Background Check

How time flies. It was only a year ago that Saddam was found in his spider hole. He has been questioned regularly ever since, just like a government worker or a Defense contractor.

If you haven’t had a polygraph lately, you ought to try one. Like It is a marvelously clarifying experience. You get tightly cuffed around the rib cage and have a chance to think over all the failings in your life, all the moral ambiguities and answer to them, yes or no.

Not everyone has to be put on the box, of course. But the problem is that if you are good at what you do in the shadow world, you are going to have a rendezvous with the box, and the young person with the clipboard that will determine whether you walk out of the airless room with permission to know the nation’s most sensitive secrets, or being escorted down to personnel to pick up your severance check.

The process is so unpleasant and subjective that Secretary of State George Schultz once told the investigators to go stuff themselves. He was not going to answer any stupid questions about his loyalty. You could hear the cheering from the Foggy Bottom workforce all the way across the Potomac at the Pentagon.

But it depends where you work. They actually do polygraph everyone who wants to work at the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Both have different standards and questions. The polygraph that the Department of Defense uses isn’t stringent enough for them. DoD just wants the answers to a few key questions. I remember what they are.

”Are you a Spy? Ever disclosed classified information to anyone not entitled to get it? Ever mishandle classified information? Did you ever sabotage government property?”

The DoD poly is called a ”counter-intelligence” examination. They pointedly do not cross the ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell” line, for political reasons, and matters pertaining to testosterone or estrogen are off limits as well. But to keep you on your toes, they cheerfully tell you that everything you say is being recorded, and should you disclose any criminal activity it can be used against you in a court of law.

While the DoD exam is limited in scope, it is unpleasant enough. It is sort of like a deposition with the ex’s attorney. The examiner still has to ask a bunch of questions to calibrate the machine to ensure that you are ”truthful.” Part of that regimen can include getting a rise out of you, see how emotion makes the lines squiggle on the box. I hate it. I was told sternly not to schedule my examination in the afternoon at my last session on the box. The examiner was having a hard time telling if I was awake.

The CIA and the NSA witch-doctors are permitted to conduct what they call the ”full scope” poly, by which they can ask you anything. I know folks who went to their exams, nice people, some of them, who suddenly departed to ”follow other career opportunities.” The poly at the two agencies is a sort of star chamber procedure. And of course the examination at one is not the same as it is at the other.

That is just one of the problems in the security clearance mess. The clearance issue plagues all levels of the Defense and Homeland Security structure, from the super-secret spooks down to the people in the mail room at the Center for Disease Control. There must be a million people who are required to be investigated to hold a Government clearance, maybe more. The mechanism to do that is hopelessly fragmented and behind on the case-load. It got much worse after 9-11.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a long section in the Intelligence Reform bill devoted to the issue. The language directs the President to pick one agency to supervise the clearance process. He has ninety days to pick the lucky winner. In addition to keeping watch over day-to-day clearance investigations and adjudications and mediating disputes that arise, that agency will be responsible for standardizing clearance application procedures and policies across the government.

Considering the different requirements of the Departments, Agencies and Offices, this is going to be quite entertaining. I had the chance to hear the Chief Security Officer of Microsoft talk about how they protected the source-code of the Windows Operating System. He doesn’t have a government clearance, but keeping his business secret is at least as important to his company as protecting nuclear weapons is to the military.

His work force couldn’t possibly pass a security check, since it is deployed around the world, and most of his smartest workers aren’t US citizens. He said the tried something new. They didn’t try to check everything the workers had ever done, rather, they monitored what those people did when they were working; who handled what, when they handled it, and what they did with it.

That is a scary concept for Government Workers, since we are not completely sure what we do when we are working. Some call the term ”Government Worker” an oxymoron. That is completely unfair to the ten percent of the people who do all the work.

The concept seems to work pretty well for Microsoft. After he finished speaking a couple earnest Government employees came on the stage to talk about what they were doing, and why the Government couldn’t even track who had clearances, much less have a central data-base on who was cleared for what. They couldn’t seem to get out of the Cold War mindset. It was night and day. Microsoft took the world as it is, filled with talented people from a diverse world, and holding them accountable for what they do.

The Government can’t quite get its arms around that concept. We want to know everything about our potential workers, and have separate investigative agencies to do it with different standards. They include the Office of Personnel Management, Defense Security Service, the Central Intelligence Agency, FBI and National Security Agency.

When they last held hearings on the matter back in May, Pentagon officials said there were 188,000 contractors waiting for personnel investigators to make a decision on their security clearances. They could not provide a firm number of Pentagon employees who are awaiting clearances. A spokeswoman for the Defense Security Service, which conducts background checks of Pentagon applicants, said there are 70,000 cases waiting investigation from 2004, and more than 50,000 unfinished cases from 2003.

The Office of Personnel Management also conducts security clearance investigations for the Defense Department; they were permitted to use private contractors to conduct them and hence could hold them accountable. OPM is responsible for clearances in places like the Department of Health and Human Services, which never needed them before, and the Department of Homeland Security, which didn’t exist.

My level-six badge from one agency doesn’t work elsewhere. Last Friday we had a goat-rope just trying to talk to a Government official. There were three of us. I had a Level-six badge from the Agency’s other location, which wasn’t recognized at this place, so I had nothing. Steve Canyon had Top Secret clearance, and thus had to be escorted, and Clyde had sent a separate message and was deemed to be OK. Since we were only certified for Top Secret, we could not be allowed to go to the bathroom by ourselves inside the facility.

Which is OK by me, but how come the Government spend the money to investigate us, polygraph us, badge us, and then not recognize that they did it? I have clearances on file at another couple Agencies, but I have to send them a message a few days before visiting to make sure I am not detained at the gate.

Doesn’t make much sense, but one gets used to the colossal inefficiency. It is all government time, after all. But it drives the contractors nuts. Time is money for us.

It gets worse. I have been investigated every five years since I started taking the Government nickel. That is five separate investigations to check if I am still a loyal American. The Government Accounting office made a study about how long it takes to do a background investigation for people joining the Government. Since 2001, the average time to determine clearance eligibility increased from two months to more than a year. You can Google it up if you want- It’s GAO Report 04-202T. It is not the first time. I remember when they had to stop doing periodic investigations back in 1981 because the system broke down.

Who can hang around for a year, waiting to find out if they are clearable? You can’t go on the payroll until the clearance is final. What are the engineers and prospective spies to do while they are waiting? Flip burgers? What are the contractors supposed to do? Hire someone to do a classified job and then have them reorganize the unclassified filing cabinet for a year? They would be out of business before the clearance was done.

The goal of the Reform Bill is to ensure that ninety percent of applications get adjudicated within sixty days after the paperwork is accepted. That includes forty days for the investigation and twenty days to decide whether to accept or reject the application.

The Reform Bill gives the President six months to tag one Agency with full responsibility. OPM is in the process of absorbing the Defense Security Service in February. I imagine that will be the solution, since that will put most of the manpower and authority in one place already. The move will involve the transfer of approximately 1,850 people and twenty DSS field offices.

OPM and DSS do business completely differently, though, so we shall see how that works out. They are only a quarter million investigations behind, after all.

There is a provision in the bill that forces agencies to recognize one another’s clearances. We tried this before, and it worked for a couple months. Maybe it will work longer this time. But I’m betting that NSA and CIA will hasten to point out that they have special requirements, and sadly, cannot comply.

Let’s see just how strong this new Director of National Intelligence is going to be. Will he be able to manage something as simple as who has a clearance?

I will have to have another poly at some point, and like a quarter million other folks, I am very interested to see if he can.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra

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