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.
heraldgeezer 4 minutes ago [-]
Are you saying weed should be punished less, or the others should be punished like weed?
moron4hire 5 minutes 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.
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-...
boothby 1 hours ago [-]
Boggles the mind that the advice from the security was to lie on the form, which is almost certainly a felony.
roughly 1 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.
Someone1234 60 minutes 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.
iugtmkbdfil834 19 minutes ago [-]
Without going into details, just recently I was able to get pretty decent business requirements from group manager, but it seems the only reason I was able to get somewhat decent idea of what they actually do, is because there was certain level of trust since we worked together previously so there was no need to bs one another. I openly stated what I thought is doable and he seemed to understand that I need to know actual use cases.
edit: Otoh, my boss is kinda giving up on automating another group's process, because he seems to be getting a lot of 'it depends' answers.
Aurornis 13 minutes ago [-]
> how often the people that are being replaced are on the fly fixing the system the machine is intended to crystallize and automate.
If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.
I have some experience doing automation work in small and large scale factories. When automating manufacturing work you almost always discover some flaws in the product or process that humans have been covering up as part of their job. These problems surface during the automation phase and get prioritized for fixes.
You might think you could accomplish the same thing by directly asking the people doing the work what could be improved, but in my experience they either don’t notice it any more because it’s part of their job or, in extreme cases, they like that the inefficiency exists because they think it provides extra job security.
roughly 9 minutes ago [-]
> If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.
And the system is always broken. Reality is messy, systems are rigid, there always has to be a permissive layer somewhere in the interface.
This is exactly why “automation” hasn’t taken _that_ many jobs. It is a totally overlooked detail. Thanks for the reminder.
threatofrain 36 minutes 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.
reactordev 29 minutes ago [-]
I’m not so sure. They operate that way because of scale and economy (and tech that enables that). In a future where all industries are optimized in such way, very little will actually flow as most won’t have the money to buy goods, thus factories won’t make goods, thus shippers won’t ship, and the global economy grinds to a halt.
We need waste as much as we need investment. The trick is to find the value in between. I think the sweet spot will be augmenting work, not necessarily optimizing it.
htrp 32 minutes ago [-]
dark factory
bityard 35 minutes ago [-]
It's easy to pass judgement on a decision like that when so far removed from the context where/when it took place.
It's likely that answering yes to that question meant an instant rejection for the clearance AND summer job. The FBI was probably not inclined to spend money looking into such an obviously trivial matter just so some kid could get some work experience. "Sorry, try the McDonald's down the street."
That security officer did the author an incredibly big favor.
appplication 39 minutes ago [-]
When I joined the Air Force, they helped us fill out the clearance forms. One question was related to marijuana use in the past. The NCO helping us told us “if you have used it before, be honest. They will know.” But then followed it up with “remember: you used it less than 5 times and you didn’t like it”.
master_crab 1 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 1 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 1 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.
pluralfossum 8 minutes ago [-]
Mala in se vs. mala prohibita.
I don't think it's all that debatable to say that deceiving people is categorically wrong, nor is it to say that it's immoral not to follow the laws of the land -- both are obviously untrue as absolute statements.
For extreme examples, would it be immoral to lie to the Gestapo about harboring Jews? Were people illegally helping slaves escape the American South being immoral?
alansaber 1 hours ago [-]
Probably thought he was joking around. This was for a summer internship after all.
cs02rm0 57 minutes 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 52 minutes 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).
4gotunameagain 25 minutes ago [-]
Wouldn't they need the be able to prove that you are a spy in order to argue that you lied ? In which case who cares about the form ?
stnikolauswagne 14 minutes ago [-]
Thats why I presume its asking about previous engagements, if they catch someone they suspect of espionage, dig into their background and find proof of previous activity they have a clear fraud charge without having to prove their suspicions about current activities.
pbhjpbhj 55 minutes ago [-]
But they're required by laws of their own country to lie, presumably. There are certainly game-like aspects.
swiftcoder 51 minutes 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 41 minutes 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.
dcminter 54 minutes ago [-]
"Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage, or genocide?"
Quite.
pbhjpbhj 56 minutes 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.
1 hours ago [-]
xenocratus 26 minutes ago [-]
I mean, his name is Les Earnest, they should expect it.
alwa 2 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 :)
purple.com had a similar page for years, and eventually the mattress company rolled up with a dumptruck load of cash
qup 2 hours ago [-]
He used to (maybe still does) have a page where he talked about turning down millions of dollars for it.
pousada 1 hours ago [-]
See the link above.
He’s willing to part with it for 10 million
alansaber 1 hours ago [-]
Almost as cool as owning ai.com!!
jsheard 1 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 56 minutes 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.
jsheard 53 minutes ago [-]
Similarly, the guy who owned nissan.com never sold out and continues to spite Nissan Motors even in death.
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)
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 2 hours ago [-]
Wonder if author name is Alice
ctoth 4 minutes ago [-]
"Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?"
sargun 2 hours ago [-]
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.
topkai22 1 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.
basilgohar 1 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.
tverbeure 1 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 2 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.
crazygringo 51 minutes ago [-]
You think it was a waste of money to try to track down a cipher during World War II, when we'd been at war with Japan for over a year?
Remember, hindsight is always 20/20.
denotational 1 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 2 hours ago [-]
It's obvious the real spy was Bob.
forinti 1 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.
pixelsub 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
1 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 19:10:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
edit: Otoh, my boss is kinda giving up on automating another group's process, because he seems to be getting a lot of 'it depends' answers.
If the system is broken, this is actually a good thing.
I have some experience doing automation work in small and large scale factories. When automating manufacturing work you almost always discover some flaws in the product or process that humans have been covering up as part of their job. These problems surface during the automation phase and get prioritized for fixes.
You might think you could accomplish the same thing by directly asking the people doing the work what could be improved, but in my experience they either don’t notice it any more because it’s part of their job or, in extreme cases, they like that the inefficiency exists because they think it provides extra job security.
And the system is always broken. Reality is messy, systems are rigid, there always has to be a permissive layer somewhere in the interface.
[0]: "Computer Says No" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0YGZPycMEU
We need waste as much as we need investment. The trick is to find the value in between. I think the sweet spot will be augmenting work, not necessarily optimizing it.
It's likely that answering yes to that question meant an instant rejection for the clearance AND summer job. The FBI was probably not inclined to spend money looking into such an obviously trivial matter just so some kid could get some work experience. "Sorry, try the McDonald's down the street."
That security officer did the author an incredibly big favor.
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.
I don't think it's all that debatable to say that deceiving people is categorically wrong, nor is it to say that it's immoral not to follow the laws of the land -- both are obviously untrue as absolute statements.
For extreme examples, would it be immoral to lie to the Gestapo about harboring Jews? Were people illegally helping slaves escape the American South being immoral?
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
Also the server header is "lactoserv"
https://milk.com/faq/
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.
https://nissan.com/
You've got to actually use a trademark-adjacent domain in good faith though, otherwise you might end up like this guy.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69634055/75-million-dolla...
Apple Intelligence?
Talk about missing the low hanging fruit!
;)
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5526903/domain-name-val...
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!
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.
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.
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.
Remember, hindsight is always 20/20.
Presumably this is the famous (?) story of him listing his race as “mongrel” whenever asked?
I have to know this now...