[HN Gopher] What not to write on your security clearance form (1...
___________________________________________________________________
What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)
Author : wizardforhire
Score : 456 points
Date : 2026-02-21 17:08 UTC (18 hours ago)
HTML web link (milk.com)
TEXT w3m dump (milk.com)
| alwa wrote:
| (1988) and real cute
|
| From an OG computer scientist [0], about antics at age 12 which
| might strike some of us as familiar :)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Earnest
| emmelaich wrote:
| The personal web page is entertaining.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231021140222/https://web.stanf...
| sargun wrote:
| I find it a little funny how much the government spends on these
| dead end investigations. We never will know precisely how much is
| wasted.
| abeppu wrote:
| I mean, in this case the government spent thousands because
| there was a small amount of circumstantial evidence that
| suggested there was clandestine communication happening during
| wartime.
|
| What was the immediate government spending on Japanese American
| internment, where there was no evidence or investigation into
| the ~120k people whose lives were disrupted, and who were
| transported, housed, fed and guarded for multiple years?
|
| Arguably, spending thousands on investigating something
| specific is less wasteful than the alternatives the government
| was willing to take at that time.
| basilgohar wrote:
| It's not funny. It's a dag-gone jobs program. ICE, TSA, and
| more throw away billions to effect little but a heavy burden on
| the population. These organizations, FBI and other law
| enforcement included, invent crises and problems so as to
| secure even more funding.
|
| Maybe the individual investigator in the story is excepted
| considering it seems he took it seriously, perhaps, but yes, a
| lot of money is intentionally thrown into these organizations
| for security theater, jobs programs, and padding the pockets of
| political friends and cronies.
|
| What we should be worried about is how many legitimate threats
| fly under the radar because time and again these organizations
| have been proven to be highly ineffective at actually
| preventing what their charters mandate, but they can appear to
| be very visibly effective by incarcerating thousands of
| innocent people.
| topkai22 wrote:
| Investigating a cryptographic key found near a major military
| installation during war time doesn't strike me as a waste of
| money. We have the full information about the outcome, but the
| San Diego FBI field office did not.
|
| I think that's what makes this story so funny- the FBI was
| acting appropriately and rationally, but ended up with a
| relatively absurd result.
| dehrmann wrote:
| If a Japanese spy knew this would happen, they could waste
| enormous amounts of time by spreading unused keys around San
| Diego.
| tverbeure wrote:
| And then when something big happens, everybody and their dog
| starts screaming "how could this happen?!?"
|
| You can't have it both ways... (not specifically directed at
| you.)
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I think it is quite reasonable to tell incompetents that they
| can't just cover their ass by claiming "you can't demand
| perfection".
|
| These are the same kind of incompetents who want the pay but
| not the responsibility of the position. Who think that
| building a giant haystack of all of the data is the solution
| so they can illogically claim to have prevented something
| that because you had that needle in there somewhere! Except
| you never found it in time because you were too busy building
| the tower of Babel out of hay! It is just utterly idiotic
| double-think. (Cough, cough NSA!)
| bombcar wrote:
| It's obvious the real spy was Bob.
| jll29 wrote:
| Bob AKA "Satoshi-san".
| lacoolj wrote:
| Wonder if author name is Alice
| ctoth wrote:
| "Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?"
| lesuorac wrote:
| For context: Alice's Restaurant Massacree [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaKIX6oaSLs
| breadchris wrote:
| I got distracted by how incredible owning milk.com is
| jsheard wrote:
| https://milk.com/value/
|
| Also the server header is "lactoserv"
| tverbeure wrote:
| The FAQ is super informative!
|
| https://milk.com/faq/
| Dansvidania wrote:
| Is it allowed to lol on HN?
| WalterGR wrote:
| You are welcome to lol silently.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| Nah
| DonHopkins wrote:
| No, you can only go low: "MOO!"
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I miss the Grate book of MOO lore from Usenet
| simantel wrote:
| purple.com had a similar page for years, and eventually the
| mattress company rolled up with a dumptruck load of cash
| connorgurney wrote:
| Which is a real server, no less!
|
| https://github.com/danfuzz/lactoserv
| tokenless wrote:
| Err. Id consider a 1m+ offer if I were him. With explosion of
| tlds and AI making the domain name less relevant (you ask AI
| and click its link) it will probably depreciate and better to
| grab $$$ and invest elsewhere.
| qup wrote:
| He used to (maybe still does) have a page where he talked about
| turning down millions of dollars for it.
| pousada wrote:
| See the link above. He's willing to part with it for 10
| million
| alansaber wrote:
| Almost as cool as owning ai.com!!
| jsheard wrote:
| Buying AI.com for an AI company just shows they have more
| money than imagination. Many such cases during the dot-com
| era (pets.com, mp3.com).
|
| The real flex would be for AI.com to have nothing to do with
| AI whatsoever.
| gundmc wrote:
| Not on the same scale as AI, but my first ever AirBnB host
| still owns harley.com. He made his money writing "The
| Yellow Pages of the Internet" physical books and had turned
| down numerous lucrative offers from Harley Davidson.
|
| Really fascinating and quirky guy as you can probably infer
| from the site.
| jsheard wrote:
| Similarly, the guy who owned nissan.com never sold out
| and continues to spite Nissan Motors even in death.
|
| https://nissan.com/
|
| You've got to actually use a trademark-adjacent domain in
| good faith though, otherwise you might get the rug pulled
| from under you.
|
| https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69634055/75-million-
| dolla...
| zarzavat wrote:
| > The real flex would be for AI.com to have nothing to do
| with AI whatsoever
|
| Apple Intelligence?
| amarant wrote:
| Apple Inc. was right there man.
|
| Talk about missing the low hanging fruit!
|
| ;)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Artificial Insemination is a massive global industrial SaaS
| (Sperm as as Service), one of the few sectors that can
| literally make its customers' clients come and deliver!
| c22 wrote:
| How do you feel about x.com?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Never heard of it. Do you mean twitter.com?
| Hamuko wrote:
| In an incredible coincidence, I just yesterday listened to a
| podcast episode that discussed milk.com.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5526903/domain-name-val...
| boothby wrote:
| Boggles the mind that the advice from the security was to _lie on
| the form_ , which is almost certainly a felony.
| alansaber wrote:
| Probably thought he was joking around. This was for a summer
| internship after all.
