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Tech Firms Seek Washington's Prized Asset: Top-Secret Clearances (bloomberg.com)
Major tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter are interested in hiring workers with top-secret security clearances as they deal with foreign meddling on their platforms and come under increased risk of hacks, reports Bloomberg. From the article: In doing so, companies such as Facebook are competing with defense contractors, financial firms and the U.S. government itself. Security clearances are a rare and valued commodity, whether at a bank trying to prevent hackers from stealing credit-card data and emptying accounts or at a manufacturer building parts for a stealth fighter or missile-defense radar system. Bringing former government cyber warriors on board at companies can facilitate interactions with U.S. agencies like the NSA or CIA as well as help the firms understand how to build stronger systems on their own. "They have the tradecraft," said Ronald Sanders, a former associate director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and now director of the school of public affairs at the University of South Florida. "And the trade craft is some of the best in the world."
You may get it in 12 months
Why doesn't Facebook and others do what the defense industry does - get one if their employees to apply?
If they insist on operating this way, I suggest everyone who has a clearance soak them hard - they can afford it.
" Sure Facebook, I'll take the job. $1,000,000 a year and a five year contract. Fire me the first day, you pay me $5,000,000."
Fuck'em.
As with anything the government does, there is a considerable tooth-to-tail ratio. For every person with a security clearance doing actual intelligence work (including cyber), there are least 10 others who have a clearance without doing that sort of work. For instance, the secretaries and administrative assistants, the HR personnel, the maintenance personnel, the groundskeepers, the managers who sit in meetings all day, the budget analysts, the financial personnel, the IT support staff, the janitorial staff, etc.
I point it out so that people understand that the pool from which the tech and defense firms are trying to hire is not of size N, but probably of size 0.2 * N. They might benefit from having some support staff with clearances, though they can certainly get by without it where the government cannot (support staff in classified facilities have to be cleared). The real challenge is that they are all competing for a small number of experienced intelligence professionals with active clearances.
BTW, you will not see them outsourcing these jobs to H1B workers.
In fact, that is an interesting thing about being a contractor for the government. If you are a worker bee, then you are practically immune from outsourcing. If another company gets awarded the contract you are working on, you can bet that with nearly 100% certainty the new winner of the contract will attempt to hire away all the workers that were on the old contract. Not only are you effectively immune from outsourcing, but you have a high likelihood of being able to continue working in the same geographic area (and maybe the same office/project) through any of a number of changes of employer. Try that in the civilian world. The tech companies will have to pony up, because the defense contractors already do.
A security clearance means that you are (relatively) law-abiding, that you follow rules and procedures, and that you can be trusted not to reveal confidential info.
Those are qualities many employers look for, but a clearance doesn't say anything as to competence.
just because people have clearances doesn't mean they have skillsets that would benefit this. It just means they don't have the markers that make them untrustworthy with highly sensitive information. there are plenty of people who hold a top-secret clearance that don't know where the "any" key is
it sounds more like someone got cyber-security industry confused with security clearance. i understand their need for cyber-defensive capabilities. some banks, like USAA, actually run their own in house cyber operations desk to help protect their digital assets. cyber-security as a trade spans across all digitally connected industries (govt, banking, industrial, commercial....) and they are all being head-hunted by the same groups. this would just be another company throwing their sharks into the feeding tank.
The Russians didn't hack them - they purchased those ads like any other customer. Are they saying that if they knew the Russians were trying to influence the election they wouldn't have accepted those ads? Sorry, but as a guy who has held just about every level of security clearance in existence and sees Facebook as anathema to security in general, I doubt Facebook is really ready to sacrifice ad revenue because of some classified intel chatter. And even if so, the Russians presumably had a backup plan involving sock puppet accounts, which as far as I can tell Facebook hasn't even admitted is a problem.
“Loyalty to the United States, strength of character, trustworthiness, honesty, reliability,’’ are among the attributes sought in the process, according to the U.S. State Department website.
Is it possible the wait would be less than 311 days if I was an Eagle Scout who contributed a large amount to a strategically selected political campaign?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
How much is Zuck gonna pay them to get his hands on classified data. As if companies like Facebook have an incentive to make their system more secure if there is virtually no penalty for weak security (remember Equifax)
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
Security clearances mean fuck all. It only proves you passed a background check. Bragging about it is a negative signal.
What bullshit is this article trying to sell? Who benefits from this? Contracting companies?
You don't need any security clearance to work on a company's most secret stuff, or defend them from (cyber-)attacks or anything.
