Cabinet officials and accusations that he leaked information to the press, which Bongino denied. In August, Trump appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as co-deputy director at the FBI, setting off speculation that the White House had lost faith in Bongino. But he remains in the job.
ProPublica could not determine whether Bongino sat for a polygraph exam or what its results were. Though the existence of a polygraph waiver is an indication he may not have passed the test, it is possible Bongino received a preemptive exemption, a former senior FBI official with knowledge of the vetting program told ProPublica.
When ProPublica sought comment from the FBI, the agency denied that Bongino or the other senior staff members failed polygraph tests. “It is false that the individuals you referenced failed polygraphs,” wrote spokesperson Ben Williamson.
The government does a lot of security theater and campaigns to make you believe that they are competent.
They are perfectly fine as detectors of areas of interest for investigators to probe deeper.
"A routine Shin Bet polygraph test of a senior officer close to Military Advocate General reportedly exposed new clues about video leak, prompting Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to order a full criminal investigation"
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bkbichbjbe
While polygraphs are not perfect they are widely used as part of a broader set of measures. I'm not sure "must not be used" is really the right way to approach this. This person would not have been caught if it wasn't for this polygraphs screening.
Plus, finding "clues" could mean anything, including false leads. If the Shin Bet is resorting to interviews under duress, they really must not have much physical evidence to work with.
One could even argue that the polygraph benefits the person being screened, as it provides some additional motivation for them to take it seriously.
The FBI and CIA still have moles and they often times operate out of the highest levels.
They're like door locks. They keep honest people honest. They provide zero security.
They are about as accurate as flipping a coin.
Polygraphs are not detecting lies, they're used to assess your sensitivities; there are really talented interrogators in counterintelligence, whose full-time job is to fuck with you in subtle ways. To poly a person at will is very much a power move, and some guys fucking love it. But that's a different story all together. Most of the time it's a formality like everything else. In reality, people don't have remotely enough bandwidth to pursue stuff like that unless there's a genuine investigation. But office politics people will office-politique.
Unpopular opinion: private companies should poly people more often in hiring, it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews. Food for thought.
Useful in what sense? That you can't figure out anyway what tested person is capable of because tested person can believe that they have skills on godlike senior level, but they are junior at best?
And this is a process that you expect to produce an output with any predictive value what so ever?
> it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews.
You could also just end up selecting for psychopaths and sociopaths for whom this test does not function, regardless of how much you "fuck with them."
BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP
The cesspool that has been opened in the US the last few years is both mesmerising and appalling.
bediger4000•2h ago
The furor here is about Dan Bongino, and Nicole Rucker, Kash Patel's assitant
The article goes on to say that FBI employees at the level Bongino and Rucker are working at have "SCI" clearance on top of Top Secret. Back in the 1990s, it was exceptionally difficult to get TS clearance. SCI on top of that must have been even harder.
I guess this is no worse than Jared Kushner getting a waiver to work at the White House during Trump's first term, but holy cow, getting this kind of special treatment really does reinforce a big difference between classes, doesn't it? Any ordinary, non-rich person getting "alerts" on polygraphs would probably be immediately dropped from getting a Top Secret.
gishh•1h ago
Not really. I know a litany of people who had TS/SCI clearances in the 90s. It was literally a job requirement for entire divisions of the US govt.
bediger4000•1h ago
Some fed contacted every single reference I gave, my old scoutmaster, and the minister of the church I was a janitor for during college. Top Secret was notoriously more difficult in terms of paperwork and scrutiny of your past.
The article about Bongino's waiver made it clear that TS was a requirement for FBI employment, an entire division of the government, although it wasn't clear if that was everyone, or just the higher level administrative staff.
majormajor•58m ago
I've been a reference interviewed in the processes before. It was not exactly rigorous. (It would have been hard to be, frankly... I had no knowledge of them doing anything shady, and they had no specific prior area of concern to try to grill me specifically on.)
rkomorn•46m ago
I was confused that I wasn't even asked if I was a citizen, or that my friend listed me as a reference because I'm pretty sure he knew.
gishh•48m ago
There is an entire industry built around clearing people, your tax dollars pay them. Of course everyone you listed was contacted, that’s the whole point.