| roughly wrote:
| The thing that is missed in most efforts to replace people with
| machines is how often the people that are being replaced are on
| the fly fixing the system the machine is intended to
| crystallize and automate.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| This is what a lot of people miss about "AI will replace"
| programmers narrative.
|
| When converting from a traditional process to an electronic
| one, half my job is twisting people's arms and playing mind
| reader trying to determine what they ACTUALLY do day-to-day
| instead of the hypothetical offical, documented, process.
|
| Some of the workarounds that people do instead of updating
| the process are damn right unhinged.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Without going into details, just recently I was able to get
| pretty decent business requirements from group manager, but
| it seems the only reason I was able to get somewhat decent
| idea of what they actually do, is because there was certain
| level of trust since we worked together previously so there
| was no need to bs one another. I openly stated what I
| thought is doable and he seemed to understand that I need
| to know actual use cases.
|
| edit: Otoh, my boss is kinda giving up on automating
| another group's process, because he seems to be getting a
| lot of 'it depends' answers.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I will say, in a lot of cases, they aren't BS-ing/lying
| with _intent_. Just the general way their minds work
| seemingly isn 't compatible with the very idea of laying
| out the process in its entirety (inc. the
| warts/hacks/workarounds).
|
| So what ultimately winds up happening is, you'll roll out
| the process according to the official way, and then it is
| drip-drip-drip of changes as you find out the real-world
| version.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| This is exactly why "automation" hasn't taken _that_ many
| jobs. It is a totally overlooked detail. Thanks for the
| reminder.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Some industrial shipping docks can be managed by a very
| small crew. I think this is the metaphor for what's going
| to happen to a lot of industries.
| htrp wrote:
| dark factory
| reactordev wrote:
| I'm not so sure. They operate that way because of scale
| and economy (and tech that enables that). In a future
| where all industries are optimized in such way, very
| little will actually flow as most won't have the money to
| buy goods, thus factories won't make goods, thus shippers
| won't ship, and the global economy grinds to a halt.
|
| We need waste as much as we need investment. The trick is
| to find the value in between. I think the sweet spot will
| be augmenting work, not necessarily optimizing it.
| foxglacier wrote:
| That doesn't seem to make sense. As things get cheaper
| and wages go down too because there's an oversupply of
| labor, those poorer people can still afford those cheaper
| things.
| reactordev wrote:
| Things never get cheaper. The only things that have
| reduced in cost is tech related because we kept making
| advancements as per Moore's law.
|
| The two things that matter, housing and food, are way way
| up.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Luxuries are cheap and necessities are expensive
| Aurornis wrote:
| > how often the people that are being replaced are on the fly
| fixing the system the machine is intended to crystallize and
| automate.
|
| If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.
|
| I have some experience doing automation work in small and
| large scale factories. When automating manufacturing work you
| almost always discover some flaws in the product or process
| that humans have been covering up as part of their job. These
| problems surface during the automation phase and get
| prioritized for fixes.
|
| You might think you could accomplish the same thing by
| directly asking the people doing the work what could be
| improved, but in my experience they either don't notice it
| any more because it's part of their job or, in extreme cases,
| they like that the inefficiency exists because they think it
| provides extra job security.
| roughly wrote:
| > If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.
|
| And the system is always broken. Reality is messy, systems
| are rigid, there always has to be a permissive layer
| somewhere in the interface.
| yowayb wrote:
| So many websites and apps are still broken in so many
| little ways. Maybe broken isn't the right word. But all
| kinds of annoyances and breaches still happen all the
| time.
|
| I generally don't complain/review, and just learn the
| workarounds/shortcuts, but I very much welcome the
| increased (albeit perhaps less skilled) workforce
| leverage, because I think in a year or so we'll see
| steady improvements accumulating.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing._
|
| Sometimes when you reveal extensive noncompliance with dumb
| requirements, the requirements get less dumb. Other times,
| the organisation doubles down and starts punishing the
| noncompliance.
|
| My employer's official security policies say everyone
| should kensington lock their laptop to their desk at all
| times, even though the office is behind two guards and
| three security doors. Nobody does. But if someone made a
| load of noise about it, there's no guarantee they'd remove
| the widely ignored rule; they might instead start enforcing
| it.
| ctoth wrote:
| And then, how often they aren't[0]
|
| [0]: "Computer Says No"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU
| u1hcw9nx wrote:
| If it is plausible that you did not remember, it's not a
| felony. Something that happened for 12-years old is easy to
| forget.
|
| There is nothing morally wrong in felonies like this, just
| don't get caught.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| > There is nothing morally wrong in felonies like this, just
| don't get caught.
|
| Highly debatable. If you believe in a categorical imperative
| that to intentionally deceive another person is wrong, then
| lying by omission is still an immoral act. A Christian might
| also interpret the words of Jesus "Render to Caesar what is
| Caesar's" as an imperative to comply fully with the law of
| the land.
| pluralfossum wrote:
| Mala in se vs. mala prohibita.
|
| I don't think it's all that debatable to say that deceiving
| people is categorically wrong, nor is it to say that it's
| immoral not to follow the laws of the land -- both are
| obviously untrue as absolute statements.
|
| For extreme examples, would it be immoral to lie to the
| Gestapo about harboring Jews? Were people illegally helping
| slaves escape the American South being immoral?
| mcmcmc wrote:
| You are completely missing the point of the categorical
| imperative. There are no exceptions, no loopholes, no
| utilitarian calculus.
|
| > For extreme examples, would it be immoral to lie to the
| Gestapo about harboring Jews? Were people illegally
| helping slaves escape the American South being immoral?
|
| If you believe in that categorical imperative, then yes.
| I'm not saying I believe in it or that Kantian philosophy
| is the only correct one. There are endless belief systems
| and philosophical schools of thought that can be used to
| answer that question, and they will have different
| answers for different reasons.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > would it be immoral to lie to the Gestapo about
| harboring Jews?
|
| This is something that first/second year philosophy
| students do debate.
| defrost wrote:
| Minnosoteans are currently hiding, feeding, and supplying
| undocumented community members.
|
| They are not debating it.
| kelnos wrote:
| There are many laws in many jurisdictions that are immoral.
| Following those laws would be an immoral act. Legality and
| morality should be aligned, but in the real world they
| often aren't.
