Government workers- Have you been spied on or harassed because you have a security clearance?

[eureka1]

Originally Posted by John7777

The government has more to do than harass land spy on people with security clearances. That's probably the stupidest thing I've heard all day.

Absolutely.

[Ralph_Kirk]

Originally Posted by Zaba

The "they have better stuff to do" narrative has consistently proven to be false basically every time its ever cited to explain away someone perceived to be 'paranoid'.

With 100% consistency, it will eventually be shown that while they may have had 'better stuff to be doing' in theory, they were nevertheless doing exactly what they were accused of doing in terms of surveiling people.

Not really. It's the same thing I mentioned above: Everything you do on a digital network--obviously internet but also most voice traffic--is recorded somewhere and is ultimately traceable. That does not mean anyone is monitoring you. It doesn't even mean anyone will ever monitor you. Nobody at NSA was ever routinely going through everyone's voice and email traffic. It was collected raw data on hard drives.

Take Google Earth as an example. Google's got a picture of your house and your workplace on their hard drives somewhere. But unless someone puts together a file on you and puts the image of your house in it--or electronically connects the two--that image is just data on a hard drive. It's not a record of you, and nobody is routinely examining every image of every house on those hard drives.

For that matter, the government has also imaged your house at some point in time (since it was made legal by a Reagan excutive order for the Intelligence Community to do that), and that imagery is just sitting on CIA hard drives.

[Northern Maine Land Man]

My best friend has numerous patents in the nuclear industry. Every couple of years I used to get a call with numerous personal questions about my friend. He's a good guy.

"How long have you known him?"

"54 years."

"54 years?"

"Well, 54 years and seven months."

Stunned silence. Maybe they don't have a block on their form for 54 years. Maybe the interviewer was trying to decide whether to round up to 55 years.

[MmeZeeZee]

Originally Posted by Know Nonsense

What do you think about someone who has a security clearance who insists their phones are tapped and they are constantly being harassed for no reason? Have you known someone or experienced this? Eavesdropping, bugs, harassment, lack of privacy etc. Is this stuff real? Do they have nothing better to do to people that are harmless? Is it just paranoia?

I understand you may be hesitant to answer if you know something.

Aren't all the phones tapped? Bugs--meh, I don't think about it but I would not be shocked to find them in every public place. Lack of privacy? Are you kidding? What privacy? I don't have security clearance but I know that my background check has been done thoroughly by the government, for a variety of reasons (work-travel related, not criminal). "They" certainly read this. I know they must be keeping tabs because I have traveled to some bizarre places and I never get asked questions at the airport. I figure it's because they already know. No big deal. Edit: this does not mean they have someone assigned to do nothing but look at what I do. I just mean, it's all in some big database somewhere.

But harassment is a different story. Why would anybody harass someone with security clearance? You don't get clearance easily. They interview your whole family, they do extensive psychological tests. Afterwards there's no harassment going on.

If someone is making paranoid claims, I have doubts about her/him actually having passed security clearance.

[Know Nonsense]

There should be a sanity test before they hire some of these people. It goes to show all the background checking and references in the world don't always mean the subject is all there or fit to be hired for those types of jobs. The unions are their security blankets. All the wasted effort, time and money to hire incompetent crazy people and then all the wasted time and money on the witch hunts. Apparently some are really witches too.

It all equals one big waste, but hey that is govt. intelligence and efficiency for the most part. Whole system needs an overhaul IMO. It's a racket and I don't care what they think of my opinion.