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Researcher Fired At NSF After Government Questions Her Role As 1980s Activist
sciencehabit writes Valerie Barr was a tenured professor of computer science at Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a national reputation for her work improving computing education and attracting more women and minorities into the field. But federal investigators say that Barr lied during a routine background check about her affiliations with a domestic terrorist group that had ties to the two organizations to which she had belonged in the early 1980s. On 27 August, NSF said that her 'dishonest conduct' compelled them to cancel her temporary assignment immediately, at the end of the first of what was expected to be a 2-year stint. Colleagues who decry Barr's fate worry that the incident could make other scientists think twice about coming to work for NSF. In addition, Barr's case offers a rare glimpse into the practices of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), an obscure agency within the White House that wields vast power over the entire federal bureaucracy through its authority to vet recently hired workers.
Researcher Fired At NSF After Government Finds She Lied On Her Routine Background Check
Read TFA. It's a he said/she said deal. No real evidence has been presented that the researcher said anything that was untrue.
So, it sounds like she answered honestly, was never part of any group with that as their mandate, but that somehow there was a tangential connection to the one she was a member of.
Welcome to the war on terrorism, it's the new McCarthyism.
This just sounds like a witch hint where we're supposed to proactively identify any and all tangential links to anybody who has ever done anything bad and exclude ourselves.
Such bullshit. In reading the article, there isn't a single shred of evidence to suggest she ever did anything illegal.
Hey, I know, Bush did business with the family of OBL, Cheney owned a private security firm which did war profiteering and possibly committed war crimes, and the CIA historically supported terrorists to fight regimes they didn't like .. can we conclude that all top government have ties to terrorism?
Or can we conclude the people in the OPM are fucking morons?
This is just stupid. She was never a member of an organization dedicated to the use of violence, overthrowing the US government or any of that crap. She was a member of a group pushing for the rights of women.
Give me your fucking papers, comrade.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
She later admitted keeping contact with two members who had commited murder but claimed she was had no prior knowledge of their activities. I think she may be telling the truth but omitting the fact that she was continuing to contact those two is enough for them to take action. Lying on those forms or omitting facts like that is one of the things they really look for. You can have a clearance suspended for forgetting to mention minor financial debts.
Knew her acquaintance through the group went to jail. Didn't connect it. Like I said, the best excuse is obliviousness.
Many years ago while traveling, I went to visit a friend of a friend. We hung out for a while and a neighbor asked her to watch her five year-old son for a while. We all chatted and (I don't remember what brought it up) I mentioned that I had never been to jail. The boy was shocked. He'd never met an adult male (apparently, his father was in stir) who had never been in jail.
So, by your logic, since he knew many who had gone to jail, that five year-old boy is probably a criminal and should be shut out of any future opportunities. What a fabulous world you'd make for us.
If McCarthy was right, it was mostly by accident. The caricature in "The Manchurian Candidate" isn't too far from the truth, except probably not booze-soaked enough.
McCarthy was basically several years late to the game, and was taking advantage of a crises that had already dissipated for his own political ends. There was widespread Communist infiltration of the US government in the 1930s and 1940s - but they were largely purged during the Truman administration once the government realized how bad the problem was.
It is utterly offensive to me that the State Department gets to decide who and what groups are "terrorists". Free Association is one of the key tenants of a functioning Democracy.
I find the associations between lobbyists and government officials to be a clear and present danger to our country... but what can I do about it?
It's a shame that the summary and the article omit the most important information needed to judge whether this is reasonable or not -- details and evidence in support of the characterization of the groups Barr belonged as "linked" to the group responsible for the armored car robbery & murder. What does "linked" mean in this context: members in common? command structure? who knows? The article doesn't say, and without that information none of us can have a really informed opinion on the topic.
Since there's not much to discuss from TFA, I'm going to tell you a little story from back when I was in school, because it's conceivably relevant (but then, as I've said, we don't really have the details we need to know..