|
| If Jesus (assuming he existed, even, regardless of any sort
| of divinity) tells us that following the law is always the
| moral thing to do, then he was wrong.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Cool, you do that then. I bet you'll get a gold star at the
| end of the year
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Not remembering is one thing, but if they find out during the
| vetting process, and then they ask you about it, your answers
| had better be forthright.
| master_crab wrote:
| It's also odd, because usually, as long as you don't lie on
| your security form, you'll get your clearance.
|
| The coverup is always worse than the original sin.
| DennisP wrote:
| And there's good reason for that. Someone with a clearance
| once explained to me that they're mainly worried about things
| that make you vulnerable to exploitation by foreign agents.
| If you're covering something up, that's something they can
| use to blackmail you.
|
| But maybe if the thing you're revealing is "I myself was
| suspected to be a spy," that changes the calculus a bit.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| The travel forms to visit the US ask if people have ever been
| involved in espionage, at least they did, I'm not aware that
| it's changed.
|
| You can guarantee the many people who work for intelligence
| agencies of US allies aren't admitting to that when they travel
| to the US.
|
| It's all a bit of a game.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| But they're required by laws of their own country to lie,
| presumably. There are certainly game-like aspects.
| dcminter wrote:
| "Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in
| terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage, or genocide?"
|
| Quite.
| binarymax wrote:
| The reasoning for some of these questions is that if you are
| caught, it's sometimes easier to charge you with fraud (lying
| on the form) than the actual thing (such as espionage).
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Wouldn't they need the be able to prove that you are a spy
| in order to argue that you lied ? In which case who cares
| about the form ?
| stnikolauswagne wrote:
| Thats why I presume its asking about previous
| engagements, if they catch someone they suspect of
| espionage, dig into their background and find proof of
| previous activity they have a clear fraud charge without
| having to prove their suspicions about current
| activities.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Proving you worked for a spy agency is far easier than
| proving you _did spying_ in actuality. Assuming you didn
| 't get caught in the act.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| The fact you worked for an intelligence agency doesn't
| mean you were an intelligence officer. You could've been
| a cleaner, or an executive assistant, or maybe you were
| working as a software developer on the payroll system.
| toast0 wrote:
| There's often also some arbitrage on standard of proof or
| statutes of limitation or jurisdiction.
|
| Maybe to deport you for espionage requires a jury trial,
| but to revoke status for misleading answers on an
| immigration form is administrative and so is deportation
| for lack of status.
|
| I seem to recall some extraordinary cases where
| untruthful answers on immigration forms were used to
| justify denaturalization.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Those forms also ask if you've ever been a member of a
| communist party, and basically everyone over 35 in all of
| Eastern Europe would have to check that one (they don't, if
| they want to enter the US)
| selkin wrote:
| Every statement in the above comment is wrong:
|
| People born in the 90s wouldn't have a chance to be old
| enough to belong to any group other than a preschool before
| the collapse of the Soviet and Soviet aligned regimes.
|
| For those who were adults before 1990, while they may have
| been party members for reasons unrelated to political
| ideology, it wasn't as common: in the late 80s, only ~10%
| of adults in Warsaw pact countries were communist party
| members. Far from "everyone".
|
| And even if you check that in the DS-160 visa application
| form, you are allowed to add an explanation. Consular visa
| officers are very well familiar with the political
| situation at the countries they are stationed in, and can
| grant visa even if the box is checked.
| midtake wrote:
| Do you mean everyone who was 18 by 1989, or 55 today?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Yes, my sense of the passage of time is a little off.
| I've met folks who were members of the FDJ in East
| Germany as young teens, but as you say, they are 50-ish
| now.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| He lied originally, kinda.
|
| He made a cypher with a school friend, which cypher was handed
| by a stranger to the FBI and investigated. That one possible
| outcome of the investigation might be 'the subject is a
| Japanese spy' doesn't mean _he_ was suspected of that; not by
| the FBI at least.
|
| If he said, "I made a cypher in school", then likely the form
| would have been considered fine? Presumably his record clearly
| showed the FBI incident, so I'm surprised that lying in the
| second form didn't cause concern sufficient to question him.
| But there you go; I've never had any associations with TLAs,
| what would I know.
| appplication wrote:
| When I joined the Air Force, they helped us fill out the
| clearance forms. One question was related to marijuana use in
| the past. The NCO helping us told us "if you have used it
| before, be honest. They will know." But then followed it up
| with "remember: you used it less than 5 times and you didn't
| like it".
| mgerdts wrote:
| I remember similar advice.
|
| In Navy boot camp the person reviewing my security clearance
| application (which was filled out weeks before) was very
| helpful in the way he asked the critical question. "It says
| here you tried marijuana once. Is that true?"
| bell-cot wrote:
| "Well, some guy I didn't know very well _said_ it was
| marijuana - but how would I know? All it seemed to do was
| make my eyes water, and give me a headache... "
| bityard wrote:
| It's easy to pass judgement on a decision like that when so far
| removed from the context where/when it took place.
|
| It's likely that answering yes to that question meant an
| instant rejection for the clearance AND summer job. The FBI was
| probably not inclined to spend money looking into such an
| obviously trivial matter just so some kid could get some work
| experience. "Sorry, try the McDonald's down the street."
|
| That security officer did the author an incredibly big favor.
| xenocratus wrote:
| I mean, his name is Les Earnest, they should expect it.
| tomrod wrote:
| He wasn't investigated though. His missing glasses and hobby
| were. Once they found out the owner was not worth
| investigation, it was dropped.
| midtake wrote:
| He was TWELVE at the time the "investigation" happened, and he
| clearly wasn't engaged as a suspect. His mother was.
|
| He had no obligation to put that on security clearance form
| whatsoever.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Clearance forms are weird in that they're not just legal
| documents, they're inputs into an investigative process
| scoodah wrote:
| In this particular case I think it has more to do with the
| times than anything else. Discovering the records of that
| investigation from when he was 12 in the 40's would have likely
| been a massive undertaking if not impossible. The investigator
| likely recognized this and just had him remove it.
|
| These days I don't think that happens with digital records.
| Omitting that incident would almost certainly cause more issues
| than not now as I'm sure they'd turn up in the investigation.
| If not included on your sf86 you'd likely be grilled about it.
|
| Investigators are usually reasonable in my experience. If you
| omitted it because you earnestly forgot because it happened
| when you were 12, they'd likely understand if you were
| forthcoming about it during your interview. Investigators are
| human though so it depends on how they feel.
