I remember when I was in the Navy, running a nuclear power plant on a ship that carried nuclear weapons, and the Chief of the Boat regularly showed up to work so drunk he couldn't speak (having driven himself to work) and everyone ignored it and when juniors complained seniors threatened to fabricate charges against them to shut them up, and listening to that guy scream and yell about how anyone who smokes cannabis is a fucking loser, a total garbage piece of shit, not even a real human being, and genuinely having difficulty not laughing and/or screaming. What a fucking joke that place was.
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 can tell you right now if any job required a drug test, I wouldn't work there.
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.
That's the big difference. A breathalyzer tells if you're right now actively impaired. Cannabis tests simply show that sometime in the past 30 days you smoked. Doesnt show active impairment.
Mouth swabs are a more reasonably analog to breathalyzers for cannabis, although even with those the detection period can be up to 48-72 hours. But still, much better than the months long detection period for the more common urine tests.
My hope is once its legalized fully, more effort can be put into researching and designing more sensitive tests until we have something that is equally as capable as breathalyzers are(which is questionable in and of itself, but I'll settle for equal treatment under the law for now rather than aiming for perfection).
Because cannabis can have effects up to a week after if I remember correctly. And it’s not very predictable. Alcohol is cleared out at a predictable rate and has no effect after a few hours, you’ll just be tired.
Marijuana’s effects last about one to three hours. A bit longer if ingested. There might technically be longer-term effects noticeable in a clinical setting, but nothing to a degree that would impact somebody’s ability to function at a typical level.
To my understanding "being tired" (which is absolutely part of being hungover the next day after a night of heavy drinking) is comparable and according to some sources pretty much equivalent to being "under the influence" in terms of how much it can impair you when operating heavy machinery.
I know a couple railroad engineers. They basically had to give up drinking because they could lose their job.
They do some kind of test that can pick up if you drank in the last couple days.
The way they assign shifts too causes the problems. If a shift pops up, they wanna take it, and that could happen at any time.
In any case I'd wager it's related to the hangover problem. You don't want a tired, distracted (by headaches or whatever), grumpy person moving 12000 tons.
You did NOT remember correctly. The only way you're going to have effects for a week is by using it for a week! The effects are VERY predictable, as studies have shown first-hand through trials for many decades. The only thing that isn't absolutely certain is an individual's rate of processing THC-COOH, which is only a leftover metabolite of what was once psychoactive THC (THC-A). You will absolutely test positive for THC-COOH a week after a single usage, sometimes up to a month; because it's stored in your fat. For this reason, it can even be detected up for multiple months in heavy users! An inactive metabolite is unable to cause any psychoactive effects.
What exactly is “dangerous machinery”? I frequently operate overhead cranes, lifting 0,5-5000 kilos. I also smoke pot. To be frank,
I would be able to do my job somewhat high, but not drunk.
Smoking a joint the day before work has minimal impact on my performance, I would argue it increases it because of a good nights sleep. Drinking alcohol on the other hand…
I wonder if there has been any studies around marijuana impairment and vehicle operation?
I worked at a California startup that got aquired by a huge east coast corporation. At the all hands where the east coasters were introduced, one of them announced that we would all have to get drug tested within 2 weeks. We just looked at each other and then slow rolled them for the next month, lol.
Eventually we all went and got tested together and no one got fired.
I'd love to see a comparison between the amount of whiskey and blow consumed by people who get drug tested and the amount of weed smoked by people who don't.
I worked for a while in the military industrial complex. The only legal outlets for modifying your reality were alcohol and sex. So there were lots of people who drank heavily and swapped wives. They were quite open about it, because keeping it a secret could cause you to lose your security clearance (it made you blackmailable). They were also very accepting of whatever your skin color was, because the military demanded it. It was something of a shock moving to an industry job and discovering that racism still existed.
> 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?
Ever? Like they go on vacation to visit their families, and they shouldn't be allowed to drink or smoke?
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).
Mormons, apparently. They also tend to have good foreign language skills and a willingness to serve. But they represented in the FBI etc to the point it's slightly problematic.