If they're recruiting people with (a need for a) clearance, it simply means they're under government contract, either directly or through another contractor.
Thank you Bloomberg for letting us know tech firms are working for the TLAs.
Security clearances are one of the biggest rackets going. It has become nothing more than a system of cronyism and classism disguised as a security concern. The well-connected breeze through the process and into a world of guaranteed money while the poor are fenced out. The whole systems sucks up billions, and in the end has failed to prevent infiltration and security breaches.
The best part for the people running the con? Zero transparency by design. There will never be an accounting because the only people who could perform it are at the top of the system.
and for a job that needs the clearance!
if you work for Facebook in a non government roll full time you may just lose that clearance from being out of the position when the renew time comes up.
...apply to that well-known vetting agency, "Spies-R-Russ".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
a former associate director of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and now director of the school of public affairs at the University of South Florida. "And the trade craft is some of the best in the world."
Tech Firms Seek Washington's Prized Asset: ...
... A contract that allows 'Management and Administration' to be 50%-70% of total cost.
To have cleared employees, your company has to be working on a government contract that requires a clearance. So Facebook, Twitter and similar can't just decide to hire cleared employees. They have to go through the process to become government contractors, and then win a contract that requires a clearance.
Also, if you have a clearance and stop working at a job that requires a clearance, your clearance goes away. So once Facebook hires someone with a Top Secret clearance, they no longer have a Top Secret clearance and lose access to the information the article claims Facebook wants.
Even if Facebook, et al manages to go through all the steps to get a contract that requires cleared employees, they can't work on whatever Facebook wants. Those employees have to work on that contract. Those employees also can't just say "Hey, we need to do _____ to stop ______ from hacking us", because that's classified information. The employee can't just share it with everyone at the company.
This author should really have spent a minute or two researching how clearances work before writing this shitty article.
The Russians didn't hack them - they purchased those ads like any other customer.
Non sequitur. The fact that the Russians purchased ads doesn't mean that they did not also hack them. They could do both.
And, in fact, it's pretty clear that the Russians were doing some explicit hacking-- they were behind the hack into the DNC e-mail (done by Posesta clicking a link in a phishing e-mail).
They're out of touch.
.. foreign meddling... hah.
The well-connected breeze through the process and into a world of guaranteed money while the poor are fenced out.
How are the poor fenced out?
The employer has to pay for the clearance, so a poor employee does not face a financial burden. The employee has to be working for the employer during the application, so they can't do some sort of "unpaid internship" during the investigation.
Many things that people think would disqualify someone don't actually disqualify someone. For example, I've known people with a felony conviction on their record who got a clearance. Also, poor credit does not automatically disqualify someone. The investigators will want to find out why you have poor credit, and as long as the reason isn't "I spend every dollar I can get my hands on", it will probably be OK.
About the only guaranteed disqualifications are an espionage conviction, a perjury conviction or failing the drug test.
Q Clearances as of 1998 cost $3,225 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No this is not true (again)
https://www.nolo.com/legal-enc...
Bankruptcies are taken into account when you apply for a security clearance but are not automatic disqualifiers.
I'm sure that no one will blab anything of interest to an adversary government.
Jesus, come on guys. How many "anonymous users" have posted an Ask Slashdot about some arcane details about US cyber security in the past 20 years? Think before you flap your lips, eh?
You mean using the open platforms provided by Facebook and Twitter to espouse their viewpoints?
What meddling!
In the America I grew up in, we had this thing called Freedom of Speech, and even the worst ideas were allowed to be spoken unfettered. If an idea was complete shit, obvious propaganda, or just plain ignorant, it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny and would therefore not grow much past the few people who believed in it to begin with.
Fast-forward to today, and people espousing "subversive viewpoints" (read: traditionalist values) are now "meddling", and we have to have top-secret clearances at bloated tech companies that should really have about 100 people managing the servers and software. If these companies weren't solely propaganda arms of the government themselves, they would be open forums, where ideas are left to stand on their own. But unfortunately, every single one of them is a tightly controlled brainwashing wing of the elites thinly veiled as the "digital town square". That's why you see them becoming overgrown and wasteful and bloated and have ever-increasing positions to control the hive mind and bureaucratic red tape that they impose on themselves under the guise of being "progressive", just like government.
I think it's absolutely delicious that the same effeminate jackoffs that were running around spouting the wonders of Russia and the commies for the last-oh, 4 decades or more are now the ones screaming the loudest about "Russian Meddling". It's the most delicious irony to see just what fully-owned-and-operated tools of the establishment they've really been all along. Of course, as delicious as that irony is, it still sucks hard to see modern Western civilization being flushed down the shitter by those same useful tools.
