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Amazon Hiring More Than a 100 Who Can Get Top Secret Clearances
dcblogs writes "Amazon has more than 100 job openings for people who can get a top secret clearance, which includes a U.S. government administered polygraph examination. It needs software developers, operations managers and cloud support engineers, among others. Amazon's hiring effort includes an invitation-only recruiting event for systems support engineers at its Herndon, Va., facility on Sept. 24 and 25. Amazon is fighting to win a contract to build a private cloud for the CIA. The project is being rebid after IBM filed a protest. In a recent federal lawsuit challenging the rebid, Amazon took a shot at IBM, describing the company as 'a traditional fixed IT infrastructure provider and late entrant to the cloud computing market.' Among the things IBM says in response, is that the government didn't look at Amazon's outage record. An analyst firm, Ptak Noel & Associates, concluded, in a report about the dispute, that CIA officials 'too casually brush off Amazon's outages' in evaluating the proposals."
"Amazon has more than 100 job openings for people who can get a top secret clearance, which includes a U.S. government administered polygraph examination."
That's very decent of them, after having sold them all those 'How to beat the polygraph test' books.
Basic englishs, you has grasps of its?
Finally a project that will hire some Americans.
Yeah, it's pretty sad.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
have dignity compared to the people who work in this field.
I guess they didn't even think about having that as a slogan. As an engineer you can work to make the world a better place or a worse place. This is a choice that is actively made. Here are 100 people who aren't going to make the right choice. I feel bad for them.
Good: A hundred.
Good: One hundred.
Bad: A one hundred.
Bad: A 100.
Private buyers are voting with their feet. They grumble about AWS but you don't see them flocking to IBM. The features, the rate of advancement and general ambition to build everything that could be useful, and the smooth automation and general competence of the whole thing outweighs their screwups.
(Which almost all seem to result from a datacenter-wide SAN and a lot of people in us-east-1. Wonder if they're regretting either the reliance on EBS or the concentration in one Region.)
And, yes, they had highly publicized region outages, but if you really need a lot of nines, you put boxes in multiple regions anyway.
If Amazon wins the bid will there be a product page where CIA employees can rate the service like we do when we buy a toaster? "Five Stars. Amazon helped our CIA division keep our constitutional-violating secrets away from an unsuspecting American public. I even got to get back at that NSA guy who spied on my hot girlfriend's text messages. That take George!"
I have been through the full scope polygraph process, and it sucked. I had to do it twice. It has been 1 year and I am still waiting for adjudication even though I passed the poly in April. However, my friend was hired by Amazon for the CIA work and he is getting a fast-tracked Full Scope Polygraph clearance apparently in only a few months. Considering how Amazon is staffing up and pushing people through for clearances, it would be very detrimental if IBM ended up winning the contract.
I was also interviewed by Amazon for one of these positions. It was a phone call with a shared coding session. The guy was not friendly and he asked a lot of academic questions that do not directly apply to the job or anything I have done since college. I was turned off by the experience and didn't care that they did not want to proceed with a 2nd interview. However, my friend had a much more positive experience so it really depends on who you interview with I guess.
I have worked in defense contracting for 10 years. I am now working for a startup company now and getting a lot more satisfaction out of my job. My friend received an outstanding job offer from Amazon, but he will likely end up hating his job and have the "golden handcuffs" put on.
One interesting thing is that Amazon is hiring for both Seattle and D.C. area for these jobs. I don't like either city but it's interesting they are wanting to have people with clearances work in Seattle. At least there is an option for people that want one of these positions.
You mean not having the government document your life for the last 20 years is not invasive?
DC is my home town, and I have several friends who have had jobs that required clearances with polygraphs. They've all told me that the job isn't worth the abuse.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Of all of the things involved in securing top-secret clearance, I'm willing to be the polygraph is the least invasive. Interesting that it would be the only one called out by name.
It's not that. It depends on the type of investigation you initially undergo to get said clearance in the first place. The big one for anyone holding a TS is a Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI). That goes through pretty much everything for (to start) the previous ten years. The next piece of the SSBI is the periodic review (PR), which should occur no later than five years after the previous investigation. Having been on the job market for almost 5 months, it was at least a relief to have the PR taken care of prior to my layoff.
