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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."
But only if you work for an employer who already has a position and is willing to cough up the $30k for the application fee.
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.
“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?
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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.
"Greetings {insert government here}, I work for {large social media company} that collects truly grotesque amounts of information on people, some of whom don't even use our service. I would like security clearance please, so {large social media company} can have access to information that they are normally prohibited from learning."
Yeah, no idea why various governments would have a problem with that.....
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
And only if your employer is even authorized to hold clearances. You can't just get one because you want to.
...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."
Why doesn't Facebook and others do what the defense industry does - get one if their employees to apply?
Because you can't just "apply" for a secret clearance; you must show that you have a specific requirement for one.
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).
This.
In fact, it's usually the government that makes a clearance a condition of a contract. And it's in the best interest of the company to minimize the number of people that need to be covered by a clearance.
A lot of people are looking at this clearance issue from the point of view of selling jet fighters or submarines to the government. Where their primary business is to sell such goods. Facebook and Twitter would be better off not having cleared employees. And developing their own anti-hacking tools and processes completely unencumbered by government secrecy requirements. Unfortunately, the NSA (and other TLAs) have managed to become the gatekeepers of inter company intrusion data. Which they need to keep their systems clean.
Have gnu, will travel.
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/...
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?
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's called a DD-254 http://www.dami.army.pentagon....
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.
Right. Lots of paperwork involved if you want to do gov't work. And much of it comes with constraints on what the contractor or its employees can do. Which is why, if I was Twitter, I'd be holding out against entering into these sorts of agreements for as long as possible.
It's arguable that the US government really has anti hacking tradecraft that is so far ahead of commercial grade stuff to make the nuisance of clearances worthwhile. And if commercial grade won't do, you can always buy stuff from Israel.
Have gnu, will travel.
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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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 ...
Then they wouldn't be trying to hire people with clearances, they would have already hired people with clearances.