Because even within intelligence agencies, knowledge is strictly controlled.
To monitor actively, you have to ask for related content. Asking about related content in a context where you have something to keep secret is an implicit acknowledgement there is something there.
It's a trick I've seen used in intelligence gathering contexts quite often. You get close to a researcher and technical expert on classified matters, then ask questions and gauge responses.
Sometimes you don't need an answer, you just need to know you're asking the right questions.
Knowledge of this practice and regular experience doing it will not make you many friends in either the intel or counter-intel dept.
t. Apparently a professional insider threat given all the DoD documentation that describes how I fix places by actually communicating with people and ensuring effective information dissemination through an organization.
Makes interviews awkward. All the periodicals in the waiting room basically explain what I do better than I can.
Many family members have been pressuring me to steer my IT/InfoSec career towards obtaining a security clearance because it is a big salary and job security booster. While I know many US Gov employees have these and do not have to work day-to-day in/on controlled security stuff, they must have had to do it for one point during their career, and I fear that I could not last through such an ordeal. The concept of not being able to collaborate with coworkers due to arbitrary security rules sounds like a disaster.
Aside from the whole grossness of working for the military-industrial complex, there is another issue for those of us who care about rigor: the whole system of clearances in the US relies heavily on the inaccurate and pseudoscientific polygraph test, which does not test or prove any measurable thing.
The interpretations of this pseudoscience can have devastating effects on your career, and not being based on facts or anything truly measurable, you have effectively zero recourse against such destruction, whether willful or otherwise, because it's elevated to the status of "evidence", simply because "the machine said it!"
What's worse is that the failings of this pseudoscientific nonsense are well known to the USG, and yet this continues for decades to be central to the system of ostensible "trust" in those who keep government secrets. It's abusive. (Imagine if your government health insurance only covered crystal healers.)
If you are already a civil servant without a clearance, getting a clearance decreases job security. It effectively nullifies your civil service protections, and allows you to be fired at will on a security pretext, with absolutely zero recourse. I worked at a navy lab for 21 years and saw this happen to colleagues who displeased their bosses.
It would be easy to crawl for this stuff imo. The technical language used for this stuff is finite and limited. Just grep the internet for phrases from their training materials, and I bet you can catch all of this.
To monitor actively, you have to ask for related content. Asking about related content in a context where you have something to keep secret is an implicit acknowledgement there is something there.
It's a trick I've seen used in intelligence gathering contexts quite often. You get close to a researcher and technical expert on classified matters, then ask questions and gauge responses.
Sometimes you don't need an answer, you just need to know you're asking the right questions.
Knowledge of this practice and regular experience doing it will not make you many friends in either the intel or counter-intel dept.
t. Apparently a professional insider threat given all the DoD documentation that describes how I fix places by actually communicating with people and ensuring effective information dissemination through an organization.
Makes interviews awkward. All the periodicals in the waiting room basically explain what I do better than I can.