9th Circuit Says Feds' Security Checks At JPL Go Too Far

coondoggie writes with an excerpt from Network World which explains that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals "this week ruled against the federal government and in favor of employees at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in their case which centers around background investigations known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive #12 (Nelson et al. vs NASA). The finding reaffirms the JPL employees claims' that the checks threaten their constitutional rights. The stink stems from HSPD #12 which is in part aimed at gathering information to develop a common identification standard that ensures that people are who they say they are, so government facilities and sensitive information stored in networks remains protected." At issue in particular: an employee's not agreeing to "an open ended background investigation, conducted by unknown investigators, in order to receive an identification badge that was compliant with HSPD#12" was grounds for dismissal.

Comments

you would not know why you failed

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a briefing where I work about the plan. If you failed the background check, you had no way of learning the reasons. Though you could technically appeal, what would have been the good of that had you not known why. What if it had been simply that you donated money to a certain person, or that your spouse was from a certain country, or a mistaken identity? The other problem was that it took so long to do the checks. Since the program had not started they had no idea, but it was thought that the new process would likely add 6 months to the already tedious process in place. To give you an idea I have had two background checks here. Once it took 4 months the other time 2 since I had already passed an earlier one. Soon we learned about the likely challenge from NASA employees and we waited it out. It has taken years to get this far and thankfully it looks like this overstepping is going to end. The other thing is that the dept I work for and the job I do has me doing absolutely nothing secret or anything of the sort that might need this level of background check. Every employee was going to need it.

The final point I want to add is that during the briefing it became clear that not only was this a terrible new big brother style of infringement but that there were companies that were going to make a fortune doing this. As an example we were going to have to get a new set of IDs and all the doors and computers would have readers in order to use them.

Re:Workers were not seeking security clerance even

[calmofthestorm]

At one of hte protests I went to, one guy stood up to speak and basically said he was glad he had a top secret clearance because it meant he didn't have to have his privacy invaded like this. That's saying something.

Disclaimer: I was an intern at JPL two summers ago when this was starting to be a problem.