The drawback GP is missing is that selecting too heavily from one group can have unintended adverse effects since you lose out on diversity of ideas and approaches - I would absolutely expect many intelligence officers to drink and do other things people might frown upon, because very often the people they need to know and talk to _won't_ be teetotallers or care much about such things.
A lot of people would probably be willing to give up a minor drug or alcohol habit to have/keep a high-paying intelligence job.
I would certainly accept being "always sober" as a condition of employment if the job was one I really wanted.
I can't find the study, but I seem to remember that alcohol consumption follows the 80/20 rule. A small amount of alcohol consumers consume basically all the alcohol, with non-alcholics consuming very little. If you consume very little, it's probably not a big deal just to go without completely.
I wouldn't. Hard-drinking military leaders have a good track record, e.g., U.S. Grant, whereas the world has little or no experience AFAIK with high leaders.
I don't interpret neither OP nor the first comment this way. What is brought up is the hypocrisy of talking down on any cannabis user while being drunk at work yourself, and positive drug tests that are not related to actual intoxication at work (since cannabis can be detected for a while after coming down).
Wait till you hear about politicians.
I don’t know what the US Capitol is like in this regard but the Westminster parliament for instance is notorious for the number of bars onsite, and the amount consumed in them by its members (all subsidised!)
Marijuana (along with multi-lingualism) is a big reason why the Mormon-American community is significantly over-represented in the US intelligence community.
That sounds dangerous as hell. No one should live that way.
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.
Wow, is that the only thing you got from my comment? I'm highlighting examples of why it's a serious problem and people need to think for themselves.
We know what group-think does way beyond the experiment. We have a very well-documented history on it. Read Soviet and Nazi history, you'll see what it can do. It's almost universal in big groups of humans.
If a police officer told you to shoot another person, would you do it? If 3 police officers tell you to do it, would you do it? How many police officers will it take to make you shoot the person?
I also heard that one of the side effects of this is that when you're in a foreign country and offer Americans tea/coffee and of them refuses, you can be assured they're a Mormon working for the CIA.
Always stood out to me how Mormon expats in PRC had unusually good mandarin skills. They're mainly there to sell farm equipment, but seems hard for teetotalers to do cover work. Hilariously I think ex CIA mormon got busted for selling secrets to PRC.
They go on missions, very frequently outside of America, as a standard part of their early adult life. Learning the local language is pretty much a requirement.
I know that they go on missions. My question was regarding the "Mormon-American" framing which suggests that Mormonism exists in other countries, which I was not aware of.
Very much so, in fact, more Mormons live outside of the US than within the US. The church reports a population of 16,663,663 with 6,592,195 of those living within the US. (got those numbers from Wikipedia).
I live in a small town in Guatemala and the mormon church here is growing very rapidly. According to Google, they're growing at 1.5% annually, which means 255,036 new Mormons every year. However, a church with even a hundred people can heavily sway a small, remote community.
I agree it's not "spreading" per se, but their numbers are respectable among proselytizing religions today. When Islam reached a 1.8% growth rate in the 2000s we were inundated with proclamations that it was the fastest growing religion in the world (eg: https://foreignpolicy.com/2007/05/14/the-list-the-worlds-fas...).
Big church right in the middle of Paris. On prime, riverside real estate. That can't be cheap and last time I passed by it was missionaries and exchange students coming in and out.
You could already get a clearance with past marijuana use (and other drugs) but I guess this would just make it so someone couldn't be denied a clearance solely for that reason.
I got denied an internship at the CIA for my past drug use, which was entirely trying marijuana after it became legal in my home state. I don’t see how someone can possibly be expected to have the personality to gather (human) intel, but somehow not ever have smoked weed.
Nope, that's typically a deal breaker. It's the stuff they find out that you didn't want them to know that can get you blocked. The thinking is that if an adversary finds it out, they could use it as leverage against you. I've held clearances in the past and was forthcoming about marijuana use. It largely comes down to the judgement of the investigator. I'm really not surprised that some people have been bounced for drug use and some people haven't.
