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JPL Scientists Take NASA To the Supreme Court
CheshireCatCO writes "Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, concerned about background checks now required of federal employees, sued NASA to suspend the checks back in 2007. The case has now worked its way up to the Supreme Court. At stake: whether all federal employees can be forced to undergo open-ended background checks whether or not the employee has exposure to classified or sensitive information. The background checks, which can include interviewing people from employees' pasts such as landlords and teachers, may seek, among other things, sexual histories."
I hope the JPL scientists win!
The "sexual history" questions will unfortunately remain relevant in background checks for highly important/secret positions so long as sexual history related topics remain highly taboo in society. The (intended) purpose of these questions is to determine if the applicant has anything in their past that would make particularly them subjective to blackmail.
They leave a bad taste in my mouth too, which is why I avoid those sorts of jobs...
Maybe people should just stop be ashamed by crap they do and not worry about it?
We all have gotten together with people we didn't want people to know. Chances are, people already know and don't care.
Seriously, blackmail only works if you let it.
You want to blackmail me? go for it. and good luck!
Be seeing you...
The "sexual history" questions will unfortunately remain relevant in background checks for highly important/secret positions
The question is whether intrusive background checks are appropriate for scientists working on unclassified projects. I don't see what the "importance" of the project has to do with it. If they don't have access to national security secrets, why should the government be allowed to go on a fishing expedition through their private lives?
"The (intended) purpose of these questions is to determine if the applicant has anything in their past that would make particularly them subjective to blackmail."
Yes, but blackmail for what? The latest images from Mars? The shoestring budget numbers for a project? The motor control code for actuators? I think people have the perception that what goes on at JPL is top secret stuff when in fact just about all of it gets released to the public sooner than later. We're talking research-y stuff here. Not DOD. And where people might be working on DOD stuff then the security clearances come into play.
These abusive background checks might make a little more sense for those pursuing a secret clearance, but for the day-to-day activities at JPL they are just that. Abusive.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
We all have gotten together with people we didn't want people to know.
Infidelity and other sexual indiscretions can easily damage or even ruin marriages and political careers. It doesn't really matter whether or not YOU are ashamed of what YOU did. What matters is what EVERYONE else thinks.
Blackmail will continue to work as long as your spouse and/or the voters care about what YOU have been up to.
More accurately, people should stop caring about the crap other people do. Blackmail works if the people around you (your boss, your wife/family, your coworkers, your friends, your neighbors...) let it.
The spouse one is a big one. There can be big financial consequences involved there.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
If one is in the closet, it is usually for a pretty good reason. When you have people in this society that will literally get violent if they find that one is gay, one would have to be very careful who he tells in order to not get killed. Gays are still being murdered in this society. And if you get a boss who's belief system thinks that homosexuality is an affront to God or something like that, he has to cover themselves to have employment.
Everyone has something to hide - or I can make anything about you be turned into something that needs to be hidden.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, concerned about background checks now required of federal employees, sued NASA to suspect the checks back in 2007.
I always suspected the checks. Oh wait, did you mean suspend?
It's not just blackmail. Stupid HR people may rarely work, but when they do it can be preventing people from getting jobs due to trivialities on their files. You'll even get a "40 and still a virgin - can't have him working here" response if that sort of thing is on file. Anything other than what the HR people consider ideal from their own personal background puts you at a disadvantage if it's on file. The only real answer is to never let them see this stuff if it is collected.
Why is Snark Required?
You make the assumption that someone working at JPL will always work at JPL. People get transferred to other jobs within thier organizations all the time. And there are parts of NASA that do work for DOD (putting secret satellites into orbit leaps to mind, there are probably many others).
You also make the assumption that JPL never does any research for or fills requests for any other government agency, or that the expertise of its staff are never called on for use in other departments.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination or experience working in a regular office to know that once they've graduated from the cubicle farm, employees are pretty mobile, and knowledge spreads like a virus.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
That's what actual security clearances are for, and not the subject of this lawsuit.
If JPL didn't care about who a job candidate slept with 20 years ago, that job candidate would be a lot less likely to become a blackmail target.
That's not what we're talking about here. We aren't talking about a highly public figure.
Right, so my comments about political career misses the mark a bit in this context, but the spouse/family aspect is still right on target.
We're talking about an employee who might want to keep something secret, like porn preferences.
Not really. Unless the porn preferences are illegal its not going to matter all that much to most people. I doubt anyone has ever really been successfully blackmailed with the fact that they like redheads in bondage porn.
