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."

Comments

Go JPL

[colinrichardday]

I hope the JPL scientists win!

Re:Go JPL

[Peach Rings]

Insightful, really? Where's the patriot act rage? The DMCA rage? How quickly people forget that Bush told us there were weapons of mass destruction (there weren't) and waged a war of aggression that cost us nearly 50 times the original estimate of $60 billion dollars. That high-level Bush administration officials were personally responsible for suppressing evidence of human rights violations in overseas American prisons. That people are only now being released with our apologies for being held without trial for almost 10 years. That civil rights were eroded beyond anyone's wildest imagination in the anti-terrst frenzy after 9/11.

And what about the financial crisis? Which would you rather have, Obama stealing thousands from the pockets of millionaires or a downward spiral of economic peril that was the consequence of a presidential administration's pathological revulsion to reasonable regulation.

Re:Go JPL

[chrisG23]

You make it sound like the economy is a simple entity that immediately responds to the actions of those in control of the purse strings, budgets, and most importantly, the fiscal policy. It is not that simple. The seeds for the recession that officially began in December 2007 (National Bureau of Economic Research) were laid in place well before the Congress shifted to a Democrat majority in January of 2007. It would have happened regardless of who was in Congress for the 11 months prior to the start.

Re:Go JPL

[causality]

Really? Is that all you care about is downloading free music?

The point is that he had a choice between representing a monied interest and representing the people in the form of no such cronyism. He made the same choice that any politician with any distant hope of high office has learned to make.

The born again Christian paranoid Texan who left Obama one fuckwad of a mess to clean up was selling you out far further than trolling IP addresses for illegally sharing content.

Absolutely. Now, consider this: the same sponsors, corporate interests, vested interests in the status quo, and, if you like, the same Establishment brought us both Presidents. This system is sometimes called the "military industrial complex" after a speech given by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. Meanwhile, two parties with a complete duopoly on any important public office means an affordably low number of factions to buy off, err I mean to support their campaigns. Do you see the problem?

As an outside observer who is not American, when I look at the mess GWB left for BO to deal with I have to say he's doing one hell of a job. The USA would be a third-world country by now if it wasn't for the crazy hard decisions Obama had to make to keep the US from tanking more than it did!

You're talking about a man who hires staffers with opinions like "never let a good crisis go to waste." If that were me in charge I'd have fired that person immediately as a public service. That's an attitude that is unworthy of proximity to power and not to be trusted with it.

He's not a God or the second coming of Christ, but he's doing a pretty good job leading the US out of the tar pits.

He's a puppet but he's a really charismatic one. The whole skill of politics is to adopt a position because of the way that the wind blows and then wear it so naturally that you must have felt that way your entire life. The author of the script he's always reading from a teleprompter is the one you should be looking at.

None of this is new, it's just that Presidents in the past would speak extemporaneously at least some significant portion of the time. The basic motivations that determine their choices remain extremely similar, with insignificant differences to which much attention is called. That's why the whole "Left" and "Right" deal is just two forms of Statism. Their differences concern only implementation details. But the constant bickering over those "ideological differences" distracts from the realization that they are indirect paths to Statism. The name for this effect is "divide and conquer".

The only interesting question is to what degree this arrangement is deliberate. Is it the product of a great deal of intentional engineering, or is the political environment more like an evolutionary pressure in the sense that politicians who aren't like this have no hope of competing with politicians who are? The very high incumbency rate of Congress gives one the impression that failing to really represent the interests of the people carries negligible political consequences.

It's about blackmail

[Sir_Lewk]

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...

Re:It's about blackmail

[Anonymous Coward]

They leave a bad taste in my mouth too, which is why I avoid those sorts of jobs

Said Sir_Lewk to the NSA job interviewer, who had asked about Sir_Lewk's sexual history.

Re:It's about blackmail

[Dyinobal]

You know I never really thought of it like that, damn I hope that raw chicken doesn't talk.

Re:It's about blackmail

[Nyder]

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!

Re:It's about blackmail

[Concerned Onlooker]

"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.

Re:It's about blackmail

[vux984]

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.

Re:It's about blackmail

[Sir_Lewk]

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.

