Security Clearance Jobs Blog

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) recently obtained information under the Freedom of Information Act regarding a June 2009 report of a study sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on the use of Cyber Vetting for security clearance purposes. The study involved 349 test cases of intelligence agency applicants who consented to participating in the study and found “adverse information” on 28% of the cases. Adverse information was defined as:

Deliberate and overly descriptive posting of personal and/or work related information on public forums. This includes information about the subject’s specific work assignment, including listing descriptive information about colleagues and/or work site. Adverse classifications were also applied when references were found indicating illegal drug use or pictures appearing to show the subject engaged in illegal drug use.”

ODNI indicated that this was not a detailed study and that it would not be used to suggest modifications to existing investigative standards. “It is simply an initial approach to increase our knowledge and awareness of what types of information are posted in these sites so that educated decisions can be made regarding any future research. . . . If the results of the survey are suggestive and justify further work, the [ODNI] Special Security Center will commence design of a formal research project which will include thorough legal vetting.”

The study recommended the use of internet research, including media, blog, social networking, and professional networking sites as an adjunct to standard security clearance investigations.

Shortly after the statement of work for this study was issue in June 2008, ODNI decided more comprehensive studies were needed. In late summer 2008 ODNI issued RFPs for 2 additional studies with a total price of about $800,000.  EFF is pursuing other documents related to the governments use of the internet for investigative purposes and may possibly obtain a copy of the two later studies.

ODNI has stated that:

From the perspective of personnel security, cyber-behavior represents an emerging area of behavior that should be considered as an important part of the adjudication process for granting security clearances for personnel working in national security positions. To address these challenges, adjudication policies must be modernized to incorporate a better understanding of the type and frequency of personnel IT activities. This necessitates identifying which specific cyber-behaviors are normative, acceptable, or favorable as well as identifying those that may be associated with risky or problematic cyber behavior within the workplace.

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An article in USA Today says more state and local law enforcement officers are getting top secret clearances from the FBI to access sensitive federal information in terrorism cases than at anytime since 9/11.

Clearances granted to members of the FBI’s network of regional terrorism task forces jumped to 878 in 2009, up from 125 in 2007…Since 2001, the number of terrorism units, which draw on federal, state and local investigators, have grown from 35 to 104 nationwide. The units are staffed with 4,433 officers and agents, up from 912 in 2001, FBI spokesman Bill Carter told USA Today.

The FBI is launching an effort to declassify information that can be shared with more local investigators.  “Trying to get everybody into the clearance arena is not the solution,” FBI Assistant Director Ronald Ruecker reported to USA Today.

After 9/11, the FBI established the State and Local Law Enforcement Executives and Elected Officials Security Clearance Initiative. This program was initiated to brief officials with an established “need-to-know” on classified information that would or could affect their area of jurisdiction.

For more information see FBI Process for State and Local Law Enforcement | Brochure [pdf]

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While lying on a job application has its repercussions, a young Michigan man found that lying on a CIA job application landed him in jail.

The Washington Post reported that Glenn Duffie Shriver, 28, was arrested on June 22 for lying on his CIA job application about his work with Chinese intelligence that netted him $70,000. He now faces five counts of making false statements that could land him a maximum of five years in prison, if convicted.

Federal prosecutors allege Shriver met repeatedly with foreign intelligence officers and traveled to China in 2007.

Shriver’s mother, Karen Chavez, told a Detroit television station that Shriver moved to China for work during a SARS outbreak. He later moved to South Korea for a job teaching English.

Shriver was arrested at Detroit Metro Airport while attempting to fly back to South Korea.

Shriver is one of more than 40 suspected Chinese agents in the U.S. who have been arrested and prosecuted for espionage-related charges over the past two years. The number of prosecuted Chinese spies is much higher than the 10 Russian spies discovered recently.

“In recent years, the Justice Department has handled an increasing number of prosecutions involving sensitive American weapons technology, trade secrets and other restricted information bound for China,” said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s National Security Division to the Washington Post.

The Justice Department had convicted 44 individuals in 26 cases since March 2008, almost all of whom are now serving time in federal prisons Boyd revealed to the Washington Post.

Last February, a Chinese-born engineer was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for hoarding sensitive information about the U.S. space shuttle that prosecutors say he intended to share with China.

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Our popular ongoing series allows you to ask your most complex questions regarding security clearances and our regular contributors of present and former clearance investigators and adjudicators will try to answer them. The rules are listed below. Failure to abide by them will mean your question will be deleted.

