Comment by nosequel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nosequel | Hacker News Reader

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Well this is certainly only partly true. The difference between a generic Secret clearance and the level of clearance talked about in the article is probably bigger than the difference between having a secret clearance and not having one at all. I got my first secret clearance in a month or so, with the interim clearance coming in only a couple of weeks. Hardly anything that would be considered "oh cool!" is labelled Secret. Once you get to the up levels of clearances you start to have a harder and harder time getting and keeping that clearance. You make it sound easy, when in fact it isn't. I was on a small team and a surprisingly large percentage of people we tried to bring onto the team got their request for clearance denied. If you are trying to get a TS/SCI clearance and have a foreign born wife, or too much debt, or a gambling problem, or you used drugs and didn't announce that on your form, or you were completely sketched out on the polygraph, boom, no clearance for you (obviously those are just examples, not set in stone).

Also, once at the TS/SCI level and above everything in compartmentalized. It isn't as if you get the clearance, get some password to some digital book of secrets and all of a sudden you know what really went down at Area 51.

I'm actually surprised by this. I work with a ton of people with foreign born wives (many not even green carded yet) -- soldiers tend to marry where they are first stationed.

Also, I work with plenty of people with TS/SCIs who have used drugs in the past.

The key is just being honest with the investigators.

You are right that people with too much debt, gambling problems, current drug use, etc. don't get one. But that makes sense. I've worked with some pretty sketchy characters though and they didn't have a problem getting or keeping there clearances.

I don't think I've ever personally known somebody who had theirs denied, I've known one person who had their taken from them for doing some questionable things.

It could have been the particular agency that was doing the clearance in my case. With a military customer, I saw less issues, but with the customer I was referring to in my previous post, there were lots of denials. I think the location of foreign born wives is important in this case. The few cases I saw were countries we don't have good intelligence relationships with, in asia and the middle east.

Yes, close personal contacts with people from unfriendly countries can be a problem. However, I do know people with clearances who are from several countries the U.S. is not particularly friendly with.

Quite often it could be that the investigator could not ascertain the relationships on the wife's side and/or they don't have a citizenship yet.

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