But the leverage is granted by the CIA being strict in the first place. If it wasn't a condition of denial it wouldn't be a condition of denial and wouldn't hold the leverage power it is meant to curb. Crazy
Good point! I think in the past it would have been a much bigger deal to have past drug use revealed. Think Bill Clinton vs Obama. We've come a long way since, I'm not surprised the IC is just now starting to rethink things a bit.
To gather human intel you have to be willing to do things like drink in social situation and (gasp) sometimes do drugs with the people you're trying to collect intel from, to gain their friendship.
In other words, you need to have a slightly adventurous personality.
Most people I know who have an adventurous personality don't smoke weed. Drinking I can see a case for as it's so heavily embedded as a social activity. Just anecdotal data I suppose but I'm not seeing a similar connection for having done drugs.
Perhaps for someone who is undercover and needs to fit in, sure, but I don't think that predisposes a personality to take drugs in their own time. For both alcohol and drugs I doubt it has any relevance to most intelligence roles.
Yeah. And the people you network with in a HUMINT job aren't hanging around doing drugs for the most part. They are working in industry or government. Probably a fair amount of drinking but mostly no time for other drugs, or if they do them, keep it discreet.
You're conflating being an intelligence operative with being an intelligence agent. The salaried employees of the CIA (operatives et al) do not "drink and do drugs with people they're trying to collect intel from." They recruit local contacts (agents) to do that for them.
Think: DEA employee, vs. DEA criminal informant. The job of the DEA employee is not to infiltrate drug gangs. It's to organize and monitor the infiltration of drug gangs. The criminal informant wears the wire. The DEA employee sits in the black van outside, listening to the wire.
The most common position in the CIA is "analyst." The job of a CIA analyst is to sit there in a cubicle and read/listen to all the evidence gathered by agents (or spy satellites, or wiretaps, or whatever), gathering any "interesting" stuff into a report (with a further fan-in to "senior analysts" who map-reduce all those reports into "intelligence".) Unlike an operative, an analyst doesn't even get to speak with any agents — let alone head out into the field to recruit them.
I don't think they're sending interns to gather HUMINT, and I'm skeptical of how many CIA employees are doing those things regularly (non-zero amount, sure. But there's a reason that the TLA's hire so many Mormons)
Weed is ubiquitous enough in American culture these days that it’s not unreasonable to associate “I’ve never tried cannabis” with religious orthodoxy or some other conservative behavior-limiting values. It’s not uncommon to hear something along the lines of old DARE talking points about gateway drugs or schizophrenia from people that have refused to try it, which can make a person seem like a… square.
aye there is a certain level of flexibility, adaptability, and worldliness that is required to network with people in a way that they'll give you classified information.
gotta be able to hang out on both sides of the tracks, dig?
A (very talented) friend of mine was supposed to work at the White House during the Obama admin. He got as far as signing documents and moving from California to Washington DC.
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.
I know multiple people with clearances who have used marijuana and significantly harder drugs as well and were honest about this on their clearance paperwork. I obviously don't know the specifics of your friend's case but it is not true in general that intelligence agencies (White House may be different or maybe was in the past) must deny you for past marijuana use, particularly if you admit to it early on.
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.
Places like the FBI used to have a specific number like you can’t have used marijuana more than 5 times. And then they’d polygraph you. But yes I knew people as well with normal TS clearances who had disclosed hard drugs but some intel organizations have stricter rules beyond that.
I tried finding it but I listened to someone on KQED/NPR who worked for Obama's White House and had to go through a security clearance. She said she used marijuana hundreds of times, and they let her get the job. Something doesn't add up. Or, for your friend's specific job they had different rules. She wasn't an intern or something very low level, but I can't remember her title. Edit: Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, so pretty high level.
"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)."
Clearance is a funny business. They want to weed out things which can be used as leverage against people with clearance.
So - financial stuff is their number 1 clearance issue I've heard. If you're deep in debt, or otherwise demonstrate poor control over your financial life.
Next up is being part of the LGBT community - if you're in the closet. I've heard they don't care about people being gay per se, just the secret aspect of it. Anecdotally, I had a govvie friend mention an FBI analyst who had a side hustle in gay porn. Totally OK.