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• Employment Suitability Versus Security Clearance
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• Drug Involvement and Security Clearances
• Rebutting and Appealing Security Clearance Denials
• Alcohol Consumption and Security Clearances
• Personal Finances and Security Clearances

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An article in the Washington Post reported that Altegrity, a privately held Falls Church, VA company that provides security/screening services, will buy Kroll from Marsh & McLennan Cos. for $1.13 billion in cash.

Altegrity was started in 1996 when the federal government privatized the investigative branch of the Office of Personnel Management. The company began with 600 employees and was originally called U.S. Investigations Services. Among its first contract work were security clearance background investigations. It has grown to 8,000 employees across the U.S.

Altegrity does a range of contract work, mostly for the federal government, including security clearance investigations for the U.S. government and training and consulting for police departments in such places as Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq and Pakistan.

Kroll performs corporate investigations and security business and has 3,000 employees in 55 cities around the world.  The deal for Kroll is expected to close in September.  Altegrity’s CEO served as Kroll’s CEO from 2001 to 2004.  The deal is expected to allow Altegrity to better compete against defense contractors on government service contracts.

Related articles:  Investigators Consider Using Smartphones | USIS Hiring 200 Investigators

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At first, it looked like 62 workers at Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS)’s military payroll accounting facility in Cleveland, Ohio would lose their jobs due to credit problems. In the past, other DFAS workers in Columbus and Indianapolis had lost jobs because of credit issues.  The Cleveland facility processes pay for active Navy personnel, military retirees, and government officials, including the President.

After some lobbying by local members of Congress, an article in The Plain Dealer explains what happened next…

“The Defense Finance and Accounting Service has agreed to suspend a controversial policy of firing workers for credit reasons while it reviews whether it was necessary to upgrade their security clearances in 2005. The announcement gives a temporary reprieve to 47 workers who were about to lose their jobs.”

“DFAS spokesman Tom LaRock said that since 2001, 54 employees from all DFAS offices have been terminated for not being able to obtain a favorable background clearance…All DFAS positions are classified as sensitive, LaRock said. Because they process people’s pay, employees have access to social security numbers, bank accounts and other sensitive information, he said.”

“It is not top secret or confidential,” he said. “It is considered a background clearance.”

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The U.S. State Department is investigating an employee with top-secret security clearance who government investigators say mishandled classified information related to national security, according to an article on FoxNews.com.

“Eugene Reginald Hopson, a 30-year veteran of the State Department, described as an information management officer, oversaw the handling and security of classified information in U.S. embassies.

He was stripped of his security clearance and ordered back to Washington in October after 12 years overseas when State Department special agents found he had unauthorized possession of classified materials, according to an affidavit filed in the case.

A January search of his household belongings yielded five U.S. diplomatic passports, one Bolivian passport and evidence of bank accounts in Honduras, Italy and the Cayman Islands, search warrants show.”

The article goes on to state that The State Department confirmed that an investigation is underway, however, no charges have been filed. There are two laws that he possibly violated, one prohibiting “unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents” and the other on “gross negligence”, allowing classified information to be removed from its “proper place of custody“.

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A February 17, 2010 article at Government Computer News reported that:

“The Homeland Security Department is nearly three years behind in getting Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards for its employees and contractors, according to a new report from DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner.”

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (August 2004), Policy for a Common Identification Standard for Federal Employees and Contractors, mandated that federal agencies issue secure federal ID cards by October 2008. As of September 2009, only 15,567, of the approximately 250,000 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees and contractors, had been issued PIV cards. The January 2010 DHS Inspector General’s report outlined 15 recommendations to improve the department’s implementation of HSPD-12.

Other federal agencies have also had problems implementing the PIV card requirement.  According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as of December 2009 only a handful of federal agencies had met the October 2008 PIV card implementation requirements of OMB Memorandum M-05-24. A February 2008 article at nextgov.com provides a good overview of the program and its problems.

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The AP reports:

The government accused Dongfan “Greg” Chung, a stress analyst with high-level clearance, of using his 30-year career at Boeing and Rockwell International to steal the documents. They said investigators found papers stacked throughout Chung’s house that included sensitive information about a booster rocket fueling system — documents that employees were ordered to lock away at the end of each day. They said Boeing invested $50 million in the technology over a five-year period.

