> It's amazing how some people will risk their job, their clearance, and potentially their freedom, just to impress some random dudes online for a few minutes.

Maybe they just feel alone, depressed, underappreciated and like nobody cares about them?

Revealing it to total strangers somewhat obscures potential negative impact, while still getting them to feel important for a day.

As a formerly alone, depressed, underappreciated TS clearance holder who nobody cared about, there was never a moment in my life where telling classified information to the public ever seemed like anything other than a first class ticket to a tremendous amount of misery.

I only speak for myself, and I no longer have a clearance. But the idea that depression excuses disclosure of classified information... that's not how depression works. That's not how clearances work. It's anathema to me. If depression is an excuse for disclosing classified information, then depression is cause for denying a person a clearance. It is cause for revoking a clearance from a person who seeks mental health assistance. No thank you. It is much better to prosecute depressed people who violate their clearance agreements and to continue to permit depressed people to gain clearances than it is deny a clearance from every depressed person.

I support giving clearances to depressed people, and I support sending depressed people who violate their clearance agreements to prison.

No one was saying depression was a valid excuse for the behavior, just a reason someone might do it. Attempting to understand a motivation doesn't automatically mean excusing it.

"I support giving clearances to depressed people, and I support sending depressed people who violate their clearance agreements to prison."

I see your point, in not trying to worsen things for depressed people - but don't you think on a general base, a mentally unstable person is more liklely to disclose something? And when you are really, deeply depressed - you don't care about anything anymore, except if it makes you feel better in that moment.

I don't think you should make prejudiced generalisations or finger in the air guesses about how depression affects people's behavior.

Well, maybe I do not make finger in the air guesses, but know something about the subject?

My good sir. I presume that you don't mean to be offensive, and I am not the kind of person that is offended by unintentional gaffs, but let me clarify for you why your line of speaking, is, in fact offensive.

First, reread everything that you wrote, and substitute "depressed person" for some racial minority. Most of what you have said is still valid and there is a possibility that it is even true. However, you must see that this would be so offensive that your post would be flagged.

Instead of fostering predjudice against people of a racial minority, you are (probably unintentionally) fostering predjudice against people with mental health problems. Do you not see why this is offensive?

Mental health problems, as said, is not a race. And not everything is prejudice. Racism is supposed to be prejudice because "You can't say there's causal relationship between the race and another specific trait". It is prejudice because it is deemed IRRATIONAL i.e. logical conclusions involving race fail at their very foundational base, race, and are thus logically incorrect. Mental instability though? It is the trait itself. It IS a valid base for logical conclusions regarding the human affected by one. You can claim one does not know enough of a mental illness to make conclusions for one's behavior. But one who does know, can then judge (not pre-judge) accordingly, and logic and truth are by definition not offensive.

Erm no. Not everything is racism.

Lack of caring for elemental things, including life, is a common trait of depression, not race.

But I did not say, depressed people should not have any clearance. I say, mentally not stable persons can simply not be trusted with every tasks. No generalisation. It depends on the task. So I doubt, you would offer the guarding of the red button for example, a suicidal person. And deep depression, is mostly combined with suicidal thoughts. There was a pilot some years ago, piloting a full plane to join him along his suicide. So much for extreme examples.

And as for the secret new release of the hot new game console x? I don't care about their security. But I see, that companies would want stable persons there, too.

My guess is that it's merely the common human trait of valuing immediate emotional desire over the intellectual knowledge of future consequences. People do it all the time when they eat, cheat on their spouses, press the snooze button, drink, or spend time posting on Hacker News.

You assume all choices are rational and wilful

Perhaps I miscommunicated? I'm saying it's often emotional. But yes, you make a choice - not a carefully examined, systematic one, but you make a choice to hit snooze, commit adultery, etc.

It begs the inclusion of "How much time do you spend online? And how much do you value the opinions of online communities?" as security clearance questions. Are they, now?

Historically, they'd be very interested in what you'd say to your friends, family, etc. But the allure of internet fame would seem to have a more pursuasive effect.