Being open about drug use, as long as it's not the hard drugs, I could see someone getting a pass for.
Anything that can be used as blackmail and/or show lack of good judgement/trustworthiness. Different agencies have different requirements, but past drug use is usually not an issue as long as it's disclosed.
The FBI/DEA has/had stricter rules on drug use likely because part of the job could entail dealing with drug seizures.
> So - financial stuff is their number 1 clearance issue I've heard. If you're deep in debt, or otherwise demonstrate poor control over your financial life.
True -- can't handle your money why would you deserve to handle the gub'mnts?
But also people massively in debt will get desperate and take bribes. And bribes work.
A friend of mine says that his coming-out moment happened while undergoing a polygraph to work at the CIA. Basically "you're still hiding something, what is it?", and that was it. He admitted it to the polygrapher at the same time he admitted it to himself.
Who knows? NPR recently had a segment where they had told a lady for months during the interview process that she was a perfect fit for the agency.
At some point they went cold on her, and then told her to reapply the following year (which she tried for a few years). She'll never know why it didn't work out.
I know at least one person who was not intimidated by the lie detectors, and were able to conceal things which might have been an issue.
I have been told, though I have never personally applied for a clearance, by some people with clearances, that they cared a lot more in at least some agencies about you lying about having done it than they did about you doing it.
I heard interviews with Obama white house staff who mentioned that they had to disclose weed use in their clearance forms but that it didn't prevent them from getting a position.
It depends on the actual adjudication policy, which differs by agency. For example, for years it was a well-known but unwritten policy that DoE considered marijuana use within the past 12 months to be exclusory but greater than 12 months ago to be acceptable. There seem to be restrictions on putting this in writing (I think because the actual adjudication manuals are classified) but clearance adjudicators themselves would refer to it as the "12-month rule." The FBI at least used to be notorious for considering any drug use at any point to be exclusory, and I think the CIA generally fell into the same camp. On the other hand some organizations, especially in the IC, seemed to be much more lax about it (but often stricter about things like polygraphs).
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.
> You could already get a clearance with past marijuana use (and other drugs) but I guess this would just make it so someone couldn't be denied a clearance solely for that reason.
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.
In addition to the rules being applied fairly indiscriminately, "past" is doing some pretty heaving lifting here. Last I knew six months was the most recent it could have been used if you were extremely lucky/valuable.
As long as republicans continue to say no to that, it's impossible to do. Democrats basically never have actual control over the American Government, it's happened like 4 years out of the past 20, and that's not a new phenomenon. Even in the times they have had "full" control of all portions of government, republican senators are still able to "block" stuff through made up rules and "norms" that democrats don't want to break, because that gives republicans cart blanche to break those same rules in a way that can do a lot more harm. Also like 4 of the democrats that are part of the "majority" for various reasons like to be contrarians to the rest of the party, meaning even the few times there have been a majority of democrats in the senate, there has not been consensus in the party for basically anything since probably FDR.
You're confusing "is" and "should". Politics violates the HN guidelines - the fact that lots of people are violating them doesn't mean that it's now acceptable.
Also, if you go back say, 10 years, you'll see that most HN threads have very little politics in them, so yes, that has been the norm before.
Oh sweet summer child. The Democrats have absolutely been in a position do this, but they did not, because they would lose that voting block. They need the issue. It will become legal once big pharma and big tobacco have decided they want it to happen, regardless of who is in charge.
> Democrats have absolutely been in a position do this, but they did not, because they would lose that voting block. They need the issue.
Correct on the first, wrong on the second. Stockpiling issues doesn't work in U.S. politics: it's how you get primaried.
The truth: there are enough Democrats in competitive districts where legalized marijuana would lose them the next general. It's a majority of the minority problem. Not anything strategic.
It requires the approval of the United Nations Economic and Social Counsel's Commission on Narcotic Drugs to remove a schedule 1 item from a member countries drug schedules provided the World Health Organization approves any uses as medicinal.
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.
> Or… just decriminalize it altogether, including forgiveness of past use.
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”.
I agree, but these are two separate issues. Clearances can be denied for a variety of reasons. Something being considered a “security risk” is not necessarily related to its legal status.
