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.
lesuorac•42 minutes ago
> 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•22 minutes ago
> 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•1 minute ago
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.
albedoa•5 minutes ago
> 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.
moron4hire•about 1 hour ago
> 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.
heraldgeezer•about 1 hour ago
Are you saying weed should be punished less, or the others should be punished like weed?
c22•8 minutes ago
I'm not sure security clearance is really about punishing people.
heraldgeezer•7 minutes ago
You know exactly what I mean. Chased after, investigated?
drdaeman•30 minutes ago
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•6 minutes ago
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""".
This sounds a bit like Feynman. I wonder whether it was more the style of the time.
gwbas1c•about 1 hour ago
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•18 minutes ago
> 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.
godelski•about 1 hour ago
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•20 minutes ago
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.
boothby•about 2 hours ago
Boggles the mind that the advice from the security was to lie on the form, which is almost certainly a felony.
roughly•about 2 hours ago
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.
Dansvidania•about 2 hours ago
This is exactly why “automation” hasn’t taken _that_ many jobs. It is a totally overlooked detail. Thanks for the reminder.
threatofrain•about 2 hours ago
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.
Someone1234•about 2 hours ago
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.
master_crab•about 2 hours ago
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.
u1hcw9nx•about 2 hours ago
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•about 2 hours ago
> 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.
cs02rm0•about 2 hours ago
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.
binarymax•about 2 hours ago
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).
pbhjpbhj•about 2 hours ago
But they're required by laws of their own country to lie, presumably. There are certainly game-like aspects.
swiftcoder•about 2 hours ago
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•about 2 hours ago
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•39 minutes ago
Do you mean everyone who was 18 by 1989, or 55 today?
dcminter•about 2 hours ago
"Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage, or genocide?"
Quite.
alansaber•about 2 hours ago
Probably thought he was joking around. This was for a summer internship after all.
pbhjpbhj•about 2 hours ago
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.
threatofrain•about 2 hours ago
I think it is cultural to lie on security clearance, you just have to know which ones. If you autistically answer you're going to unnecessarily disadvantage yourself. Nobody else in the population is doing that.
alwa•about 3 hours ago
(1988) and real cute
From an OG computer scientist [0], about antics at age 12 which might strike some of us as familiar :)
He used to (maybe still does) have a page where he talked about turning down millions of dollars for it.
pousada•about 2 hours ago
See the link above.
He’s willing to part with it for 10 million
alansaber•about 2 hours ago
Almost as cool as owning ai.com!!
jsheard•about 2 hours ago
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•about 2 hours ago
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.
zarzavat•about 2 hours ago
> The real flex would be for AI.com to have nothing to do with AI whatsoever
Apple Intelligence?
avodonosov•about 2 hours ago
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)
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.
basilgohar•about 2 hours ago
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•about 2 hours ago
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.
tverbeure•about 2 hours ago
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.)
abeppu•about 3 hours ago
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.
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acehilm123456•about 2 hours ago
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!
lacoolj•about 3 hours ago
Wonder if author name is Alice
denotational•about 2 hours ago
> 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?
bombcar•about 3 hours ago
It's obvious the real spy was Bob.
forinti•about 2 hours ago
> 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 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.
tolerance•about 3 hours ago
> Pratt showed how to use letter frequencies to break ciphers and reported that the most frequently occurring letters in typical English text are e-t-a-o-n-r-i, in that order.
I use Dvorak. I tried Colemak first but couldn’t get in tune with it. I appreciate how the latter has all these keys in the home row but I feel like Dvorak feels more balanced between my hands. Colemak is supposed to roll or something right? I couldn’t get with that.
Discussion (72 Comments)
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.
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.
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.
Phishing is not the problem here. Your laptop isn’t getting SIPR emails with links to fake login screens.
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.
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.
It’s just “things aren’t right”, and not “here’s what we need to do…”
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-...
> 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.
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
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.
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.
The coverup is always worse than the original sin.
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.
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.
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.
Quite.
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.
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
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)
Also the server header is "lactoserv"
https://milk.com/faq/
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5526903/domain-name-val...
The real flex would be for AI.com to have nothing to do with AI whatsoever.
Really fascinating and quirky guy as you can probably infer from the site.
Apple Intelligence?
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.
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.
You can’t have it both ways… (not specifically directed at you.)
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.
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!
Presumably this is the famous (?) story of him listing his race as “mongrel” whenever asked?
I have to know this now...
I use Dvorak. I tried Colemak first but couldn’t get in tune with it. I appreciate how the latter has all these keys in the home row but I feel like Dvorak feels more balanced between my hands. Colemak is supposed to roll or something right? I couldn’t get with that.