Re:It's about blackmail

[jackbird]

That's what actual security clearances are for, and not the subject of this lawsuit.

Re:It's about blackmail

[Nyeerrmm]

No. I work at JPL. I've done classified work before. Just because I have done it in the past or might in the future implies nothing about whether I should have a background check for my current job. If I were to do classified work in my current job, I would need to regain my clearance. This is the same as if I decided to go work minimum wage at a fast food chain then went back to classified work.

Though I dont care for my own sake, since I've already gone through it for legitimate reasons, making all employees here go through it is absurd. My best understanding (I started well after they stopped issuing the badges, so I'm not certain of the details) is that it was an unassuming attempt to put a generic federal badging procedure, which normally applies to DOD contractors, for which the background check makes sense. However it should not apply to JPL or other NASA centers, and to me this lawsuit is against the idea that more security is always necessarily better, and should be applied without consideration for the civil liberties of federal contractors.

Re:It's about blackmail

[Jafafa Hots]

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.

Obama's Busy Defending Bush Admin. Policies

[billstewart]

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.)

Re:Obama's Busy Defending Bush Admin. Policies

[Firethorn]

Obama is not the same as the Old Boss. Educate yourself.

Sure, he's not identical. Sure, he changed a couple policies. Policies that studies were showing were ineffective. But he's held the same course in so many OTHER areas that you can stay he's much the same.

For example, we're still in Iraq. We're still in Afghanistan. We're still spending borrowed money like crazy. Gun control hasn't changed, and don't ask don't tell still stands.

Personally I think that we need to 'finish the job' in Iraq and Afghanistan, which to me means a functional government able to defend itself from extremists and foreign powers. Able to represent the people, etc... At this point the reason we went in is almost moot.

I'm very much FOR balanced budgets. I think that gays should be able to openly serve in the military, it's only a source of friction right now. As for gun control, well, check out my sig for my thoughts on that...

For the record, I'm not happy with either party.

Re:Obama's Busy Defending Bush Admin. Policies

[Firethorn]

The NRA has had a history of supporting pro-gun rights candidates irregardless of party. I've paid attention. While there hasn't been a lot of movement on the federal level, there's been quite a bit at the state level. We're down to, what, 2 states that don't allow concealed carry at some level? Then again, speaking of federal level there was the strike-down of the DC gun ban. But I wouldn't associate supreme court judges with parties...

The problem, as I see it, is that the Democrats for the longest time seemed to insist on putting gun control advocates up for election, not to mention making gun control a party plank. I can't blame the NRA for taking the party at it's word and assuming that a candidate, unless he or she has stated differently, follows their party's platform, to include the gun control bits. You have some of the most vehement gun grabbers in the democrat party. Feinstein, for example. Kennedy, before his passing, was recorded proposing banning all rifles capable of penetrating soft body armor - He listed the '30-30' as an example of a gun caliber to be banned. The .30-30 was developed on the cusp of the widespread replacement of black powder with smokeless. It's primarily for lever action rifles, and was never intended for military use. It's generally considered on the bottom end of cartridges suitable for deer hunting today. Yes, it'll cut through soft body armor like butter, but so won't pretty much every other center-fire rifle round.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that Obama hasn't touched gun control stuff. Because, frankly speaking, he's a politician from Chicago and doesn't have the best record.

How you can help

[ScottMaxwell]

As a named plaintiff in this lawsuit, I'm awfully happy to see the widespread support here on Slashdot. I'd like to be able to keep driving Mars rovers around without having to sign a form that says NASA can interrogate my priest, my doctor, my lawyer, my accountant, and my ISP to make sure I'm sufficiently uninteresting.

If you'd like to help, please consider donating to keep our amazing legal team afloat. The privacy you save could be your own. Thank you!

Re:How you can help

[Geoffrey.landis]

An important thing to note is that the administration lied about the background checks. They stated that invasive personal background checks were required by a presidential directive called "HSPD-12". This, as it turns out, is incorrect.

The full text of HSPD-12 is available on the web. In fact, what it says is that the government identification cards should be difficult to forge. As a part of that, it said that the government should verify the identification of its employees before issuing identification cards. That's it. The only background check required it "check their ID."