I'm assuming this is only because it's getting harder and harder to find qualified people and adding on unreasonable constraints is only making the situation worse.
I’ve talked to a lawyer who does govt clearances, and the reality is that clearances are rarely denied for past use of marijuana. Especially if a year or two has passed since last use. Lying during the investigation about your drug use is what will get you denied. Unless the bill allows people use marijuana while holding a clearance, this changes almost nothing IMO.
There's probably a heckuva natural experiment enabled by this change. By surveying pot usage and comparing it with earlier responses during lie detector exams, it may be possible to tease out about how many people were confident they could consistently beat the polygraph (probably because they knew or suspected polygraphs don't work).
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.
People who previously lied about usage probably won't admit it now, because lying in itself, regardless of reason, is grounds for losing your security clearance.
I applied to the CIA in college. I had a great chat with the recruiter and he told me to apply online and come in for an interview the following morning.
I filled out the app and they asked "How many times have you consumed marijuana in the past year?" I answered honestly, "150 times".
“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
> 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.
If the government actually fired all their subcontractors and clearanced employees with a weed pen in their desk they'd have almost nobody left. I can't help but feel like worker shortage is why they're doing this.
The primary purpose of the CIA is to maintain a continuous pipeline of endless wars to fuel the military industrial complex. All other goals are secondary. This has been true since the CIA and LBJ assassinated John F Kennedy in a coup to overthrow the US government.
Such a bizarre time in the US, just today folks I grew up with were raided by helicopter/dogs/cops on dirt bikes for growing personal use marijuana in their own home (8 plants). Meanwhile everyone knows marijuana crimes are a complete joke.
Frankly, I'd have to be high to accept a job in the intelligence community. I was recruited once in college, got a bad feeling and never regretted it for a second.
Democracies shouldn't have giant unaccountable spy orgs.
> 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.
Having friends and neighbours that will lie for you (or be unaware of your gravest moments of joint smoking) seems like a good level of trustworthiness.
You can't predict who they will reach out to you. Also, lying during a federal background check is ... dangerous, to say the least. Remember, it's really hard to produce lies that stand up to repeated questioning, especially lies that span several people.
They don't have to detect it, they'll ask as part of the security interview. The interview is very thorough and requires to be completely transparent and truthful in the given answer. The worse that may come out is that you don't get hired (unless you confess to murder, maybe?). Lying, hiding facts or getting whatever kind of crafty to get hired will lead one to MUCH MUCH bigger trouble if/when it gets discovered later on. Think _treason_.
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.
> Lying, hiding facts or getting whatever kind of crafty to get hired will lead one to MUCH MUCH bigger trouble if/when it gets discovered later on. Think _treason_.
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.
I thought part of getting anything like a security clearance involves their interviewing people from your past. So all it takes is one of those people admitting they smoked pot with you under the bleachers in high school, for example.
It really depends on the level of security clearance, I think. I had a secret clearance years ago, and never heard from friends or acquaintances that anyone had asked about me.
I agree with this. I got a security clearance with the Canadian government, and the only way they could have interviewed my friends was to find them across EU and the world. They relied on police check, including federal, and fingerprints.
The investigation for S is pretty tame. But for TS they do a lot of interviews. I had a long conversation with an OPM investigator about one of my friends' past drug use (he got the clearance).
Great to see the government tackling those thorny, nuanced problems that threaten the livelihood, security, and future prospects of the average citizen.
Let me be the first to welcome people with more diverse substance abuse problems to our beloved secret police. My greatest regret is that I can only declare a mere hour of applause for their great personal sacrifices and worthily earned pensions.
Tbh, I kind of liked the idea that decriminalization and liberal attitudes were starving them for talent.
Spying prevents war. It's easier to get into a war if you don't really understand each other. Not to mention if you don't know who has missiles pointed at you.
Oh, man, is this what the future looks like? We provide the weapons, get other countries to do the fighting, wash our hands clean of the whole thing and call our global adventures not-wars as long as we can still buy gas and toilet paper? Somehow, this euphemistic imperialism of proxy wars feels even sketchier... at least the old empires were honest about their intent.