|
| What they really care about is stuff to try to purposely hide.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The advice was from the 1949-1952 period. I imagine that was
| the prevailing wisdom developed getting literal former Nazis
| jobs in our space program, etc.
| nashashmi wrote:
| The word investigated is a lot bigger than some simple inquiry
| someone makes. Investigation is actually a complete tear down
| of someone's past in a search for clues. He was not
| investigated. He played a part in an investigation of a lost
| cipher. His cipher was investigated.
| denotational wrote:
| > On another occasion much later, I learned by chance that
| putting certain provocative information on a security clearance
| form can greatly speed up the clearance process. But that is
| another story.
|
| Presumably this is the famous (?) story of him listing his race
| as "mongrel" whenever asked?
| nosrepa wrote:
| From elsewhere in this thread:
|
| https://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html
| forinti wrote:
| > On another occasion much later, I learned by chance that
| putting certain provocative information on a security clearance
| form can greatly speed up the clearance process. But that is
| another story.
|
| I have to know this now...
| kyusan0 wrote:
| Here you go: https://yarchive.net/risks/mongrel.html
| p1anecrazy wrote:
| What a wholesome guy. Thanks for the read
| avodonosov wrote:
| This story was written in another text also and discussed on HN.
| It was longer and the author also described how later in life he
| introduced a standard to wear hemlets on bicycle competitions.
| (Sorry, I dont have a link handy)
| svag wrote:
| Not related to this story, but this one https://milk.com/true-
| stories/stupid_computer_users.txt was hilarious :)
| moron4hire wrote:
| I have a somewhat similar story involving the death of an
| extremely elderly neighbor by an accident on his farm, and the
| suspicion by the state police that I at 12 years old had murdered
| him, based solely on someone saying they thought they saw me
| messing with his mailbox from a car that was similar to the one
| parked in our driveway. The mailbox which stood directly next to
| ours at the end of an easily walkable driveway. So yes, Mr.
| SF-86, I had once been investigated for a felony. Oh, you're only
| supposed to tell the truth if the truth will help the government
| catch to a bad guy? Very impressive system, sir. Top notch.
| dgacmu wrote:
| The modern SF-86 only asks about charged, not investigated (and
| AFAIR, that was the case also 20 years ago).
|
| (And arrested, but presumably you were not).
| acehilm123456 wrote:
| When I was 15, a couple months short of 16, I ended up working as
| a student intern at a research facility. They required a
| clearance to badge into and out of the building, but I never
| worked on anything that directly needed the clearance.
|
| So I was given the form to fill in and read the question: Since
| you were 16, or in the last 7 seven years, have you ever smoked
| weed?
|
| So I thought, I guess I better think back to when I was 8!
| TrackerFF wrote:
| The fact is that even for (NATO) top secret security clearances,
| there are lots of people that lie through their teeth, and
| receive the clearance. Obviously on things that aren't in any
| records. The big ones being alcohol use, drug use, personal
| finances, foreign partners. Some are more forgiving than others,
| though.
|
| The military is unfortunately chock full of functional
| alcoholics. As long as they don't get caught drunk on the job,
| seen partying too much, DIU, or admit anything to their doctor,
| they keep getting renewed their clearance.
|
| Interestingly enough, if there's even the smallest suspicious
| that you smoke weed, they'll put you through the wringer. I've
| seen more people lose their clearance for pissing hot, than those
| with six figure debts or drinking 5 days a week.
| moron4hire wrote:
| > I've seen more people lose their clearance for pissing hot
|
| When? In the 90s? Biggest pothead I know has had a clearance
| since '05. For my own form, I straight up admitted I had done
| it and did not regret it.
| hinkley wrote:
| It was always explained to me as a mix between, 'are you
| going to fuck things up by being in an altered state' and 'is
| someone going to blackmail you to make you into a double
| agent?'
|
| If your family and wife know you sometimes sleep with men,
| that's not necessarily a problem. If nobody knows, that's a
| problem. Similarly if your wife and boss don't know you owe
| $50,000 to a bookie or your coke dealer, that's a liability.
|
| Actually would be sort of interesting if your boss _did_ know
| you owed a bookie $50k and they found a way to use that to
| make you into a triple agent...
| ikr678 wrote:
| >It was always explained to me as a mix between, 'are you
| going to fuck things up by being in an altered state' and
| 'is someone going to blackmail you to make you into a
| double agent?'
|
| You are missing the foremost consideration - how
| critical/specialised/irreplacable is this person in their
| role and can we just ignore the positive test instead.
|
| If you are good enough at what you do and management like
| you positive tests dont seem to matter if you make the
| right noises about it being a one off, retesting clean etc.
| tucnak wrote:
| > Actually would be sort of interesting if your boss did
| know you owed a bookie $50k and they found a way to use
| that to make you into a triple agent...
|
| Welcome to counterintelligence you'll like it here
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Are you saying weed should be punished less, or the others
| should be punished like weed?
| drdaeman wrote:
| I think they're saying that there is an inconsistency, but
| they don't suggest anything, leaving any conclusions to the
| reader.
|
| It's just "things aren't right", and not "here's what we need
| to do..."
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Yes and I am saying I am tired of those boring cop-out
| "analysis". Yes, having a social science degree, it was
| full of those. Make solutions instead. Anyone can
| """analyze""".
| c22 wrote:
| I'm not sure security clearance is really about punishing
| people.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| You know exactly what I mean. Chased after, investigated?
| b112 wrote:
| Who are you replying to? When I click 'parent' on your
| post, the poster said nothing about his opinion on what
| should be done, only what he's seen.
| c22 wrote:
| I think I'm less confident that I know what you mean now
| than I was before.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > The military is unfortunately chock full of functional
| alcoholics. As long as they don't get caught drunk on the job,
| seen partying too much, DIU, or admit anything to their doctor,
| they keep getting renewed their clearance.
|
| Well yeah. If it's not affecting your job then what's it
| matter? If your a closet alcoholic then sure that's something
| the Russians could hold over you.
|
| There's millions of people with clearances; that's impossible
| to staff at below market wages and also above average moral(?)
| standards.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If it's not affecting your job then what's it matter? If
| your a closet alcoholic then sure that's something the
| Russians could hold over you
|
| Alcohol lowers inhibitions and alters decision making.
| Drinking a lot of alcohol more so than casual drinking.