In his ruling, Carney [the judge] wrote that the notion that Chung was merely a pack rat was “ludicrous” and said the evidence showed that he had been passing information to Chinese officials as a spy.

Chung worked for Rockwell until it was bought by Boeing in 1996. He stayed with the company until he was laid off in 2002, then was brought back a year later as a consultant. He was fired when the FBI began its investigation in 2006.

To no ones surprise, China has denied any involvement.   It’s worth noting that this case came about while investigators were looking into another suspected Chinese spy.

Of course, this is just one way to spy – another, bigger,  growing problem exists.

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An article in POLITICO this morning is an interesting tale. Apparently, the CIA is offering their operatives to the private sector.  The work they perform is not on “government time”, but as a side gig.   When I first saw this story, I thought it would be agents consulting along the lines of  corporate physical security or cybersecurity.   In fact, they’re working for Wall Street firms.

The CIA defends the practice as a type of talent retention program, where highly trained CIA officers can supplement their government salary without leaving the agency for the private sector, where they stand to earn 2x to 3x their current salary. POLITICO describes the work of one such firm used by Wall Street firms.

“The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.”

The tactics that BIA officials such as these teach hedge fund clients are based in a program it calls “Tactical Behavior Assessment” which focuses on the verbal and nonverbal cues that people convey when they aren’t telling the truth.

Often, BIA deploys its CIA-trained operatives to analyze quarterly corporate-earnings calls…and BIA uses them to figure out if the company may not be disclosing the truth…The information they gleaned from this phone call could be worth millions of dollars.”

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On December 7, 2009 Psnews reported that the Government of Australian will consolidate the granting of all security clearances under their Department of Defence by October 2010. Currently clearances are granted by more than 100 different agencies using 50 separate investigative service providers.

“The new approach is expected to save $5.3 million a year and improve the security vetting process by ensuring Public Servants and business contractors have a single clearance effective across Government.  It was also designed to address unnecessary regulation and remove inconsistencies within the current system.”

Australia only processes about 50,000 federal security clearances a year (about 6% of the number processed in the U.S.), but it’s still commendable that government agencies there are wililng to surrender authority for their own security clearances to a single agency in order to create a monolithic system that promises greater efficiency and consistency.

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Over at the Newsweek blog, Declassified, Mark Hosenball explored the recent events at Fort Hood and the role the security-clearance procedures played or didn’t play.

According to Wayne Hall, a spokesman at Army HQ at the Pentagon, everyone who receives a commission as a U.S. Army officer has to undergo a security investigation, which qualifies him or her, at a minimum, to handle information classified secret…he said standard practice is that officers normally have to receive their secret clearance before they are formally commissioned, and that sometimes commissions are held up pending the successful conclusion of the security check.  At this point there is no reason to believe that Hasan had anything higher than the standard secret clearance required by all officers at his level.

The background investigation of the shooter will likely come under some scrutiny as the investigations proceed.

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Secretary Gates said the “freedom of communication and the nature of it is a huge strategic asset for the United States…there are clearly a number of governments, around the world, that try to control these communications…but these governments “can’t draw the net tight enough to stop everything”…

However, the DOD also warns against the dark side of social networking as well. The problem is not so much people twittering away secrets as letting slip many smaller pieces of information that an adversary can piece together.

Where’s the middle ground? What precautions do you take?

Update:  Just today, a Washington Post article points out that even the super-secret National Security Agency is on Facebook.  Not only the NSA, but the CIA, FBI, and DIA.

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Per this new article on Wired, the CIA is using its relationship with In-Q-Tel to buy into a company called Visible Technologies. Visible Technologies is a software company that specializes in monitoring the social web, including Twitter, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and others.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Good idea? We think so. The ability to communicate quickly via social networks is no doubt an attractive prospect to terrorists. By compiling data, seeing trends, and possibly getting early warnings, the U.S. intelligence community is smart to jump into this game early.

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When your job responsibilities include overseeing nearly $1 billion in research for the Missile Defense Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and other intelligence agencies, the chances are you’re going to need security clearance to get a peek inside.

The Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University is overseen by the University’s President, Ronald Daniels, who is Canadian.

The article in the Baltimore Sun went on to say that the University had to use some creative thinking to keep the Lab’s government funding; with the creation of a Limited Liability Corp. (LLC) and the university’s board of trustees chairman overseeing the Lab.

Related Article:  Foreign Influence and Security Clearances

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