Today it's Ukraine, tomorrow Taiwan, and then what, back to the Koreas and the Middle East? Our constant involvement in cyclical non-wars sure doesn't feel the same as "peace" to me. Maybe that word just doesn't mean what I think it does anymore. Or maybe we have our tentacles in so many places that warmaking and peacemaking have become indistinguishable.
I guess as long as it's not Americans in body bags, we're in the clear? The world is our mercenary. But even that won't last long, I'm willing to bet. The world's not getting any stabler, and our competitors aren't just sitting idle.
You can call a spade a spade but if you did a hole with a backhoe that backhole doesn't magically become a spade.
I'm a bit confused on how you think the USA got Ukraine to do the fighting considering Russia invaded (did USA pay off Russia to invade?). But regardless, yes Ukraine is at war and USA is not. It's just like if I drove to the dry cleaners and had them wash something. I didn't wash it; I'm not a dry cleaner. Playing the dry cleaners money or etc doesn't change that fact.
> Our constant involvement in cyclical non-wars sure doesn't feel the same as "peace" to me. Maybe that word just doesn't mean what I think it does anymore
I mean my whole argument is that you're using war to describe something that isn't so I guess this makes two of us.
> Or maybe we have our tentacles in so many places that warmaking and peacemaking have become indistinguishable.
Yes, because the USA is not at war. Russia warmakes with Ukraine so Ru & UA are at war and efforts by other countries China/USA/etc would likely be peacemaking efforts because China/USA/etc aren't at war. If USA declared war on Russia then it'd be a warmaking effort.
> The world is our mercenary.
Which countries did the USA hire to fight another one? That's also a word not being used correctly.
This is needlessly pedantic. Technically, yes, the United States hasn't "Declared War" in the style of a president standing before congress making a speech. Instead, the country has been engaged in "police actions" authorized by congress, which (at least to me) is a distinction without much of a difference.
> No draft is required.
The draft was re-instituted during Vietnam, so the presence of selective service isn't an indicator for being "in a war". To this day every adult male of draftable age is only an itchy trigger finger away from being called up
> No war shortages exist.
the powers-that-be have been placing a good amount of blame for "supply chain issues" on the war in Ukraine. "Supply chain issues" being newspeak for "shortages".
A war shortage would be because we're using our resources to produce war equipment. We have chip shortages because Russia is attacking Ukraine so they can't export neon gas to chip fabs. That's not something we're doing.
And "supply chain issues" obviously aren't the same thing as "shortages"; a traffic jam at the port is a supply chain issue.
The US has had a heavy hand in this situation for a decade. You can argue that it's the right thing to do, but it's not like the US just got involved once Russia invaded.
> The US has had a heavy hand in this situation for a decade. You can argue that it's the right thing to do, but it's not like the US just got involved once Russia invaded.
It’s worth remembering that this war actually started close to a decade ago and not in 2022.
Based on that it does sound like the US got involved around the time Russia invaded.
If by that you mean Paul Manafort helped install a Russian puppet as president who was ousted by the Ukrainian people, then you could argue that, but Ukraine is a sovereign and has been since the 90s. Your argument is the same as Putin's, claiming it isn't an invasion because Ukraine is Russia's!
US weapons, US intel, US alliances and organizations... I doubt Russia looks at it and thinks "Oh, OK, the US is totally not involved. They're our friends!"
Even when we're not actively sending troops, we're busy making enemies for the next war...
they regularly declared the US was their primary enemy well before invading Ukraine, and actively leveraged aggressive information and political influence operations to destabilize the US
there is no "making enemies for the next war" -- they were always enemies
They've just off-shored the lives lost. It's not any different than off-shoring manufacturing and poisoning some third world country with the waste chemicals and runoff instead of the homeland.
If the Russians listened to American intelligence, or hell, their own intelligence instead of wishful thinking, they wouldn't be the second-best army in Ukraine right now.
The director of the CIA went to Moscow and tried to get the Russians to see sense. Ah well. I guess having intelligence is not the same as acting intelligently.