| Frequently drinking a lot of alcohol has a very high area
| under the curve of poor decision making.
|
| Functional alcoholism can come with delusions of sobriety
| where the person believes they're not too drunk despite being
| heavily impaired.
|
| So they'll do things like have a few (or ten) drinks before
| checking their email. It makes them a better target for
| everything like fishing attacks, as one example.
|
| It's not just about enemies holding it against you.
| vscode-rest wrote:
| Gross misunderstanding of the threat model.
|
| Phishing is not the problem here. Your laptop isn't getting
| SIPR emails with links to fake login screens.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Being drunk at the bar/club/social event and telling that
| very interested lady a bit too much is probably the
| better example
|
| Still not as bad as being susceptible to blackmail or
| bribes
| vscode-rest wrote:
| That is not correlated to Alcoholism. The "extremely hot
| spy" problem is essentially unsolved.
| tbihl wrote:
| I got ads from the army about "extremely hot spy" over
| Valentines day weekend
| Aurornis wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding the threat model for why
| security clearance cares about impaired judgment of your
| off time, too. There's more to these people's lives than
| when they're on the clock (figuratively speaking).
| Getting compromised anywhere is a problem.
| yowayb wrote:
| And, within high-trust societies (eg Japan, Korea, Vietnam)
| getting wasted lubricates social bonds in the workplace. I've
| met successful functional alcoholics. Seriously, they
| actually function and make lots of money. They're also fun to
| be around as long as you're not working for them.
| albedoa wrote:
| > Interestingly enough, if there's even the smallest suspicious
| that you smoke weed, they'll put you through the wringer. I've
| seen more people lose their clearance for pissing hot, than
| those with six figure debts or drinking 5 days a week.
|
| I have to defer to you here since it sounds like my experience
| is more limited, but this is not my understanding at all. The
| agencies care a lot about financial indiscretions, as those
| applicants are most susceptible to compromise. And indeed, if
| you look at the lists of denials and appeals, you might think
| that money issues are the only reason anyone is ever denied.
|
| _Lying_ about _having smoked_ weed is another story.
| hinkley wrote:
| How do you really ever know if someone you hired for psyops
| is telling you the truth?
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| It gets weirder when they train you how to evade polygraphs
| as part of your role.. only to have you take one for your
| re investigation and to be asked "have you ever tried to
| evade a polygraph" or something along those lines. Of
| course you're not in a SCIF and your training or having
| been exposed to that training may in fact be classified.
| Quite the pickle..
| yowayb wrote:
| First job out of college, I spilled my guts on form 86, ~40
| joints, ~10 ecstasy. Denied clearance the entire 3 years.
| This was 2002.
| albedoa wrote:
| Were you sponsored by a company? I feel like there is a
| difference in diligence and expeditiousness when you have a
| sponsor that is familiar to the OMP/DoD.
|
| And yeah, I said something like "I smoked a couple times in
| college but not anymore". This was about two years after
| college. I wonder if quantifying your joints raised a flag
| lol.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| A lot of that comes down to what's objectively verifiable vs
| what's discretionary, and also what's culturally normalized
| inside the org.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The Vietnam War and all the soldiers on drugs encouraged a very
| strict drug policy.
| yowayb wrote:
| Makes complete sense. I've spent some time around Southeast
| Asia and met plenty of vets that discovered many psychoactive
| substances who also happen to be anti-war.
| hinkley wrote:
| When gift buying for minimalist friends it's common to offer
| gifts of perishable items or experiences like tickets. So that
| a week from now the gift has been cleared from their domicile.
|
| It also seems like a fairly smart way to do graft. If you're
| bribing someone and they drink up or smoke all the evidence
| then they can't prove how much or how often you bribed them.
| Which would make alcoholics a good target especially if you can
| get your hands on fancy liquor.
| yowayb wrote:
| I doubt anyone in an official capacity is using such
| techniques, but I can tell you this is common in sales. A lot
| of people in management with control of budget have at least
| one of just a handful of human weaknesses.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The US Military is currently led by a dysfunctional alcoholic
| totally unqualified DUI hire.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| I was chatting with an old classmate at a homecoming a few
| months ago, and he mentioned that, during the polygraph top get
| Canadian Top Secret clearance for a co-op job, he had to say
| how many drinks he had each week. Being a university student,
| it got brushed aside, but the answer was considered to be
| alcoholism-level.
| Terr_ wrote:
| In a weird way, that's almost a positive sign, if you view
| the security-clearance process as mostly being about quickly
| clearing away secrets that could be used for blackmail down
| the line, when the person has more authority and more to
| lose.
| Terr_ wrote:
| P.S.: Further musing: There's a system-design tension
| between granting access to people that are "perfect" versus
| "flawed in ways we are aware of and can manage." Where a
| process ought to land on that spectrum depends on certain
| assumptions about baseline applicant quality, an estimate
| of the organization's accuracy at [false/true]
| [negatives/positives], and the impacts.
|
| If you auto-reject the people who _admit_ to something sub-
| criminal like cheating on their spouse, that means no
| applicant will ever admit to it, so you 'll end up with
| _more_ people hid it. In the long run, that means a higher
| proportion of employees who have something an adversary can
| use for blackmail, and the blackmail is more-effective
| because the repercussions are large.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| You can get co-op/internship that requires a Top Secret
| clearance?
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| There are co-operatives in manufacturing which would need
| their staff to be security-cleared in order to win
| government contacts (such as assembling weapons). Perhaps
| this is what parent is referring to. Co-ops aren't just for
| groceries :)
| xav0989 wrote:
| In the Canadian university lingo, co-op refers to a
| (usually paid) internship that you complete as part of
| your degree. You usually have a couple co-op
| terms/semesters along with your traditional terms. For
| example, you may start your degree with two semesters of
| classes, then a semester of co-op, then one of classes,
| then another two co-ops, more classes, etc. until you
| complete the degree requirements. Degrees with a co-op
| requirement usually will make mention of it (e.g.
| Software Engineering with co-op).
| yowayb wrote:
| omg this was my experience. I figured there was no point lying
| officially, so I listed exactly how many times I smoked weed
| and took mdma. I was banished to the unclear side for my entire
| 3 years there. Meanwhile the head of IT was a raging alcoholic.
| I even wrote their very first J2EE webapp, which required me to
| be escorted to the cleared side anytime someone needed help
| with my code. I couldn't touch the keyboards! I was giving vi
| instructions verbally lol
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The US government uses data brokers and the banking industry to
| continuously monitor cleared people. Eventually they will find
| any problematic patterns of life.
| samus wrote:
| The point is that they seem to worry more about being a weed
| user than being an alcoholic.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The punchline is that automatic firing for 'vulnerabilities'
| itself creates the very blackmail vulnerabilities they are
| trying to avoid.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I ran a dial-up BBS in the late 1990s. One summer a few of my
| loyal users suddenly stopped calling.
|
| About a year later I learned that one of my users hacked an
| airport. At the time a few of my users would set their computers
| to dial random numbers and find modems answering. One of the
| numbers was a very strange system with no password. The story I
| heard was that they didn't know what the system was, because it
| had no identifying information.
