Friends in the intelligence community have told me they have as many extreme, extreme alcoholics as the Navy does, and that's just fine, part of the "culture", but oh boy, cannabis is not acceptable. Not sure if it was always like that, or just recently because they have recruiting problems.
I also have friends at national labs watching this very enthusiastically, hoping it spills over to their sector, because they have difficulty recruiting PhDs who are willing to get randomly piss tested.
I use cannabis sometimes but it's more the principal of it.
It's a privacy violation and positive results don't actually mean you're intoxicated on the job. What people do in their free time is nobodies business so long as it's not harming other people.
Airline pilots? People operating dangerous machinery?
Is wife swapping like less blackmailable escape than prostitutes? Clearance life hack.
Both are not ideal for people in positions of public trust.
I don't want my intelligence officers drunk OR high. Is that too much to ask?
On the job? I agree with you.
Off the job? Do you mind if an inteligence officer who is not on duty let’s say on a fourth of july, bbq-s some burgers with his friends and family and then drinks four beers? Enough to be considered as impaired if they were to drive. But they don’t drive. They don’t babble about secrets. They talk about sports and then they sleep it off. Would you mind that?
And would you mind the same if it were a canabis joint instead of the beers?
I could maybe see this for the highest leadership--the President, 4-star generals, people who are politically or functionally on-call 24/7. But for everyone else, the rule should be, don't show up to work impaired, either drunk or stoned or hungover. (Though I'm not sure how to deal with chronic pain conditions in that case).
The status quo endorses the former and demonizes the latter.
Mormonism deeply values work ethic and breeds a strong trust of authority.
You're taught at an early age questioning authority is a sin and doing what your leaders tell you is the right thing to do.
The end result is a group of people who are hard working, don't question leadership, and do what they are told.
If you aren't allowed to question leadership and are instead expected to do "what you are told", then all the experiments and horrors studies on group think are a reality at a dangerous level [1][2][3] What if you think an order is dangerous and have good reasons why?
Good leadership needs to know what the ground-level knows, they need good input and questioning. Stalin killed anyone who opposed or questioned him, so all of the input and feedback was only positive feedback/intel to avoid being killed. Even when they were setting up one of the worst famines in recorded history [4].
Healthy societies aren't cults, and that is definitely a description of a cult.
I hate a Godwin-Law argument, but the damn Nazi's "did what they were told" [5], and those 'hard-working'-don't-question-leadership lemmings had a blind-eye to/assisted and/or murdered millions of people because they didn't have to deal with the burden of questioning and thinking for themselves. Fuck that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
[2] https://www.prisonexp.org/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown#Deaths_in_Jonestown
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
[5] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-the-nazis-defense-o...
Has been throughout history!
Mormon membership numbers of actual adherents are likely 20% to 40% of membership claimed based on "inactivity" rates (and people leaving).
It's not clear to me how these would have absolutely any relationship at all.
That was when they told him that his offer was rescinded for past use of marijuana. They said there were no exceptions to the rule, but it was the only reason he was denied.
Edit: marijuana use is now common enough that investigators will actually grill you and accuse you of lying if you say you've never used marijuana.
Edit:
Found it https://www.npr.org/2018/03/30/598253244/i-basically-ran-on-...
"GROSS: (Laughter) Right. So I thought this was really interesting. You had to get national security clearance for your job.
MASTROMONACO: Yeah.
GROSS: One of the questions you had to answer was a kind of detailed list of your drug use. And you'd smoked marijuana.
MASTROMONACO: Yes.
GROSS: You had to say how many times (laughter).
MASTROMONACO: Yes. That was...
GROSS: Yeah. So you handled it by saying unknown. How did you come to the conclusion that that would be your answer, an unknown number of times?
MASTROMONACO: Because - well, because I really feel strongly about not lying. And so when the FBI agent asked me for a number of times and she said, you know, 20? And I was like, no. She said, a hundred? I said, no. And then when she got up to 500, I was like, I'm not saying - I'm not giving you a number because who knows if they're going to go try and prove the number? So I just said, unknown. And apparently from her reaction, nobody had ever said that before.
GROSS: You write that you had to get randomly drug tested almost every month. Is that because you'd said unknown or does everybody have to do that?