I'm saying spying doesn't really seem to prevent war in the modern era. When inconvenient, intelligence gets ignored. When it lines up with the party narrative, it gets exaggerated and used to fan the flames, then thrown back under the bus after the dust settles.
Meanwhile all that capability gets turned against us, surveilling US citizens instead.
Why specifically them? The article mentions the NSA as well, which has done its fair share of domestic spying. As a taxpayer, it doesn't really matter to me how those lines are drawn, how budget/intel/personnel flow between them, what they call a mass surveillance program in any given decade, etc. In my short life, they've failed to prevent an attack, failed to prevent two major wars of false pretenses, failed to foresee, much less prevent, a major Russian invasion...
Has the intelligence community, regardless of agency, actually prevented any recent wars? Or why do you believe that "spying prevents war"?
> failed to foresee, much less prevent, a major Russian invasion...
They absolutely did foresee it, we spent months announcing everything Russia was going to do before they did it. It's actually a brand new strategy Biden tried; usually we'd keep everything to ourself to protect how we got the info.
But it didn't prevent it because nothing would have except assassinating Putin. That would be pretty destabilizing too!
CIA said 4 days RUS will be in Kiev! Honestly, CIA has one of the worst human intel. My only hope is these pot-heads in their hope of scoring some weed would actually learn the local languages.
They did. The CIA in their NIE rated high confidence in the continued existence of Iraq's WMD program. 'High confidence' is intel speak for 'confident enough to go to war over'.
Not that I disagree but I'm definitely less hopeful. Maybe after a decade or two and a pot smoker has managed to make it to a decision-making role but I'm not holding my breath (pun definitely intended).
Er, it was never a strategy in the first place? Or this is just a joke? :)
But to be clear, law enforcement agents (all as far as I'm aware) are allowed to do illegal things to catch their mark. In the US at least, this is not entrapment unless they forcibly coerce you to do something you normally wouldn't; just smoking or snorting some stuff in a casual setting isn't enough, they'd have to have you more or less at gunpoint or threatening in another way to make you do it.
Just a very important fact for people to remember: Law enforcement agents in the US can and will lie frequently and do illegal things in pursuit of their goal.
Entrapment does not mean what most people think it does, so it's not good to rely on this, as entrapment has a very narrow legal definition far away from the layperson definition.
I'm not talking about law enforcement. Consider that many people on HN do work that the spooks would find "interesting" but would not be "illegal". As such, most of the intelligence community is not related to law enforcement. You might be surprised about just how many 3 and 4 letter agencies exist.
Er, it doesn't matter though :) Federal "spook" agencies do the same thing and are equally above the law. You can't know really if your past business partners joined you for a fun evening just because or if their multi-letter work places got all the forms in order for them to do "whatever it takes" to catch you doing something illegal.
If your active threat scope involves governments, don't expect them to behave with regards to the laws where you are; either they don't care and will just deal with the fallout, or they have explicit approval do to illegal or wrong things.
I don't have an answer on how to check for spooks, I guess you'd have to do reverse reconnaissance, but I have no idea how feasible it is. But testing legal and social norms is not reliable; governments are not really bound by their own rules, especially when it comes to branches dealing with security or intelligence.
Being serious, I think this is the correct take. There's a lot of in misinformation about outing undercover cops, most famously the mistaken belief that cops can't lie about not being a cop. Regardless, from my experience on a federal grand jury that almost exclusively dealt with drug cases, the cops just get someone in your group to flip, and possibly wear a wire.
Bonus: Hanging up a sheet between the kitchen and the living room when you cook meth, isn't enough to protect the people in the living room from catching a case of Conspiracy to Manufacture.
The US government has never had a policy against recruiting drug users as intelligence field agents. Just because they aren't public servants doesn't mean they're not snitches.
It took me a minute to get the semantic distinction here.
People directly working for a government intelligence agency, in the sense of drawing a regular salary, receiving benefits like a pension plan, and probably enjoying the protection of some sort of cover (like attache for cultural affairs at the embassy) are "operatives" or "officers."
"Agents" are people in the foreign country whom the officers convince to provide information or services for them.