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/doj-charges-...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > the hacker left behind a calling card by changing the system
| identification name to "Jester."
|
| > The attack on the branch of an unidentified major pharmacy
| chain occurred on four separate occasions from January through
| March of last year. The hacker acquired the names, contact
| information, and prescriptions for the pharmacy's customers
|
| I think the story you heard was a watered down version of what
| they were doing. You can't do things like exfiltrate data from
| a pharmacy database and not know what the system you're
| attacking is for.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| In case you want to read about the proactive information speeding
| up your security clearance: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/6/50
| neilv wrote:
| This sounds a bit like Feynman. I wonder whether it was more
| the style of the time.
| ink_13 wrote:
| Thanks for posting. That's actually a much more interesting
| story.
| aliceryhl wrote:
| Thank you. I was wondering about that.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| Clever, but I'd worry that they'd actually find some way to
| nail me.
| yowayb wrote:
| I appreciate the fun, but he's clearly messing with them or has
| Asperger's. You can definitely reduce hoops by knowing the
| bins, which they helped him with.
| kamyarg wrote:
| This has been one of the best articles I have read.
|
| Thank you for the digging that up and sharing.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34437937 - Jan 2023 (545
| comments)
|
| _What Not To Write On Your Security Clearance Form_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444653 - June 2010 (98
| comments)
| godelski wrote:
| Security clearances are probably a really good example of
| Goodhart's Law.
|
| One reason for all these questions is really to determine if
| someone can be blackmailed, and thus a security risk. (Big reason
| they look at your financials and why debt can cause you to lose
| clearance) But the letter of the law trumps the spirit. A common
| lie these days is about weed usage. You may get or entirely
| rejected for having smoked in the past even if you don't today
| (e.g. you tried it once in college but didn't like it). So
| everyone lies and it creates a system where people are even told
| to and encouraged to lie, like in TFA. The irony being that this
| is exactly what creates the situation for blackmail! Now you can
| get blackmailed for having that past thing cause you to lose your
| job as well as lying on your clearance form.
|
| Honestly it seems smarter to let the skeletons out of the closet.
| Spill your secrets to the gov. Sure, maybe the gov can blackmail
| you but a foreign government can't blackmail you for something
| that the gov already knows. You can still have filters but the
| dynamic really needs to change. Bureaucracy creates its own
| downfall. To reference another comment, I'd rather a functional
| alcoholic have a clearance _and_ the gov know about it than a
| functional alcoholic have a security clearance and the gov not
| know about it (or pretend to not know). We 've somehow turned
| clearance checks into security risks. What an idiotic thing to do
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| Yeah on my SF86 I listed all the dumb shit I did and the
| investigator called obviously kind of concerned but receptive.
| We went through each one and his key point was "do you
| understand you can't do that" and as long as you answered yes,
| documented it on the form ahead of time, and it was obvious you
| weren't lying through your teeth then pretty much anything you
| did that wasn't in the last 3-5 years was pretty much
| immediately forgiven.
|
| Some security officers are really touchy on these kinds of
| things and will tell you to exclude or lie but investigators
| pretty much never care what you did as long as it is obvious
| you don't plan on doing those types of things again or being an
| active problem.
|
| They just want it for their records and they want you to be an
| open book such that they don't feel you are concealing anything
| problematic.
| godelski wrote:
| > Some security officers are really touchy on these kinds of
| things and will tell you to exclude or lie
|
| But this is the problem. It is good that the investigators
| don't care but the security officers are the one you meet and
| talk with. They set the tone. Them doing this gives people
| the impression that investigators will care. And frankly,
| some do. I don't think we can dismiss the security officer's
| role here.
| vscode-rest wrote:
| This information is highly outdated. You can say any number of
| things on your SF86 and still get cleared. This is indeed the
| point.
| godelski wrote:
| The weed example is something that happened to a friend of
| mine. That's within the last 5 years...
|
| In fact, I remember Comey saying something about it too. But
| the rule as I know it is not having smoked in the last 3
| years. While that is probably fine for most people, it does
| seem to have a bias when you're considering people fresh out
| of college. Considering that college is frequently where
| people try weed, along with a lot of other things (not even
| drugs, just new activities, dress styles, and so on) as they
| find themselves.
| vscode-rest wrote:
| That is not the rule by any means. 6 months is a rule of
| thumb.
|
| What exactly happened to your friend? It is not in the
| domain of possibility that they were explicitly informed
| "you are being rejected for X reason", so everything they
| do say is pure speculation. Probably, they lied about
| something and got caught.
| hinata08 wrote:
| imagine curing alcoholics and drug dependant ppl who work for
| you ?
|
| I'm really surprised at how they would rather ignore or silence
| all and report that they is strictly no problem among their
| pool of employees, to say they have the best employees and good
| KPIs
|
| It doesn't look like a winning strategy indeed.
|
| I myself refused to do government jobs as the table in which
| you had to list foreigners in your friend list was just so
| small. They prefer you to say you don't know nobody.
|
| Also yeah, I agree with you. These forms are straight out of
| the 1950s when more liberal habits have been coming since the
| 60s. And we're straight up declining anyone who is outspoken
| about his habits while he knows the true boundaries of the
| laws.
|
| The government is just selecting applicants who do the sharia
| or some straight up vague "you have to be a good guy" menaces
| that completely opens them to blackmail
| godelski wrote:
| > imagine curing alcoholics and drug dependant ppl who work
| for you ?