How is filling out an SF-86 hard?
Maybe what you meant was, justifying the reason to get a clearance in the 90s was harder. Perhaps that is true. Getting a clearance isn’t hard.
Scubabear68•46m ago
Divulging where you've lived for the past 10+ years, having agents contacting your references, etc for "Secret" is not very onerous or difficult.
Given that, your subsequent statement that "Top Secret was notoriously more difficult in terms of paperwork" seems to be pointless.
crystal_revenge•18m ago
As a former federal government employee, all of this is also required as part of the standard background check. People will show up in a black sedan and interview your neighbors, all you past employers and people who knew you at each residence. This happened for me and I’ve never had any real security clearance (nor required it).
Just because it’s work doesn’t mean it’s rare. My father and most of his coworkers all had TS clearance in the 90s. It required flying out to Dallas (if I recall correctly) for the polygraph. Lots of work but very common.
moron4hire•7m ago
KaiserPro•1m ago
The number of poepl that hold top secret clearance (assuming its the same thing...) is 1.3mil
kevin_thibedeau•1h ago
CGMthrowaway•1h ago
HeinzStuckeIt•1h ago
I think you are exaggerating this as the other poster points out. Every US military cryptolinguist gets a TS-SCI clearance. So, while every student at Defense Language Institute was doing his/her language course, a background check was done, and the rejection rate in the 1990s was presumably tiny. And ditto for other military intelligence roles. A certain amount of military personnel getting the clearance were semi-native speakers of a language in demand who still had foreign ties (family or land owned in the old country) but they passed nonetheless, which must speak to a certain laxness.
moron4hire•46m ago
The different clearance levels are not really an indication of different levels of vetting being done to a person. If you can get cleared for Secret, there's no particular reason you couldn't get cleared for TS. It's the same SF-86 form, the same investigation (well, not that I know, exactly. All I know is that it didn't look any different from my perspective), the same interview. There are some differences in how often you'll get re-interviewed, I think. It's not really anything so onerous that you have to ever think about it, really.
The different levels are much more about need to know, which is driven by potential impact of breach. You don't even have to go through the lower levels before you get to the higher ones. The selectiveness of giving people higher clearance levels is more about controlling exposure surface area.
On top of that, clearance level is kind of more about what meetings you'll be allowed in, what conversations you'll be allowed to participate in. SCI is more having ongoing access to data. Then there are additionally "caveats", which are clearances to specific programs. Each of these things are a different axis in the clearance system, not different levels of a linear system.
Contrary to somewhat popular belief, a polygraph is not required to obtain TS/SCI. You can do a polygraph and that's a whole additional designation, "TS/SCI with Poly," as you might see in various job ads.
The fact that these people can't pass TS is extremely telling and extremely concerning. Not being able to pass basically means the investigation revealed information that the person has a reasonable chance of being coerced into providing information. A simple example: maybe you have a mistress you're trying to hide; a foreign intelligence service could try to blackmail you into providing them information. Maybe you have a lot of debt, especially gambling debt; you'd be judged particularly susceptible to taking bribes, which would also set you up to be easily blackmailed.
But I know at least one guy who is a raging pothead who has had high level clearance for the last 20 years. They didn't care because he was open about it. If he was open about it with them, then it was clear it wasn't an issue he could be coerced over. I know people who had past criminal charges on their records. They were fine, too, for the same reason. It used to be you couldn't hold a clearance if you were gay, but nowadays, people are much more open and accepting of it such that it's not a reasonable attack vector for coercion.
Basically, it means you've got major skeletons in your closet and probably tried to lie about them if you can't pass for S or TS. If you can't pass for TS then you probably shouldn't have a position of public trust at all, even for just handling CUI.