Next step up is clearing for Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). Having the TS-SSBI (and PR) makes you ELIGIBLE to gain compartmented access, but that all falls under the umbrella of need to know. From what I recall back when I first became eligible, I was asked a few questions by the OPM investigator assigned to my case (really heavy on foreign interactions, etc.). Based on that info, along with the info in the SSBI, is what gets you into SCI.
The poly only comes into play whenever a specific SCI program requires it, and even then, it's a little more involved. The big one that we're all familiar with is the Full Scope/Lifestyle, which is what most of the three letter agencies require for the really involved work. Some programs are only interested in counterintelligence (CI), while other programs don't need a poly at all. The main difference between a FS/LS and a CI poly is pretty simple: FS/LS look at anything you can possibly fess up to in your entire lifestyle (money habits, sexual inclinations, drug experiences, etc.), while CI looks at whether or not you'd be the type of guy (like Snowden) who'd sell US secrets to someone that wasn't an American.
Having personally gone through the CI poly process, it's more tedious than anything else.
Bezos owns the Washington Post.
And now Amazon wants to get in bed with the CIA ?
What a crock of shit.
Tomorrow it's McDonalds and Coca Cola. The old timers are dying off. They have to find somebody that can keep their recipes secret. It's like Willy Wonka finding his successor.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
that's nothing compared what is involved in getting a TS clearance if you don't know
people i've known said they investigate you at least 15 years back. find all your friends, find lost friends, interview them. people in their 20's said the government talked to all their teachers, neighbors, everyone they ever knew in their life
They always accuse you of using drugs. Always. They also try to beat you into a confession. Always.
I got up and walked out of my polygraph at the CIA when I interviewed. I didn't want to come close to finding out how an organization treated its employees when it treated its prospects like that.
And the quid pro quo of these deals is Amazon handing over the purchasers data to NSA.
So whether you buy a political book and can be flagged as politically active and worth monitoring, or you buy an environment book and can be flagged as 'eco terrorist potential candidate', all of that goes into the Stasibase.
I was told by a contractor working for Sammy, Samsung is going to cancel their EC2 cloud contract to avoid legal liability in some countries, their phones connect to Amazon and their backend is done on Amazon. So Amazon must be getting hit by this NSA fallout and that will grow worse over time as the existing contracts run out and aren't renewed. So NSA gave them a sweetener I think in return.
US trade deficit turned around in July and widened. Anyone wonder why? I know I contributed $700 of it at least simply by ditching US hosting.
So companies will get more dependant on the NSA subsidies.
You are speculating incorrectly. I held a special clearance and they went back and talked to elementary school teachers, old friends, etc... If they come up with concerns, they dig further than they did with me.
The 4 million number includes people that have held a clearance for decades. Renewals do not take much investigation.
In other words, if it was 4million new investigations it would be cost prohibitive. It's not, so don't make up stories.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
while CI looks at whether or not you'd be the type of guy (like Snowden) who'd sell US secrets to someone that wasn't an American.
Pretty sure Snowden could have honestly replied to any questions that made him sound like a spy.
Or is a standard question... "If you found out your the entire apparatus of your employer up to the very top was corrupt and conducting illegal acts, and then lying to Congress about it. Would you keep quiet and participate in those criminal acts in violation of the law and the constitution?
Lol... reminds me of those ethics tests they make people take for retail jobs. Where the "right" answers are to be a sociopath freak.
"Suppose there is a coworker you were friends with, lived through a kidnapping with, and who is the god parent to your children and the best man at your wedding, and is in your opinion an excellent employee. Now if they were in a car accident, and he's running a touch late. He calls you from the parking lot as he's rushing in and asks you to punch them in so they would not appear to be late... would you:
a) clock him in early
b) stay out of it
c) promptly report that he asked you to clock him in on time to your manager, and testify for the company against him when we sue him for the attempt to commit fraud?
Company Answer sheet:
a = wrong answer, automatic fail, and you are a worthless criminal
b = wrong answer
c = correct, this is the exactly the kind of people we want as employees. Just think, your new boss passed this test!! We bet you are looking to work with such ethical people!