If the tech firms want cleared people so they can get more government contracts, then they have to draw from the same pool that all the defense contractors, TLAs and military do. But if they want that level of background check, why not just spend some of their resources, hire a PI and do similar levels of vetting?
An acquaintance of mine was in the Navy on a nuclear submarine and had TS clearance. From what he's told me and what I've read about it, the difference between a clearance investigation and a simple background check is that they're trying to figure out why they might have a problem with you _later on_, and less about why you have the problem _now_. Someone who's a problem gambler or always in trouble with the law is a reasonable risk for being compromised by a foreign agent. Someone who has chronic financial disasters is a huge red flag because all a spy has to do is wave enough money in their face. And more importantly, having something in your past that's embarrassing or that you would do anything to hide would need to come out in an investigation as well, to ensure you won't do what a spy asks to keep your dirty little secrets hidden. The point is to trace down all these avenues and determine whether or not the individual is worth the risk to trust. (I'm sure military professions requiring clearances have this issue too...especially in the enlisted ranks you probably have a ...diverse... range of credit problems, criminal histories, etc.)
It seems that Facebook et al, with access to all sorts of private-ish info on you, would be well-positioned to conduct their own secret-equivalent clearance checks.
It wasn't worth it. Constant invasive background checks on you and people close to you; you have to disclose basically everything about your life to the government, such as everywhere you've lived for the last seven years, monthly bank statements for all of your back accounts for the last year, personal information about all of your in-laws, and so on; and you have to constantly take training classes that teach you how to be paranoid and never trust anybody else. I was starting to experience serious anxiety problems, all so that I could work in a concrete bunker that had no connection to the outside world, on dummy terminals that connected to ancient computers that were doing classified work that you're not sure the government even should be doing.
I quit and decided that I'll never work at another job that requires a government clearance, and I've been much happier for it.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
This is one of my favorite times that it wasn't creimer
even if you aren't working on classified material. The big one is that at many government sites
you get a badge that lets you go to lunch and the bathroom on your own. I.E. you get a badge
other then the bright red ones that say "Escort Required".
your wages are still lowered by it when you're left competing with people leaving the private sector and gunning for your job.
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There are plenty of things that don't need to be known by just anyone. General, top level transparency should be there, perhaps delayed, depending on circumstances, but the nitty gritty details are often of no use except to an adversary, not John Q. Public. There can certainly be an instinct to over-classify, but that doesn't mean that classification in general is unnecessary.
This comment of yours...
"For that matter, anyone with a security clearance has a higher than average likelihood of some loyalty to secret or not-so-secret societies that prey on the kind of mental instability that is rife in the military." ... is laugh-out-loud stupid.
Regular folks get clearances just so they can get a job in the company town (DC). You don't really know anyone with a clearance, do you?
http://time.com/4172866/white-... Walking right on the edge isn't all that bad. Better than falling over. Or worse, being pushed over.
Christopher, my love,
I am deeply sorry. I didn't feel well lately but I am better now. I am sorry that I called you all sorts of names on /. and I feel truly ashamed of myself.
The python click script you wrote for me my sweet love for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work.
Could you come visit me in my studio so we could look at it?
Update: I could go get you at work around noon and we could go have lunch at the Cafe Latte near by where we went last week and tonight we could have a look at that python click script you wrote for me my sweet love for my pheromone revenue stream web site.
Signed:
Your sweetee who will love you for ever.
Or, if you read between the lines, maybe it implies that Facebook, Twitter and similar are ALREADY involved in classified government programs.
Under the pretext of protecting us from the hackers the NSA-CIA are going to embed spies into tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter ...
Chris living in his imaginary world again which most people find weird, twisted and absurd and which Chris accepts as being perfectly normal.
We love you Chris,
---
Nancy Guerrero
Dircetor
Special Education
Santa Clara County Office of Education
It's hard to believe that creimer represents every AC on Slashdot. Sad.
It's sad that creimer thinks anyone except for him and and his trolls will see 0 score comments nested 9 levels under a -1
Then they wouldn't be trying to hire people with clearances, they would have already hired people with clearances.
It's sad that you have to read at -1 to see any comments on Slashdot these days.
I just want to see what happens if we keep replying
and not as some money making scheme. Many people with top line^H^H^H^H^H^H top secret clearances don't use them because government jobs are unpleasant.
Since you're totally not creimer could you pass along that maybe he'd be happier doing things for fun instead of attempting to monetize his every activity for starbucks money.