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US Supreme Court Says NASA Background Checks OK
coondoggie writes "In a long-running dispute about privacy and security, the US Supreme Court today sided with NASA saying its background checks were not invasive and that the information required for not only NASA but most government positions was a reasonable security precaution and that sufficient privacy safeguards existed to prevent any improper disclosures. You may recall that in this case, 28 scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory filed suit against the US government and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2007 saying that NASA's invasive background investigations as required by government regulations [inappropriately violate workers' privacy]."
Questions like "Are you now, or have you ever been a Communist--or voted Democrat?" "Have you ever criticized NASA, one of its employees, or a relative of one of its employees?" and "Does the movie Red Dawn give you an erection and, if not, why?" are vital in assessing the security risk of a new employee or contractor. Otherwise, they had might as well put a sign out that says "Pinkos and homosexuals welcome!"
NASA is the first line of defense, people. Their job isn't to hire good engineers, it's to hire good AMERICANS!
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...28 scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory filed suit against the US government and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2007 saying that NASA's invasive background investigations as required by government regulations.
Perhaps you meant to finish that sentence with a verb or two? I am forced to guess... Did the background checks insult their mom and kick their dog?
Likely the issue was not that the background checks were too invasive but that the people who had access to the information gathered from the background checks did not have the self-control to keep their mouth shut...
So once you have a background check pretty much the entire world knows about that time that you crapped your pants in third grade because your Mom forgot to wash her hands before she packed your lunch.
Background checks for security... sure. Background checks used to humiliate and intimidate... that's the problem.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Did you seriously expect the current incarnation of the US Supreme Court to do anything other than uphold more government intrusion? The only interesting part of this case is that it was basically unanimous.
I am officially gone from
so its essentially the same clearance if your in the army or work for a defense contractor
See subject line, & this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
APK
P.S.=> His background, Nazi Scientist, didn't stop him from being utilized in the name of United States Progress in Sciences & Military applications... why? Because he was a pre-eminent scientist in the field of rocketry so, especially at that time, pretty much everyone wanted what he was good at so, there you are! apk
A significant portion of the space concentration aerospace engineers that I graduated with from Cal Poly specifically avoided the defense megacorps when hunting for jobs (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup) precisely because they did not want to work for an organization that had that kind of access into their personal lives. Many of those folk saw JPL as one of the 'civil' workplaces where they could find a job without having to deal with all of the security clearance BS. After this ruling, I am pretty sure that even more talented upcoming engineers will specifically avoid working for JPL (opting, instead, for places like Loral and SpaceX).
I would wager that this ruling had to due with ITAR technology though. ITAR agreements tend to apply to just about any space technology in the U.S. (which, incidentally, is hampering progress to a degree). So exposure to many advanced technologies must be heavily regulated and monitored. Hell, I plan to take a tour of JPL Tuesday, and I will be required to show proof of citizenship just to enter the facility; a facility that is entirely and completely funded by our tax dollars.
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A friend of mine used to be a contractor to NASA and he used to tell me stories about how you could get into trouble if you queried the wrong column in a database table. His background check was so extensive that it went on for 3 months, while he just sat around and brought home paychecks for doing absolutely NOTHING.
He also said that if you pushed the wrong number on the elevator and got off on the wrong floor, you would be interrogated and possibly fired. If you did it more than once, you would definitely be fired.
Those gubment folks are pretty strict.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
As someone who just turned down a job offer at a "big company" because I felt the background check was becoming too invasive, I now worry about how much control big employers have in defining candidates' eligibility to be employable.
It was much more about security theater than security. And, I'm troubled that the definition of employability is now the willingness to send one's tax records to outsourced fact checkers on the other side of the world.
so its essentially the same clearance if your in the army or work for a defense contractor
Which is pretty much irrelevant, since this isn't for a security clearance, and the issue wasn't about a defense contract.
The rocket system-du-jour is the shuttle, which does carry military and defense related payloads from time to time..
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---
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Yeah it should be nothing like a security clearance for a defense contract. They're just shooting giant missiles with possibly nuclear payloads into the sky every couple months. I mean why even background check anyone?
> They don't have to work for JPL
Are you only joking, or really implying that if they don't like the policy they should just go somewhere else?
Leaving may be great advice for minimizing their personal troubles, but it's lousy advice for fixing a paranoid and stupid bureaucracy. Some people fight evil/stupidity rather than running away from it.
In light of [my Hungarian experience] in doesn't seem so harsh, does it?
I'm not sure former Soviet satellites are the gold standard here.
Therse background checks are stupid/wasteful because they ask the wrong questions of the wrong people. And they are invasive because the government really doesn't need to stick its nose up scientist's pants.
Lots of that stuff is subjective. And when they come around to check up on you, they don't limit themselves to the contacts you have listed.
When I was a kid, my dad worked on some aerospace stuff for Boeing. So did our next door neighbor. But we didn't get along with them very well. The guy and his wife were alcoholics and have one (maybe two) kids suffering from fetal alchohol syndrome. My folks just didn't care to associate with the riff-raff. But they didn't mind venting about us. At one point, my dad completed an interview about the neighbor with the DoD investigator. When it was done he said that, even though he wasn't supposed to discuss it, he had also conducted the interview with our neighbor about my dad. Hew said, "Boy, that guy really hates your guts. If it wasn't for the fact that we know he's got problems, we might take him seriously. But don't worry about it."