"Polygraph" is the fancy, semi-scientific name for a "lie detector," a machine that's supposed to be able to tell whether you're fibbing by measuring things like "galvanic skin response" (another science-y word, meaning "sweatiness") and your heart rate. They were invented in 1921, and, like many science-y things, people decided they were so complicated that they must work. This, of course, is an insane reason to believe something.
Lie detectors are crap. What they tell you is whether the person they've been hooked up to is sweaty, or whether his pulse has gone up, but that doesn't mean he's lying. Courts don't admit lie detector evidence for a reason.
But they're still made and they're still used -- for much the same reason that people still wear crystals around their necks to cure their diseases or buy "homeopathic remedies" to get better. It's a combination of two distinct flavors of stupidity. I call the first one "It's better than nothing." I call the second one "It worked for me."
These delusions are why many big corporations, the U.S. military, and the FBI subject their people to lie detectors. Imagine that you're some kind of millionaire big-shot company executive, the founder of a chain of successful convenience stores. You need to hire a regional manager, and if you hire the wrong person, he or she might rob you blind and ruin you. You need to get this right.
So you pay some expensive "executive recruiting" company to find the right person. They have a big sales pitch: we're smart, we've been doing this for years, and best of all, we're scientific. We have "scientific personality tests" we'll administer to make sure you're getting the right person. And before you hire that person, we'll wire her up to our lie detector and ask her some important questions, like "Are you planning on robbing the company?" and "Are you a secret drug user?" and so on.
Science is awesome, right? A scientific recruiting company's going to be totally bad-ass at finding you the right person, using the science of hiring-ology, and their science lab must have a bunch of Ph.D. hire-ologists. But you've heard that the polygraph is, you know, kind of sketchy. Does it really work?
"Oh, sure," the consultants tell you. "Not perfectly, of course. But nothing's perfect. Polygraphs, though, sometimes tell you when someone is lying, and isn't that better than nothing?"
(The correct answer is "probably not." Flipping a coin or sacrificing a goat would "sometimes" tell you if someone was lying, if you had enough lies and enough goats and you did it for long enough.)
Now, imagine you're a section chief at the FBI. You got your job by passing a lie detector test. You'd been wired up, you'd been asked if you were a secret communist islamofascist terrorist dope-fiend. You'd said "no," and the machine agreed. It works! Now, some people out there say that the machine's a piece of crap, but what do they know? After all, it not only worked on you, it worked on everyone you work with!
(Of course, everyone it didn't work on wasn't hired, or was hired even though they're snorting lines of meth through rolled up pages of The Communist Manifesto while they strap on their suicide bombs.)
The world is full of science-y crap. You probably know someone who wears a copper bracelet to "help with arthritis." They might as well burn a witch or cover themselves in blue mud and dance widdershins under a full moon. There's a chance either of those things will make them feel better, because of the placebo effect (when your brain convinces itself to stop feeling bad), but there are an alarming number of people who insist that because something "works" it must not be a placebo, it must be "real."
1) No criminal history - if your from a good family...the computer says your ok...
2) No heavy debt or credit issues - some seem to be very over extended...
3) No skeletons in the closet to feed blackmail - you would really think that one would be vital...
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/upshot/pentagon-declined-investigate-hundreds-purchases-child-pornography.html
4) No drug and only light alcohol use - always good to test for.
5) No relationships with foreign nationals - but you sooooo need that regional dialect, language, cultural insight.
6) US citizen goes without saying, foreign born may disqualify you. - some nations are more equal than others and the US really has risked/lost so much on the dual citizen aspect.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Yes if the gov did not interview your extended family and friends... teachers, neighbours - your clearance was done (post 911) by a contractor, mostly state/federal searches on a computer, ie if its not networked it was never really uncovered. The US gov has really created huge security mess long term.
People the gov will not really know are moving up in the cleared systems and networks with totally unknown pasts eg the really basic stuff of state sealed youth court issues, school, personality...
What the US missed in its hast, the Russians will find over time.- offering cash or exposure or understanding.