Annnnyyyyway.. Once upon a time, long ago (but still some years after this woman was in school) I was a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. During the time I was on campus there were a group of chuckleheads who fancied themselves the vanguard of the socialist revolution that was sure to sweep the country Real Soon Now (tm). They were the scourge of all of the small clubs on campus because of a trick that they pulled, over and over, quite successfully until the other student groups learned to defend themselves against it.
Here's what would happen.. A small, inoffensive campus group having little or nothing to do with the main goals of the revolutionary organization in question would have a meeting at the beginning of the year to welcome new members and to elect leadership positions for the coming school year. Let's imagine we're talking about the Campus Knitting Society.. Well, a group like that might have 8-10 members who attended meetings regularly, and a few more who would drop in when their schedules allowed. The Revolutionary Chuckleheads League (not their real name) would descend en masse on the Campus Knitting Society the week that group was electing new officers and since a lot of groups had open membership the RCL would nominate its own slate of officers and take over the Campus Knitting Society. They'd use the small budgetary stipend the group got from the student government activities fund to print up flyers and the next thing you'd know, every kiosk on campus would be covered with fluorescent orange flyers saying "U of M Campus Knitting Society DEMANDS AN END TO US IMPERIALISM" and "U of M Campus Society Says: Free Mumia!". Then the Revolutionary Chuckleheads League would abandon the burned-out husk of the club they'd taken over and move on to play the same trick on some other organization. The shellshocked original club members, if they weren't completely soured by the experience, might form a new club to replace the one that had been stolen from them, which is why from time to time you'd see flyers pop up on campus saying things like "First Meeting Sunday Night: Michigan Knitting Club (NOT THE Revolutionary Chuckleheads League)"
So.. I've got no idea from the article what Barr's politics were at the time, what they are now, and what her level of involvement with the banned group might be. But it wouldn't surprise me if there were a lot of people that I went to school with who belonged to perfectly harmless clubs who could conceivably fall afoul of the same shadow that blighted Barr's career just because they belonged to a club that got infiltrated and taken over by a group of radicals whose interests were only tangentially related to the club's original goals. I don't think that happens very often, but I would like for the government to have a higher standard than "affiliated" or at the very least to make clear what they mean by that.
I never thought about that aspect of skiing, surrounded by all white stuff. I still don't like to ski, or more like never ski'd in my life, nor would I want to. I used to go sled riding though as a kid, but I would not enjoy it anymore as an adult.
The 2nd amendment, right to self defense, is there for the very purpose of allowing the people to violently overthrow a corrupt government that has failed them. It did not make it to be the very first amendment, because free speech, freedom of expression is that much more important and has been curtailed that much more often. Of course a failed government, paranoid about being overthrown because of feeling their own ineptitude and losing control of the situation, will start witch hunting anyone with the slightest signs or tendencies to promulgate such actions. What else is new. Fuck da Man and all his bitches he pimped into the highest offices in the government! Power to da People!
Ehh.. That could be- but it could be a lot less.
I was once denied a security clearance because I didn't know my brother was arrested for drug paraphernalia and concealed weapons once in the 80s.Of course the reason I didn't know about this was because the weapons turned out to be a base ball, a bat, and a glove and the drug paraphernalia was one of those string of feathers with an alligator (roach) clip on the end that they give out as prizes in the games at the county fair. The cop that arrested him was the brother of the girl he just broke up with and the prosecutor ran as fast as he could to drop all the charges but the record was there and when I answered the question about drugs and knowing anyone who uses them, I didn't disclose that.
Anyways, didn't matter much to me, I found out the job really sucked and they did me a favor. But you wouldn't believe how anal they can be on stupid shit, let alone crap they think is terrorism related.
Well that is a nice steamy crock ... I am a straight white guy, prior enlisted, and currently a contractor for the DoE. For contractors, you don't even get an interview - you get a form, they perform a background check, and then its whatever the hell the "Special" agent decides, based on no factors what-so-ever, is your determined status.