Aldrich Ames, for example, was an "officer" in the CIA, working for the US, but also an "agent" of the KGB, working for the Soviets.
So, to return to the article, the US government never had a problem hiring drug users as "agents," but would not hire them as "officers."
I don't even worry as much about field agents. Analysts (i.e. Snowden types) outnumber them significantly and are more likely to be the ones "checking up" on the kinds of people who post here.
I'd be shocked if there weren't a bunch of people who work for one intelligence agency or another and who read or post here for reasons not connected to their official duties.
“your stoner friends”, lol, where are people like you still found?
In California, and the entire West Coast, recreational use of marijuana is as normal as alcohol use.
People that use substances are different than those that abuse substances, and yet you are
conflating the two.
“Senate lets people that have had a drink before work at Intelligence agencies” “my alcoholic friends working as spooks would be a threat to national security”
While I agree with your general point, recall that DC is on the East Coast, and that there recreational marijuana use isn’t nearly so culturally accepted as it is on the West.
consensus on the floor was pretty much unanimous this year, while the committee vote was party line, it got out and everyone else is like “yeah we agree”
“As more states legalize cannabis, it becomes less and less tenable to deny security clearances to those who have used it,” Wyden said in remarks inserted into the report. “The amendment…will help the Intelligence Community recruit the qualified personnel needed to protect the country.”
There's a difference between a person who uses weed for fun, and a "stoner" which is closer to a functioning addict. A person who takes a toke every other night "to calm down" probably isn't a stoner. The guy who has to puff before work because he doesn't function otherwise is a stoner.
As I understand it the drug use screening in a security clearance isn't so much because the government are squares but it's that illegal drug use is something that could be used to blackmail you. The worry is if the KGB learns about your cocaine habit they could confront you and demand you work for them as a double agent or they'll expose your illegal activities and ruin your life.
Work as a double agent then: make the FSB think they got you and feed them false information. Your own service obviously has to keep a no-drugs policy front to make your situation more legit.
When it comes to cannabis, that obviously isn't much of a factor. How the hell could someone be blackmailed over weed? Most people that use, don't care who knows, certainly not enough to literally commit treason to your country to hide it. I think the major problem is just in principle: it's federally illegal so if you use it you are a criminal thus can't hold clearance
> How the hell could someone be blackmailed over weed?
Legal in your state, eh who cares.
Working for FBI/CIA/NSA.. most people don't care for state level repercussions. But KGB threatens (oh they would for funsies) to reach over to talk to CIA that you're in violatoin.. bang loss of job, questioning of your prior work, legal consequences (you lied to get the job), etc...
It being federally illegal and something you're prohibited from doing while employed with the federal government means it's at least usable as a mild form of blackmail/leverage if they have evidence you currently use it.
Current use = you're fired + lose your security clearance.
Sure, I don't think most people are going to pick "here's the nuclear codes Mr. KGB agent, just don't tell them about the weed!", but it's enough of an opening to convince some people to divulge some information that they shouldn't.
Add on a few more vulnerabilities - maybe they're struggling a little financially and their job skills don't translate well outside their current government role, and just the threat to their job security can be something significant.
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Obviously, federal legalization would basically solve this issue.
I could imagine it would have been a problem many decades ago in the past when social norms were different. But yep, nowadays it's really no big deal and pretty normalized.
This justification only works if candidates lie about their drug use (which they might do if you disqualify on it). If they are honest about it there is nothing to blackmail them with. IE. this is a bullshit, circular justification.
It's not just blackmail. There's also the fear that addiction to expensive controlled substances will lead to money problems, and thus the desire to sell some of the valuable secrets you have.
One of the questions they ask is on alcohol (also with gambling): Have you ever suffered financial consequences as a result of your drinking.
Being super honest I answered: Yes, I spend more money than I plan on when going out frequently. (Limiting to 20$ of drinks, and it ends up being 25..this was more than a decade ago and I was fresh out of school)
Financial consequences is so vague. Of course I suffered "financial consequences", I had to give them money in exchange for my drink in the first place! Of course they mean severe repercussions, but the way it's worded it, I just had to say yes.
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.