I'm guessing you don't know what you're talking about. Everything is on computer networks now. The computer network knows more about you than your friends, your family, it knows more about you than you know about yourself thanks to the capabilities of big data. There is less reason to do intrusive interviews with friends and family.
Also people don't have friends who are in their neighborhood anymore. People have friends all around the world via the Internet so it makes a lot more sense in that case to look into the internet history and Facebook than to try to physically interview every person that any individual knows. It would probably be thousands of Facebook friends who would have to be physically visited which is just unrealistic.
But nothing stops them from going to the NSA, FBI and other agencies and digging up files. I'm pretty sure Google knows everything about a person and Facebook knows every friend the person has, and all of that combined is a pretty clear picture of who they are. Immediate family would have to be physically interviewed but this idea that the Russians will be able to corrupt people so easily is silly. No amount of background check will tell you with 100% certainty who will be corrupt.
Of all of the things involved in securing top-secret clearance, I'm willing to be the polygraph is the least invasive. Interesting that it would be the only one called out by name.
It's not that. It depends on the type of investigation you initially undergo to get said clearance in the first place. The big one for anyone holding a TS is a Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI). That goes through pretty much everything for (to start) the previous ten years. The next piece of the SSBI is the periodic review (PR), which should occur no later than five years after the previous investigation. Having been on the job market for almost 5 months, it was at least a relief to have the PR taken care of prior to my layoff.
Next step up is clearing for Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). Having the TS-SSBI (and PR) makes you ELIGIBLE to gain compartmented access, but that all falls under the umbrella of need to know. From what I recall back when I first became eligible, I was asked a few questions by the OPM investigator assigned to my case (really heavy on foreign interactions, etc.). Based on that info, along with the info in the SSBI, is what gets you into SCI.
The poly only comes into play whenever a specific SCI program requires it, and even then, it's a little more involved. The big one that we're all familiar with is the Full Scope/Lifestyle, which is what most of the three letter agencies require for the really involved work. Some programs are only interested in counterintelligence (CI), while other programs don't need a poly at all. The main difference between a FS/LS and a CI poly is pretty simple: FS/LS look at anything you can possibly fess up to in your entire lifestyle (money habits, sexual inclinations, drug experiences, etc.), while CI looks at whether or not you'd be the type of guy (like Snowden) who'd sell US secrets to someone that wasn't an American.
Having personally gone through the CI poly process, it's more tedious than anything else.
The real question is why would anyone want a Top Secret clearance? Is the pay really so great to be worth the trouble?
All them Sys Admins now have a private job waiting.
"Don't Forget to Salt the Fries"
Posting as AC as I have active clearances and don't want to spew all that info along with my account name
A few corrections to this post:
- An SSBI is the baseline investigation for anything Top Secret or higher.
- A PR is not a prereq for any clearance. An PR is simply a 5 year update to your background. How recent your last investigation was is what matters. (Informally referred to as "having a good date")
- Just having an SSBI (or SSBI-PR) does NOT mean you are eligible for SCI. The adjudication for SCI is more stringent and can have additional restrictions placed on it than a normal SSBI. SCI (and other SAP/SAR activities) can institute additional security measures above Top Secret. For example there are certain programs I have worked where individuals who already have SCI access to other programs were denied access due to issues (such as foriegn contacts). Some programs are just more picky or more sensitive
- Which brings me to: There are only 3 levels of clearance, Top Secret being the highest. These are also referred to as "collateral" clearances. SCI and other compartmented data is given in "accesses", these are different from clearances and can have any number of additional investigative requirements.
- A polygraph is not automatically required for Top Secret or even some SCI activities. It depends on the customer and the program. I've worked SCI programs that dont require it and others that do.
As for the poly, its not as invasive as the SSBI... its just not a comfortable afternoon....
The real question is why would anyone want a Top Secret clearance? Is the pay really so great to be worth the trouble?
People will take a drug test and answer a bunch of personal questions to get a fast food job. Is it a wonder that people will go through security clearance to get a cushy government [contractor] job where pay is not dependent upon performance?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Q: What do you get when you require a Top Secret Clearance?
A: A poorly skilled employee that can pee clean and has never had a life.