In 2005 I was falsely accused of a felony (rape, and we never even had sex, plus I was the fifth guy she had pulled that on), but it was fairly quickly dismissed. In spring of 2013 I get notice back from OPM saying that I was hired followed by notification the following week that I was disqualified for the same string. It took me hiring a lawyer who was able to pull some strings to get the initial agents assessment thrown out and someone new assigned who was forced to specifically document in my summary that their initial assessment was in error.
Only if you use such a definition as was used to call the millionaire Charlie Chaplin a "Communist". Most of that "Communist infiltration" was just people who hated Fascism with a passion, which tagged them as "Communists" even though today we would look back at their ideals and even call some of those people "Republicans".
Did you RT same FA that I did? Here's how it went:
FIS: "Do you know anything about this group of people?
Barr: "No."
FIS: "Are you sure you know nothing about these people?"
Barr: "Absolutely."
FIS: "So how do you know this guy, who is one of these people?"
Barr: "Oh, well I wrote to Balagoon occasionally while he was in prison before he died; it would have been reprehensible for me to drop my correspondence with a dying person! Oh, and visited him once in prison."
FIS: "So you lied when you said you knew nothing about these people?"
Barr: "No, I just uh... didn't tell you about it."
Yeah, right. No evidence presented that she said anything that was untrue. Except her own behavior, statements, and deliberate omissions.
When I last filled in a security clearance form, there was a question asking whether I had used illegal drugs in the last 4 years. Was I failing to be entirely open by not confessing to have a friend who had an oxycontin prescription 6 years ago?
In a security clearance questionnaire or interview, the questions are very specific, and you answer those questions truthfully, not any others.
Advocating peacable overthrow is completely ineffective and is essentially a government mandate to control the populace by forcibly marginalizing differences of opinion.
I wish there was a way in a few sentences to make you understand how both right and wrong you were. The power of (presumably) our government is truly awesome in ways, thankfully, the vast majority of Americans will never understand. I have some personal experience on this issue, as I advocated a "revolution" by absolute and unflinching non-participation in all government interactions, that people just simply hold their own elections in their own communities and deal with things themselves. For many reasons, this became a giant mess for me and I ended up a target. It started off quite subtle and juvenile-- social media interference, attempts to discredit me, attacks against my employment, inferences that I was a cop/military/etc, but ultimately ended up with things that I do not believe were legal to do to a person in the least.
The short of it is, I truly comprehend the depth of what you're saying here in many ways that most could not really comprehend unless they've experienced it. So you're right, the non-violent are suppressed in some of the same ways, although I think they know how to handle the violent a bit better.
That said, you're absolutely, positively, without a doubt, factually wrong about the success rate and ability to change government via non-violent resistance. I think if you really actually looked, you'd find over the past 30 years or so more countries governments have fallen to non-violent revolutions than violent ones. Not only is non-violent resistance realistic, but it's also more effective, and there are cold hard facts to back this up. In Serbia (2000), Madagascar (2002), Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004Ã"05), Lebanon (2005), and Nepal
(2006) there was significant regime change through non-violent resistance, we could of course count Ukraine a second time as they successfully ousted the same politician a second time before Russia intervened. Non-violent resistance has a success rate from 1900 to 2006 approximately at 53%, relative to ~26% for violent conflicts and insurgencies or terrorism has fared even worse. (src: https://www.csun.edu/cdsc/Why_Civil_Resistance_Works.pdf )
And that's putting aside issues of humanity and morality-- as if you can teach people that brutalization and oppression is wrong by being more brutal and more oppressive while you reduce the local suburb to rubble. But the point I really want to bring home to you is that you are factually incorrect, not only does non-violent resistance work, it works better.. Read the book linked above.
How about those guys who go around with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks?
The Confederacy did a good job of attempting to overthrow the government by force and violence.
"Aha! You're driving around with a Confederate flag on your fender. You're supporting an organization dedicated to the overthrow of the government by force and violence. You lied on your application. No security clearance for you."
Russia or USSR or the Soviet Union is notoriously more violent against all kinds of people, including their own people, than the USA or any of its past governments ever were.
Except for negroes and indians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...