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Its pretty backwards if you think about it, if the places you go or people you know or mistakes you make, can easily make you lose your security clearance and therefore your career could be ruined, it makes you much easier to blackmail than under a system that was more laissez-faire

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I think the idea is more like if you are able to pass those clearances , you are less likely to find yourself in a future position that would compromise them. Similar to the belief that a high credit score shows that you're more likely to pay your bills and not abuse your credit - because you haven't so far.

Hmmm... If that were true we'd have lots of empirical evidence, so I'd like to see some link to that.

> we'd have lots of empirical evidence

That assumes there would be many attempts at this kind of blackmail, and that any attempts that did occur were discovered and documented.

> I'd like to see some link to that.

Even if the conditions above were satisfied (which I find highly unlikely), this assumes that we (the public) have access to the documentation.

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