If you read some historical accounts of spies, I think you'll notice there is already a massive ego/excitement boost to be had, without involving Internet fame... It's not ay l clear whether online activity would move the needle, in terms of predicting leakers.

But more importantly... Participating in online communities, and caring about one's online presence, is statistically normal behavior for working-age people in first world countries with Internet access... Moreso the younger you get. But the point is, it's massively normal behavior.

So if you tried to use your questions to predict potential leakers, you're just playing the "Most serial killers eat bread" game.

In order for your question to be a useful predictor, it would have to have low rates of both false positives, and false negatives. That doesn't seem very likely.

> "And how much do you value the opinions of online communities?"

Seems a more difficult question, but a more indicative one, which is why I included it.

Per my experience, you can easily find individuals who spend similar amounts of clock time in online communities, but are very different in how much the community can influence them.

F.ex. HN could offer me dang's karma count, and I wouldn't feel any compulsion to leak classified information here.

> Are they, now?

They're not included in Standard Form 86, latest revision November 2016: https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf

That's not to say it's excluded from polygraph questions; I can imagine a world where online associations are very relevant to an agency in need of a CI or full scope poly for compartment access.

SF-86 doesn’t ask any questions like this. They’ll send out agents to collect more in-depth questions that may probe situations like this. They’ll also ask friends, neighbors, family etc about all sorts of things. This isn’t really the kind of question a self-reported form can answer (except for the most obvious questions like debt problems). It takes a human who can synthesize various statements to get pictures like “this person could be blackmailed” or “this person can’t keep a secret.”

Wait. Some people still get put through a complete nonsense pseudoscience polygraph test for clearance?

It’s a polite way of saying that you’ll be randomly interrogated.

It’s like the FAANG interview process. Everyone knows it’s suboptimal, but nobody knows how to do better at that scale.

Close.

It's similar because there are lots of false negatives, but few false positives.

My understanding is that it's used as an "interrogation" technique and that they don't really care what the machine tells them.

They do, I had a clearance rejected because the examiner was convinced I had previous involvement in drug manufacturing. I don’t. I’ve never even used them. Hell, I barely drink. I ended up getting a much better non-clearance job offer elsewhere so it didn’t ultimately negatively affect my career, but it’s still irritating.

It’s a standard practice for a tier of Top Secret security clearance.

Is this a rhetorical question?

And of course your family gets checked too like for the anti-bribery check. E.g. how likely is it that your siblings can cause you to get bribed. Had a few of those as a sibling

It's a good reminder to be realistic about our security models. People sometimes do things without thinking them through that clearly (or they just think very differently than you might hope).

An intelligence agency get more intel per dollar spent goading active duty people into revealing military secrets on obscure forums than you do with traditional bribery.

Source on the intelligence agency thing? Sounds really interesting

If it would be real information, he would leak classified information, to boost his importance, too ...

Reminds me of the Google SRE who got literally frog-marched out of the Kirkland office for reading the messages of a female acquaintance. He got busted, because creep that he was, he tried to impress her by revealing that he did. And the Internet never forgets[1]. Persons, especially young persons, really need to be cautioned about the stupidity and consequences of this kind of behavior.

[1] https://www.ecampusnews.com/2010/09/15/google-engineer-fired...

How did he think that conversation would go?

Option 1, he thought he was some cassanova and that she'd be impressed by the effort he put into stalking her. Women who fall for this... exist, but not without significant childhood trauma. The relationships (two) I've seen form under such conditions have been passionate, short-lived, abusive, and eventually involve the police.

Option 2, he has a humiliation/degradation kink and got exactly what he wanted.

Folk like that always see themselves the hero.

Getting a date and maybe more later?

Hey, not just "impress", that's tons of upvotes!

Upvotes have limited utility for an account that stands a good chance of being deleted.

We'll always have the screenshot

wouldn't being in possession of the screen shot be evidence?

Of course. My point is the mind of the actor is like "hurr durr, I did it for the lulz"

In really important environments, just the last part is good enough to be useful to an adversary. Someone now knows you know something and all they need is the leverage. Go with “no idea”

The only upside to anything more than that is to impress or feel important.