MASTROMONACO: No. Most people get drug tested, like, once or twice that first year. But I was drug tested quite often because I was very forward-leaning about my drug use, very open-kimono, as we would say. And so, yeah, every - just about every month, you'd get an email that said, you know, you have 24 hours to show up for your test. And I would. And it was fine because I wasn't. So I had nothing to hide (laughter)."
It is useful to explain a bit about the bureaucracy here: the clearance process consists of the investigation and the adjudication. These are two separate steps and often performed by different agencies. The investigation is often performed by OPM, but DoD switched to doing their own, the FBI always has, and it's acceptable to use private contractors (usually retired insurance investigators) up to the S level in some agencies. The adjudication is much more often performed by someone directly in the issuing agency, and agencies publish their own manuals to which adjudicators work. Although the general grounds for denial of a clearance are in statute, the exact rules of what conduct amounts to what grounds (in other words, the real rules of adjudication) are contained in these manuals.
https://www.dni.gov/files/NCSC/documents/Regulations/SEAD-4-...
In the present context, see "Guideline H: Drug Involvement and Substance Abuse," page 17 ff.
It depends. At least, it did when I went for clearance a decade ago.
a) I think recency as well as frequency mattered.
b) You had to be willing to stop.
I don't know how much (a) is still a thing but it was definitely back then. The other thing is it depends on your sponsor and who you get stuck with during the process - some people are going to care way more than others.
They schedule drugs through Article 6 of our Constitution which makes treaties law of the land. Our ability to change drug laws in the US is outsourced to the UN. It's not a "Republican or Democrat" issue specifically. Though, the prison system that is increasingly private which makes money hand over fist on drug users and pushers certainly is an issue either political party could champion and change.
They kind of have done the first part, in effect, “marijuana” and “hemp” being legally distinct, and it being possible to get all the pharmacologically interesting bits for which marijuana is sought in forms that are legally “hemp”.
https://news.clearancejobs.com/2016/04/02/consequences-lying...
The main idea is to assess the ways in which an asset can get corrupted by outside influence. Agencies can work with people's various deficiencies and vices, after all it's what they do all day long. But they need to be able to qualify the risk represented by each of their people vs the other agencie's people.
That's hyperbole. According to the United States Constitution, Article III, Section 3:
> Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
It's narrowly defined for the very reason that prior history had tons of abuses of a much broader definition to silence political enemies.
Granted, lying to federal officials is almost certainly a crime, and not one you'd like to have on your record. But treason it is not.
No, don’t think “treason”, because lying on (even a national security related) job-related interview is nothing close to treason.
OTOH, lying to government officials about a matter within the jurisdiction is a felony even without invoking weird flights of fancy about treason.
Tbh, I kind of liked the idea that decriminalization and liberal attitudes were starving them for talent.
If spying prevents war, it's not working. LOL...
My goodness.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
-- John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy advisor, from an interview in 1994
About marijuana activists, he said:
> I want a Goddamn strong statement on marijuana, I mean one that just tears the ass out of them. You know, its a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish.
Democracies shouldn't have giant unaccountable spy orgs.
All governments on the planet have giant unaccountable spy orgs.
Why should a democracy forgo one of the most effective tools the world has ever seen? Accountability is a strange word to use with any government agency. Most government bodies are only accountable to themselves.
"Everybody [all countries] plays the Great Game. You don't get to not play. Choosing to not play just means when you play you always lose."
Same is true for office politics, market research, academic publishing, etc.; "publish or perish" -- you play the game or you're not an academic.
They don't but there are definitely some bad, unaccountable people and parts to it though.
Individuals are generally accountable but it's going to look unaccountable when the nation also wants to do the things the spy org is doing.
speaking pashto ain't gonna get you to SME L6 at a FAANG but could get you doing cool stuff as a contractor or full-on Fed.
and hate on the GS band but it's at least adjusted for inflation
It could generate more data to finally help prove that polygraphs, which largely rely on subjects believing they work, are pointless because so many people already know they don't.
Anyways, good on them for a step in the right direction.
I filled out the app and they asked "How many times have you consumed marijuana in the past year?" I answered honestly, "150 times".
They did not call me back.
