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NASA Employees Fight Invasive Background Check
Electron Barrage writes "Longtime JPL scientists, many of whom do not work on classified materials, including rover drivers and Apollo veterans, sued NASA, Caltech, and the Department of Commerce today to fight highly invasive background checks, which include financial information, any and all retail business transactions, and even sexual orientation."
Because in the last year we've seen a homicidal astronaut drive across the country wearing a diaper, a sabotaging contractor, and allegations of alcoholic astronauts. All they need is an astronaut getting busted having gay bathroom sex.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Actually, since it is a government job, and there are equal opportunity laws, if someone is the most qualified and wants the job, it IS a right.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It's not that they're morally judging you, its that they're making sure that you're not unduly susceptible to influence.
Why is it that politicians don't have to undergo the same background check before being eligible for office then? They have far more power in terms of changing laws, setting budgets etc. than the average NASA employee. Of course they also make the rules about who needs to have background checks...
Background checks make sense for people dealing with classified material but not for non-classified, scientific work which in most cases is published. You'd have to be a really stupid "intelligence" operation to try and pressure people to reveal information that you can get by subscribing to an academic journal!
Honestly, its time for the US population to stop thinking like Miss Carolina and just grow the fuck up. Nobody gives a shit if you're gay, lesbian, bi, or straight, or you cheated on your spouse, or you have debt, or you used illegal drugs, or you have a Britney Speares collection. Nobody. And the sooner the government makes this their official position, and sends a clear signal to the rest of society, the sooner blackmail for this sort of crap will no longer be possible.
Of course, the odds of that happening with Idiot Bush in charge are nill.
It isn't.
JPL is a division of Caltech. JPL employees have a contract with Caltech and receive a paycheck that says Caltech. Much of the funding comes from NASA (but by no means all of it and the proportion has been shrinking), but the employees at JPL are not civil servants and they are not NASA employees.
Add to this that the people at JPL never signed a contract that said that there will be background checks (but now there are, suddenly, and they're a requirement for continued employment) and you might see where the uproar is coming from...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
At least where jobs in the government are concerned, if you were going to be discriminated against, you wouldn't be filling out the clearance questionnaire-- you would have been stopped loooong before that point, especially considering that the lowest clearance, the NAC (National Agency Check), costs about $10,000 to complete. Colleges, contractors, and vendors foot the bill to clear their employees; direct government employee clearances are on the taxpayer.
Every government position that has access to dangerous materials, sensitive/proprietary information, or responsibility of human life requires such checks, and rightly so to protect the public and the Union. Anyone who has worked in the government is quite used to the clearance process. To make matters "worse" for you privacy doom and gloomers, it occurs at regular intervals-- every 10 years for Secret, 7 years for Top Secret, and 5 years for clearances beyond that.
Sure, its uncomfortable to have a stranger rummage through your life as everyone has skeletons they'd prefer to hide, but its not worth sweating bullets about. Considering that the goal is to exclude obvious risks to the public, I'm more or less okay with the occasional privacy reinvasion to maintain my clearance knowing that the same process is going to hopefully keep John Q. Smackhead from becoming a reactor safety manager at the nuke plant in the next county.
Maybe if people understood the process...
After completing the encyclopedic questionnaire, a team of investigators is sent to verify your answers-- very often these will be local people that have retired from law enforcement who are contracted by DSS. If its your first clearance, an upgrade, or if clarifications are needed after the precursory review, you'll also sit down with an investigator for an interview where the two of you go over the questionnaire. They'll proceed scour PUBLIC record and talk to your references, neighbors, and acquaintances (heck, during my first TS clearance, the investigator spoke to my 2nd grade teacher!) Once all of the information is assembled, you are assessed as a whole person by DSS. Adjudicators (employed directly by DSS) look at the following in order of importance:
-Honesty in answers versus the investigative findings (you didn't report that you had declared Chapter 13 Bankruptcy in 1997? Whoops!)
-Accuracy of your answers versus the investigative findings (correct addresses, date ranges, employment history, account numbers, etc. mostly to determine if there's a deliberate attempt to misdirect or hide aspects of your history)
-Immediate red flags (habitual substance abuse, uncontrollable debt, felony convictions, etc)
-Travel/residence for the scope of the investigation (frequent visits to a 'non-friendly' foreign country not of your origin or without familial association)
Its the adjudicator's job to generate a mean risk assignment to your case based on these criteria. Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to have a spotless history to obtain a clearance. As long as you are HONEST and UPFRONT about your history, there's little that will stop you from obtaining it. 75% of clearance requests that are rejected are due to that alone. Many of those rejections get a second chance to come clean, as it were, and ultimately receive a clearance assignment.
Regardless of rejection, you are entitled to appeal the final decision. ALWAYS. In that event, I believe a team of 3 adjudicators (not including the original) independently assess the package with the majority ruling.
Its a rough approximation of how trustworthy a person you are. That's all.
Now, that's all fine and dandy for the government sector, but what about the corporate world?
I don't necessarily agree with some of the extensive garbage that is foisted upon corporate folk, especially for positions that don't justify such extensive checking, but it comes down a point that I mentioned earlier.
Investigations are EXPENSIVE. A potential employer isn't going to i
When everyone was paranoid about communism, JPL ran background checks on all of the members of the "suicide squad", the scientists who started the rocketry program at Cal Tech, basically the first people in America to get anywhere with rocketry. They didn't like what they found (some members were actually communists (Weinbaum, Summerfield), others just too into the occult(Jack Parsons, friend of Alister Crowley)), so they took away their clearances(revoking clearances:rocket scientist::excommunication:Catholic), and lost their experts.
One of the people who had their clearances revoked was the first "Robbert Goddard Professor of Jet Propulsion" at Cal Tech, Dr Tsien. I'm sure I don't have to explicitly mention that he was a total genius. They arrested him and then wouldn't let him leave the country for five years so that his scientific knowledge would be obsolete. As soon as he was allowed to, he moved back to China.
In China Tsien was very well respected (respecting intelligence is an archaic custom of some Asian cultures), he became Chairman Mao's tutor in science, and went on to supervise the development of China's ICBM program. So when the US gets nuked by the China, we'll have American paranoia to thank.
That's one thing that the US can make better than the Chinese ever will. We are great at making enemies out of friends.