Revelations of infidelity and bisexuality/homosexuality will still be effective blackmail though, because they can still trash your marriage / family / personal relationships - whether you are ashamed or not.
And illegal porn will of course be effective blackmail, along with any other blackmail involving crime.
If you don't give a shit if your spouse finds out, even if your spouse would care a lot about it themselves, there is no leverage to blackmail.
If you didn't give a shit you wouldn't be keeping it a secret in the first place.
The fact that you are keeping it secret indicates that you put some value in it being a secret.
But I agree that 'how much value' you put into it remaining a secret is a personal valuation, that isn't directly tied to how upset they will be. ... but if you value your spouse highly, and you firmly believe that if they found out they would leave, then you will value the secret highly.
The point I made originally is that blackmail is not founded on a simple question of 'shame' but one of consequences.
I care much more about issues like illegal prisons, torture (whether or not by that name), secret kidnappings, state secrets, assassinations without trials, warrantless wiretapping, and policies like that than I do about downloading free music, but Obama's Just-Us Department is defending the Bush Administration's policies on all of those things. Instead of Hopey Changey Stuff, we've been getting Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss. And the kind of people who want the uncontrolled spying on people's music download habits get along really well with the politically-motivated spooks who want the same powers and same infrastructure.
As far as the economy goes, Keynes himself was smarter than most people who use his name to describe themselves - it's not surprising that the Obama Administration tried to fix Bush's massive economic damage by borrowing and spending lots of money, but if that were all it took, the way Bush racked up deficits by spending money like a drunken sailor with a bunch of stolen credit cards should have helped things instead of hurting them. It's certainly better to spend them on domestic pork-barrel projects than on wars, but Obama hasn't slowed down the wars by much either. There's a better excuse for it (naive optimism instead of cynical irresponsibility), but I don't see it getting us out of the tar pits, since we're still going to have to pay that money back, and with the demographic hit of all the boomers going on Social Security in the next decade, the general budget will need to start running surpluses, not deficits, which will be tough with fewer actual workers.
(And religious bigotry's not pretty even if you are attacking politically correct targets. Blamin' Texans is ok, though...)
(Also, I once pulled a bird out of the La Brea Tar Pits; it was still alive, but the folks at the museum said it was unlikely to recover from getting stuck in that stuff.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Blackmail isn't always about things you personally feel ashamed of - I've had friends who got fired from their jobs for being gay (hey, she didn't know her boss was a homophobe when she started working there), and there are people whose families would freak out if they knew.
One of the TLAs, probably NSA, once wanted to hire a guy who was gay, some time after it had stopped being illegal in most of the US. The deal they made was that he had to come out to his family, so it couldn't be used for blackmail. If it had been the Army, either under DADT or the previous Hunt Down The Queer Witches policy, blackmail would have still been a possibility even if his family was fine with it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You make the assumption that someone working at JPL will always work at JPL. People get transferred to other jobs within thier organizations all the time. And there are parts of NASA that do work for DOD (putting secret satellites into orbit leaps to mind, there are probably many others).
You are making the assumption that your security clearance requirement (and subsequent check) never changes when your job changes. When you get a job with a higher clearance requirement, there will be a check. If you don't have any clearance, you will be investigated for one.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
NASA is a civilian agency, not a "wing" of any branch of the military.
Military space operations are run by the USAF Space Command and/or SAC.
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Oh it doesn't have to, we have you secret video tapes right here mister chicken man.
You forgot the blackmail.
FTFY [substitute "wife" or "the press" if they are married or have a public reputation to protect]
AFAIK, the only defense against this sort of thing is either prevention (background check) or openness (antisocial weirdness that prevents you being embarrassed about having a bad rep), and savvy (to recognise social engineering and not fall for it). Alternative better ideas would be neat if you have any?
Also, nations at war often tend to think it's the 50's again..
At stake: whether all federal employees can be forced to undergo open-ended background checks
Really? I don't see that in the questions being answered by the supreme court.
That would be question 2 in the link you provided.
This would require that people aren't what they are - ignorant, hypocritical, self-centered, immature idiots who hold every other person on the planet to a standard orders of magnitude higher than that to which they hold themselves.
We are a country that impeached a president over a consensual sex act.
(Oh don't start whining wingnuts, yes it was technically for "lying" about a sex act after his perfectly legal consensual and private sex life was the subject of a multi-year, multimillion dollar taxpayer funded investigation. You should thank me instead of whining - the reality actually makes you look MORE pathetic, craven and childish.)
We are a nation of six year olds.
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