Now that I'm in the position my dad was in, I can only wonder what kind of crap my bible thumping nut case neighbor might be telling the authorities. After all, if I don't have Jesus in my heart, how can I possibly build weapons systems for killing non-Christians around the world? I know they talk to him because, in spite of instructions not to discuss the interview, their kids come over and say, "Hey mister! The FBI was asking my dad questions about you!"
Have gnu, will travel.
Caltech/JPL employees don't work on the shuttle. No one was objecting to clearances for anyone who needs one. The objection was to an open-ended background check for jobs that don't deal with sensitive data or need a clearance. The folks who do that had to get clearance anyway. The Soops just pretty much said that if you get paid by the government in any way, shape, or form, even twice removed, the government has the right, nay the duty, to investigate your background. For instance, JPL employees are not government employees: they work for Caltech (once-removed). And JPL contractors don't work for JPL, they get paid by their contracting firm (twice-removed).
Again, JPL employees typically don't deal with classified or sensitive data; most NASA data and inventions are required by law to be released to the public eventually (pick up a copy of NASA Tech Briefs sometime). This will propagate; the DOE doesn't have to do this now, but they will. As will the DOT and DOEducation, and every other government organization and contractor. How many of you will be free from this? How many of your jobs depend on government money at some stage?
Not in the headline is Scalia's concurring opinion, where he comes right out and says that there is no right to informational privacy. Good luck with that too.
Adios, Fourth Amendment.
(Disclaimer: I'm a named plaintiff in this lawsuit.)
I'm only about halfway through the ruling, but it's hard for me to know where to begin criticizing it. Here are some choice bits:
* The ruling says that we shouldn't be worried because the government promises to protect our privacy. That's fatally absurd in the era of Wikileaks: if the government can't keep its own secrets secret, what are the odds that it'll keep my secrets secret?
* The ruling says that the government needn't show that its questions must be crafted as narrowly as possible to further its interests. This seems to ignore an interesting distinction between the government and private employers: the government can now ask you anything it wants, and jail you if it doesn't like the answers. Worse, the government can change its mind about what you get in trouble for, as a lot of people discovered unpleasantly in the 1950s, so something that's perfectly safe to admit now can get you in trouble a decade from now.
* It's a special irony that Justice Thomas held (in a minority view) that there's no right to informational privacy at all. (Fortunately, the majority explicitly refused to rule on that point.) Perhaps Justice Thomas would like to tell us what really went on between him and Anita Hill, then? Or maybe privacy is good for the gander, in his view, but not so much for the goose.
* Remember that this ruling is only on a preliminary injunction. We haven't even gone to trial yet. The legal system is as intricate as only a centuries-old piece of code can be, and we have a long way to go yet. (Contrary to a highly misleading internal all-hands JPL email message issued after the ruling, incidentally.)
I have lots more to say, but I'm going to meet with our lawyers now. Grr.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
You missed the part where the issue being decided was whether or not employees termed low risk (i.e., have no access to mission systems) had to submit to an open-ended investigation. My wife doesn't even have access to the computer room with her machine, much less any flight stuff, and she had to "volunteer" to be investigated more thoroughly than for a DoD secret (trust me, I know). It's the ability of the government to simultaneously call someone low risk and demand an intrusive background check that's so... impressive.
It takes up to a year to complete a clearance. Maybe there was something else coming up that these guys aren't going to be working on, at least not now.
This wasn't about security clearances, it was about intrusive background investigations (that required signing a very broad waiver/release that is essentially unlimited in scope and duration) for people who are in positions NASA deems "low risk"-- i.e. handle mostly scientific data that's going to be released anyway, or do editing, or engineering on completely unclassified things, or work in the cafeteria, or are janitors, etc. The waivers for clearances have a time limit that they're usable for, but this one doesn't.
JPL also does very little classified work and for much of that small amount of classified work the people doing it aren't all required to have clearances, only those who have system level knowledge or need to know the application. Pretty much everyone who has a clearance there has one because they actively chose to work on something that required it, or it lets them propose work that requires it. Most people don't and most parts of the lab are pretty open once you're in. Things that need to be locked are locked (many buildings are not), and things that have special access requirements have cipher locks or badge reader access with access control lists. You can't accidentally come across classified stuff-- people working on it are required to keep it secret, even from other people who have clearances unless they have a specific need to know.
If the govermint's questioning gets too invasive then no one will qualify/want to work for the governmint, and many position will remain unfilled. Eventually no one worth-a-shit will want to work for them...
Could this be a way of reducing the governmint budget by reducing interest in governmint related jobs?
If the goal of the background check is to determine whether or not you are susceptible to blackmail, then I would say that they have succeeded admirably.
"Sign this form which gives an unnamed private contractor carte blanche to investigate your personal life or else we will fire you."
I have so much more to say on this subject beyond a quip, but I'm tired. It's all been said already. The correct course of action is obvious to anybody who is aware of the facts.
When I was a child I read about McCarthyism in high school. It seemed like a fairytale to me; I couldn't understand how people could ever do something like that. These last 3 years have been a bitter lesson for me.