|
| To complicate this further I think people don't recognize how
| people can start their jobs without problems and then gain
| them. These are stressful jobs (and with low pay) so that
| itself is a common gateway to a drinking problem. But there's
| also very mundane ways too. A large number of heroine and
| fentanyl addicts had their addictions begin through use of
| legal medication. The problem is we have a culture that
| pretends addiction is a choice and that the only to become
| addicted is through poor decisions and that to kick an
| addiction just requires " _really_ wanting to stop ". But
| that's not really consistent with the definition of
| addiction...
|
| It seems like a poor strategy for high security topics, like
| you say. If anything, I want these people to have _zero_ fear
| of opening up about their addictions. Be it gained
| unintentionally or through bad decisions. Reason being that
| 1) it reduces the risk of blackmail and 2) giving them a
| pathway to help also reduces their chance of blackmail. We
| don 't even need to mention the fact that these are people
| and should be treated with kindness, we have entirely selfish
| reasons to be selfless. > I myself refused to
| do government jobs as the table in which you had to list
| foreigners in your friend list was just so small.
|
| I always found that odd myself. Do these people know what the
| demographics of a typical American University are these days?
| If you don't have a decent list of foreign nationals then
| you're either 1) a social recluse or 2) in a cultural bubble,
| and probably not the kind that we want people with this kind
| of authority to have... But I think they could resolve some
| of this by clarifying what level of contact they mean. Is it
| someone you sit next to in class and talk to frequently? Or
| do they not count if you don't talk with them outside class
| or study groups? Last time I looked at the forum it seems
| like they want you to just list anyone you ever talked to.
|
| Personally I've avoided getting a clearance because I just
| don't see the value. It is a lot of work to put together,
| forces you to be more quiet about what you work on, means you
| need to be more careful/vigilant in every day things and
| especially when traveling, and all for what? Low pay and not
| even that cool of work? I mean if it was working on alien
| technologies and cool sci-fi shit, sign me up! But the
| reality is that most of the work isn't very exciting. I'd
| rather have more freedom, more pay, and work on more
| interesting things. Maybe their work can have more purpose
| and more impact, but I am also not convinced that's true for
| the majority of things you need clearance for (even as a
| person in STEM).
| commandersaki wrote:
| It seems to me that if you lie and get the clearance, it is
| better than being honest and getting NACKed. Maybe morally
| dubious, but there's financial incentive and motivation for
| having a clearance.
| godelski wrote:
| I think you need to reread my comment... you seem to have
| misunderstandings...
| scoodah wrote:
| You shouldn't be denied for smoking weed in college and
| disclosing it. I had no issues with that. The other thing is
| you can appeal a denial of your clearance if you can
| demonstrate the issue is not an issue. If you truly did only
| smoke weed in college and get denied due to that, you could
| appeal and make your case that your weed use is not ongoing,
| ended in college, and not an issue in your personal life. It's
| not guaranteed to be a successful appeal, of course, but the
| process does exist.
|
| The bigger problem is when people fib about their usage. Saying
| you only used it in college when you've used it more recently
| is something people do fairly often, and seemingly are
| encouraged to fib about.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| I once worked at a top financial firm which had regular
| background checks from Pinkerton (yeah, that very agency from the
| books and with bad US history).
|
| They sent me a questionnaire asking to fill personal details in a
| Word file while their email signature said not to disclose
| personal details over email.
|
| Security clearance business is rotten to the core.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > When I handed the form in to the security officer, he scanned
| it quickly, looked me over slowly, then said, ``Explain this''--
| pointing at the FBI question. I described what had happened. He
| got very agitated, picked up my form, tore it in pieces, and
| threw it in the waste basket.
|
| > He then got out a blank form and handed it to me, saying
| ``Here, fill it out again and don't mention that. If you do, I'll
| make sure that you never get a security clearance.''
|
| It's important to "see like the government" when dealing with the
| government (pun on "seeing like a bank" by
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ if
| anyone didn't catch the reference).
|
| Everything fits into bins and categories with checkmarks and
| such. As an entity it has no "bin" for "investigated as Japanese
| spy as a joke when was a child". So you have to pick the closest
| bin that matches. However, that doesn't mean the same government
| later won't turn around also punish you for not picking the right
| "bin". Not "realizing" that it's its own fault for not having
| enough categories i.e. bins for you to pick. And, some may argue,
| that's a feature not a bug...
| phreeza wrote:
| Not sure if you were maybe joking, but Seeing like a Bank is
| itself a pun on the famous book "Seeing like a state"!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
|
| So you've come almost full circle!
| rdtsc wrote:
| It is the full circle! patio11 refers to that explicitly in
| the blog. But most people here probably saw and remember
| Pat's blog more than the book.
| jglamine wrote:
| The book is very famous! I would guess more people have
| heard of it than read that specific BAM post.
| bigiain wrote:
| You're almost certainly right. But I bet the tables tip
| distinctly the other way if you're talking about HN
| readers instead of everybody. So I'd guess you're both
| right.
| notatoad wrote:
| the challenge is always determining what the "bins" are.
|
| maybe the government has no bin for "investegated by the FBI
| for a silly and innocuous reason". but maybe they do, and lying
| about it slots you into the bin for "lied on their security
| clearance form".
| Frost1x wrote:
| In the security space you're encouraged to be as transparent
| as possible. Most modern forms have ample space to write in
| detailed explanations.
|
| I have some silly not nearly as interesting infractions and I
| wrote them out in detail explaining, without any issue in
| processing background checks. It usually is something that's
| asked about in an in person interview at that point.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| The danger isn't just being risky, it's being anomalous
| shakna wrote:
| And then, over with AGSVA, they just do interviews. Every
| candidate gets one, and they absolutely do bring up all the
| random crap that happens to various people as kids. And ask why
| it wasn't on your form.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Exactly this
|
| People of a more autistic orientation here seem to think this
| is a no-no when in fact it's quite the opposite
|
| The note was investigated. Not the person.
| john01dav wrote:
| In response to the seeing like a bank article, one thing which
| can make this a lot better is to use asynchronous ticketing or
| messaging systems instead of phone trees.
|
| At my bank, I can just send a message in the app, even when
| it's closed, about whatever I want. Then, when the bank opens,
| someone reads it, and then either handles it, or transfers it.
| Then, if its transferreed, that person either handles it or
| forwards again.
|
| The same triaging of basic issues exists, the same tiers
| described in the article, but the user interfece is wildly
| superior. I take 1 minute to write what I need to write, and
| then a few business hours later, its solved. I don't need to
| waste my time on hold. I don't need to be instantly available
| for an undetermined period for a call back. I don't need to
| explain the same issue repeatedly. If I'm asked a question, I
| can answer it, and the answer is then attached to the full log
| that every escalation or transfer has full access to.
|
| This is so much better that I refuse to do business with most
| businesses that don't offer something like this. I was
| extremely pissed when a data broker leaked my SSN and I was
| forced to deal with such institutions to clean up that mess.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Just how little space was there on the form? I think I would have
| tried something like:
|
| "When I was 12 years old, I exchanged encrypted messages with
| friends. The FBI found a code and briefly thought I was a spy."
|
| Or, if there was even less space:
|
| "As child, used encryption for fun. FBI found code &
| investigated."
|
| I would want to avoid lying at all costs, even if a superior
| instructed me to. Who knows what could happen.
| est31 wrote:
| Note the date, it's April 1 1988.
| acomjean wrote:
| This happened to my mom when being interviewed when coming over
| here in the 60s. During verbal questioning she said something
| like "of course". The government agent turned deep red and asked
| her if she understood the question (English isn't her first
| language and she hadn't). She's been here since.
|
| I kind of get that the agent is looking out for the applicant in
| this story. You have no idea what's going to happen when you do a
| security clearance thing and they ask about this and that. How
| serious is the wrong answer.
|
| Excepting my favorite question which something like "have you
| ever tried to topple the government?"
|
| The system is messed up when screening for honesty encourages
| people to lie.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| I suspect that's why experienced officers sometimes intervene
| like in the OP's story
| bjt12345 wrote:
| I admire people who don't lie about past drug use on their
| clearance forms. Sure, it might delay their clearance, but I
| still admire them.
|
| The core social problem with drug addiction and alcoholicism is
| this concept of telling people what you think they want to hear
| from you, not telling them the truth.
| runamuck wrote:
| "the most frequently occurring letters in typical English text
| are e-t-a-o-n-r-i." But "Wheel of Fortune" told me to guess R-N-
| S-T-L-E!
| toast0 wrote:
| It's not contradictory. Wheel of Fortune only gives you one
| vowel for free, e is the most common, same as here.
|
| Wheel of Fortune gives you several consonants, order matters
| less, and both lists share n r and t.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| So something uncomfortable about clearance processes: they're not
| purely about truth, they're about interpretable truth
| cheese_van wrote:
| It might have been 2002, can't remember, when they upgraded the
| e-QIP software for the security check form.
|
| I was doing my mandatory update coincidental with the roll-out
| and when I got to the question, "mother a US citizen" I had to
| check the "no" box and the immediate pop-up was "date of first
| contact?" which actually got me thinking along existential lines
| for a moment.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| honestly, had he written the reason as "I devised new encryption
| scheme at 12" he might have gotten promoted rather than dissuaded
|
| it's like insurance claim - precise wording matters more than
| facts
| rkagerer wrote:
| This one's fun too: https://milk.com/wall-o-
| shame/two_dollars.html
| tokenless wrote:
| They just needed to polygraph him
|
| ;-)
| keepamovin wrote:
| At least we now know that everyone working in classified programs
| is above reproach and cleaner than clean. It's a good thing too,
| because working without accountability in secret would definitely
| be abused, but thankfully that's not the case because the people
| hired are too pure and good.
|
| It's also a very good filter for high openness and creativity,
| ensuring that the most sensitive works attracts the most
| brilliant creative geniuses. Truly these nations know how to
| develop their advantages in the best way.
| piskov wrote:
| > it was in 1943, just after citizens of Japanese descent had
| been forced off their property and taken away to concentration
| camps
|
| Anyone else did that during the war or only horrible Hitler and
| humane Americans?
|
| Come think of it, I wonder what would happen to all the
| immigrants if full-on war ensues.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| People are cruel. Good people arent cruel enough to overpower
| the cruel people
| defrost wrote:
| Like the USofA, the British interned "enemy nationals" - this
| policy extended across the Commonwealth including Canada,
| Australia, India, and elsewhere. During the
| Second World War, the British government interned several
| different groups of people, including German, Austrian and
| Italian nationals. However, following Nazi Germany's
| military successes in France, Belgium and the Netherlands in
| the spring and summer of 1940, there was increasing concern
| that 'enemy aliens' in Britain would form a ' fifth column '.
| These concerns were amplified by the British press. As a result
| of this growing fear, the British government interned
| approximately 27,000 'enemy aliens', including those assessed
| as low risk, supposedly in the interests of national security.
| Those interned were predominantly men between the ages of 16
| and 60, but 4000 women and children were also interned.
|
| ~ https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/resistance-
| responses-c...
|
| In Australia: https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-
| collection/immigration-and-ci...
|
| In India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years_in_Tibet
|
| _Technically Heinrich Harrer was not a civilian as he held the
| "honorary" rank of a Nazi sergeant in the SS, kind of an early
| PR stunt rank given due to his status as a world famous
| mountaineer .. still it points to the internment of Germans and
| Austrians in India and references an interesting book_
| xyzelement wrote:
| I think the motivation and experience of those camps were quite
| different
| piskov wrote:
| Yeah, let's call that involuntary race-based detention a
| retreat.
| themafia wrote:
| > It apparently didn't occur to them that if I were a real
| Japanese spy, I might have brought the glasses with me from
| headquarters.
|
| It occurred to them. They like to test their apparatus out
| anyways.
| bandrami wrote:
| My favorite part of re-upping every five years is the
| investigator indignantly asking why I spent multiple years in all
| these different countries and showing him the government orders
| that posted me there. There's really a "left hand has no idea
| what the right hand is doing" aspect to this process.
| kazinator wrote:
| I've read this before but this time what stands out is:
|
| > (To me, $8 represented 40 round trips to the beach by
| streetcar, or 80 admission fees to the movies.)
|
| Glasses being a ripoff scam goes back that far?!
| rurban wrote:
| All the articles at https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/ are a
| goldmine. I prefer the one of a student called ''Missile'' Seitz
| buying a missile for nothing, and then didn't have to pay income
| taxes for several years
| ikjasdlk2234 wrote:
| This story is under the title "Government Surplus" and is
| indeed quite a tale (and on point for MIT students).
|
| https://milk.com/wall-o-shame/government_surplus.html
| nektro wrote:
| body { max-width: 60em; margin: auto; }
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-22 12:01 UTC)